Urban Morphology of Indian Cities

• Urban morphology is the study of the form, layout and internal structure of cities: streets, plots, buildings, land-use zones and open spaces, and the historical, social, economic and physical processes that produced them. It is the city’s biography written in lanes, buildings and land use.
• Indian cities are best read as layers: ancient, medieval, colonial and post-independence phases each left a distinct imprint, and later layers were added beside or over earlier ones rather than replacing them.
• The classical models of urban morphology (Ernest W. Burgess, Homer Hoyt, Chauncy D. Harris and Edward L. Ullman) were drawn for American industrial cities. They explain Indian cities only in part, so Indian cities are best classified by history of origin and by degree of planning.

Evolution of Indian Urban Morphology

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Morphology as Historical Layers

• What the term covers:
  • The word comes from Greek roots for describing shape or layout.
  • Laurence Dudley Stamp (1961) tied it to form, structure and the development that shapes them. Raymond E. Murphy (1966) looked at the form elements: lines of streets and railways, building types and the whole townscape.
  • Three constituents follow: internal layout and outer shape, functional structure or land use, and demographic structure.
  • Enayat Ahmad read a town plan from two angles: the internal plan pattern of streets and built ground, and the external outline.
  • No two towns share one morphology, and the form of any one town changes with time.
• Many Indian cities have a long history. Their nucleus and old city show organic, indigenous growth.
• During British rule, a new anglicised part was added beside the old town: government offices, cantonment, civil lines and railway colonies.
• After 1947, planned colonies, industrial estates and new towns were built in a modern style, and after 1991 a globalised layer of IT parks, malls and gated townships.
• A single city therefore shows features of several periods. As Enayat Ahmad (1957) put it, a town’s morphology is a function of its site, historical vicissitudes, successive cultures and economic setting.
• Allahabad (Prayagraj) shows the contrast clearly:
  • The old city lies densely to the south, near the Yamuna, in a maze of narrow streets around the Chowk and Ghantaghar.
  • North of it, the Civil Lines follow an extensive grid plan, with the High Court and administrative offices.
  • The railway line acts as a divide between the crowded, irregular city and the spacious civil lines and cantonment.
• Delhi shows the same superimposition:
  • The walled city of Chandni Chowk and Sadar Bazar has high building density, irregular streets, narrow lanes and caste and community quarters.
  • Beyond Daryaganj lies the spacious European-style city centred on Connaught Place, with the bungalows, offices and Parliament of New Delhi, and a Central Business Circular Area of modern shops, departmental stores and supermarkets.
  • The old wall and moat have given way to post-1947 building, while uncontrolled mixed land use survives inside the old line.
  • A new layout has been grafted on the indigenous one, so the whole facade of the new city is a British legacy.
• City walls of princely towns have become anachronisms. In Jodhpur and Udaipur, walls have been breached or demolished to make way for roads and new markets. Banks, offices and shops line the roads that radiate from the old gates.

Classification by Period of Origin

Ancient Cities

• Indus Valley cities (Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira, Kalibangan) had the earliest known planning in the subcontinent:
  • Grid-iron (chequerboard) streets running north–south and east–west, dividing the city into rectangular blocks.
  • A raised citadel and a lower town.
  • Covered drains, granaries and public baths.
• Classical Hindu town plans followed a rectangle oriented to the four cardinal directions:
  • Two main avenues crossed at the centre and ended at four gates.
  • The centre held the temple, palace, tank or garden.
  • Mandala (cosmic diagram) principles survive most clearly in Madurai, whose concentric streets ring the Meenakshi temple, and in part in Jaipur.
• Texts on town planning:
  • Kautilya’s Arthashastra prescribes a walled, rectangular town with gates, a moat and quarters assigned by varna and occupation, with the palace and temples near the centre.
  • The Manasara names layout types such as dandaka, nandyavarta, swastika, padmaka, prastara, karmuka and chaturmukha, chosen to suit the site and the rank of the settlement.
• The grid plan has costs as well as merits:
  • Merit: every street gets about the same air and sunlight.
  • Demerits: right-angled routes lengthen trips, and poor sight lines at crossings cause accidents.
  • Diagonals across blocks improve visibility but leave awkward triangular plots.
  • Rectangular layouts are also traced at Ayodhya, Lumbini and Rajgir.
• Surviving ancient cities (Varanasi, Kanchipuram, Ujjain, Mathura, Gaya, Patna) have:
  • Organic, winding lanes (galis) with a temple or ghat as the anchor.
  • Mixed residential and commercial use and a very dense building fabric with little open space.
• They were organised by ritual hierarchy and caste occupation, not by economic rent:
  • Brahmin quarters stood near the temple, and artisan castes (potters, weavers, smiths) lived in their own lanes near their work.
  • The lower castes were pushed to the periphery.
  • This pattern persists, in modified form, in the mohalla structure of old cores.
  • The jajmani system of hereditary service between castes gave this segregation its economic logic. No Western model captures it.
• Indus blocks had uniform housing, so their plan shows equality in the lower town and hierarchy in the citadel.
• Three old cities in brief:
  • Varanasi (Kashi): among the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities.
  • Kanchipuram: a Pallava capital with a temple-and-tank core.
  • Patna (Pataliputra): a Mauryan capital on a Gangetic terrace.

Medieval Cities (c. 1200–1750)

• The core is a fort–mosque–bazaar trinity:
  • The ruler’s fort or palace, often on high ground.
  • The congregational mosque beside it.
  • The bazaar spreading from the fort gate.
• The city was walled, with monumental gateways (darwaza).
• Inside the walls, it was divided into mohallas: self-contained quarters defined by caste, craft, religion or community, each with a mosque or temple and a small market (katra).
• Streets were narrow, winding and pedestrian. Sarais (roadside inns), hammams, dargahs, meena bazaars and havelis were typical features.
• Many medieval towns kept the older grid and added forts, walls, markets, tanks and chowks: Ahmadnagar, Aligarh, Aurangabad, Bijapur, Bulandshahr and Chittaurgarh among them.
• Agra has its fort, with the Taj Mahal a little apart, and growth around the bazaars. Lucknow has the Rumi Darwaza beside the Imambara complex. Allahabad also counts as a medieval city by origin.
• Examples:
  • Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi), built by Shah Jahan (1639–48): the Red Fort on the Yamuna, the Jama Masjid and Chandni Chowk as the commercial spine.
  • Ahmedabad, with its walled city of pols (gated neighbourhood lanes).
  • Agra and Lucknow, where the Chowk and the Imambara complex are the old core and Hazratganj the colonial layer.
• Some medieval cores were planned:
  • Hyderabad’s Charminar (1591) stands where four roads meet at the centre of Quli Qutb Shah’s new city.
  • Fatehpur Sikri and the royal and sacred centres of Vijayanagara (Hampi) were laid out as ceremonial capitals.
• Jaipur (1727) is a rare planned indigenous city:
  • It was founded by Sawai Jai Singh II and laid out by Vidyadhar Bhattacharya on a grid of wards with broad bazaar streets meeting at chaupars (squares).
  • Its proportions were designed, not organic. The walled city became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019.

Colonial Cities (c. 1750–1947)

• The British superimposed a planned Western layer on the indigenous city. This created the dual structure of Indian cities.
• Colonial additions:
  • Civil lines: planned residential areas for British officials, with wide roads and bungalows in large compounds.
  • Cantonments: military stations on a rigid grid, deliberately separated from the “native city”.
  • Railway colonies: around stations and workshops, housing railway staff.
  • Government quarters: secretariat, high court and collectorate, often in grand European styles.
  • Hill stations: Shimla, Darjeeling, Ooty and Mussoorie, which follow the contours.
• Presidency port cities grew from a fort and trading factory on the waterfront:
  • The usual sequence: trading factory → fortified centre (ammunition dumps, barracks, walls) → administrative city (civil lines, churches, courts) → industrial port city. British, French and Portuguese powers all built this way.
  • Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai (and Pondicherry under the French).
  • Each had a White Town (European quarter) and a Black Town (native quarter), with maidans and government buildings between them.
• Colonial planning patterns:
  • Radial-concentric (spider-web): Lutyens’s New Delhi, with roads radiating from roundabouts and Connaught Place as a circular centre.
  • Rectangular (grid): the planned parts of Jamshedpur, Chennai’s George Town and Kolkata.
  • Linear-radial: Mumbai, stretched along a peninsula, with roads and railways running outward from the Fort area.
  • Semi-circular: the western part of Patna, Kochi and Meerut.
  • Canberra is the overseas parallel of the spider-web plan. Organic plans also suit plateau towns. Melbourne, sometimes cited as organic, is wrong: its centre is a surveyed grid.
  • Organic: hill stations, where topography dictates the line of roads.
• New Delhi (planned from 1912, inaugurated 1931) by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker combined garden-city ideas with imperial display:
  • A hexagonal and radial road net of wide avenues and roundabouts.
  • The ceremonial axis of Rajpath (now Kartavya Path) from the Viceroy’s House (Rashtrapati Bhavan) to India Gate.
  • Low-density bungalow zones graded by official rank, and Connaught Place as the shopping centre.

Post-Independence Cities (since 1947)

• New planned cities were built from scratch on modernist principles:
  • Chandigarh is commonly called the first planned city of independent India.
    • Albert Mayer’s first plan (1950) was reworked by Le Corbusier (1951) with Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew.
    • The city was inaugurated in 1953.
  • Bhubaneswar’s new capital was planned by Otto Koenigsberger from 1948.
  • Gandhinagar was planned on Chandigarh’s sector principle.
  • Steel towns: Bhilai, Rourkela, Durgapur and Bokaro.
  • Navi Mumbai (1971) was built by CIDCO as a counter-magnet to Mumbai, as a chain of nodes along rail lines, each with its own centre. Such planned satellite towns were meant to draw growth away from the core.
  • New capitals: Dispur, Itanagar, Naya Raipur and Amaravati.
• Partition refugee colonies (1947–50s) were a distinct layer: planned plots and markets at Lajpat Nagar, Rajinder Nagar and Patel Nagar in Delhi, the township of Faridabad, and Ulhasnagar near Mumbai.
• Their plans use sectors or neighbourhood units, a hierarchy of roads and zoning that separates residential, commercial, industrial and institutional use. These ideas came from the modernist CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne).
• After 1991, liberalisation added a new layer to existing cities:
  • SEZs, IT parks, malls, gated communities.
  • Metro corridors and airport cities.
  • Greenfield financial centres such as GIFT City in Gujarat.
  • Most of these grew at the periphery, as new nuclei.

Internal Structure of Indian Cities

The Dual Urban Structure

• The most distinctive feature of Indian cities is the coexistence within one city of two contrasting parts:
  • The indigenous old city:
    • Organically grown, with narrow galis, a dense building fabric and temples, mosques or dargahs as focal points.
    • Organised in mohallas, with mixed residential and commercial use and poor drainage and infrastructure.
  • The colonial or modern extension:
    • Planned, with wide roads, a grid or radial layout, civil lines, cantonments, railway colonies and modern colonies.
    • Land uses are segregated, and civic services are better.
• Classic dual cities:
  • Bengaluru: the old Pete (market town) beside the British Cantonment with its parade ground and MG Road.
  • Hyderabad–Secunderabad: the old walled city around the Charminar and the cantonment town of Secunderabad, across the Hussain Sagar.
  • Chennai: the George Town (Black Town) behind Fort St George, and the European suburbs of Egmore and Nungambakkam.
• Kolkata is Western in function but far more compact than Western cities of similar size.
• Old cores (Chandni Chowk, Lucknow’s Chowk, Hyderabad’s Charminar area) keep their morphology despite enormous population growth. This is because of:
  • the high cost of redevelopment;
  • the attachment of communities to their place;
  • the political complexity of urban renewal.
• Post-1991 glass towers, malls and gated townships make a third layer, so the largest metros now show a triple structure.
• The duality is social as well as physical:
  • Nineteenth-century society stamped ethnic and social distinctions on the form of towns.
  • Social areas in Third World cities turn on the degree of modernisation, so traditional and modern patches lie side by side.
  • The pattern can be split into local and foreign lineaments. Some cities blend indigenous and Western forms; others show hybridised European ones.
  • Since 1947 the Western way of urbanism has continued in political, economic, cultural and social life: subtle in medium towns, dramatic in metros.
• The duality is sharpest in Delhi, Kolkata, Lucknow and Hyderabad and fainter in medium and small cities.
• European cities were rebuilt after war and American ones built from scratch. Indian cities keep each layer under the next.

Internal Zones of a Typical Indian City

• No Indian city fits one model exactly, but most large cities show the following zones.
• Zone I, the old core (pre-colonial nucleus):
  • A temple, mosque, fort or ghat as the anchor; narrow, winding galis, many impassable to motor vehicles.
  • Mixed land use: shops and workshops below, homes above.
  • Same-trade clustering in lanes: cloth, brass, utensil and book markets. Shops spill onto the lanes.
  • Dense multi-storeyed buildings with little setback, light or ventilation. Old havelis stand beside new concrete buildings.
• Zone II, transition (inner periphery):
  • Light manufacturing such as handicrafts, bidi-making, lock-making and printing. Artisans’ housing (the weavers of Varanasi).
  • Wholesale markets for grain and manufactured goods.
  • Congested roads; pockets of slums.
• Zone III, working-class residential:
  • Strong community bonds and less visible class difference.
  • Self-built pucca and semi-pucca housing, improved over time.
  • Local markets, schools and places of worship within walking distance, often around a community well, park or religious building.
• Zone IV, middle-class planned colonies:
  • Laid out on grid or sector plans by development authorities (DDA, BDA, HMDA).
  • Wider roads, parks, schools and hospitals; apartments and cooperative societies beside bungalows.
  • Examples: Delhi’s Rohini, Dwarka and Pitampura; Bengaluru’s Jayanagar and Rajajinagar; Mumbai’s Bandra and Powai.
• Zone V, outer fringe (peri-urban zone):
  • The fastest-changing zone: campuses, hospitals, government offices, heavy industry, airports, IT parks and new townships.
  • Squatter settlements of new migrants, and luxury gated townships such as DLF City, Prestige City and Sobha City.
  • It merges into the rural–urban fringe, where urban and rural land uses interpenetrate.

Classification by Degree of Planning

• This three-part scheme follows Kusum Lata.
• By history of origin the same towns sort into ancient (Varanasi, Kanchipuram, Gaya), medieval (Delhi, Agra, Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Shahjahanabad) and modern (Noida, Chandigarh, Visakhapatnam). Towns like Visakhapatnam took shape around British administrative needs, with a Ghanta Ghar, civil lines and cantonment.
• Planned towns:
  • Laid out before growth, on a grid or sector plan, with zones for each function.
  • Chandigarh, Gandhinagar, Bhubaneswar, Navi Mumbai and Noida; Jaipur’s walled city among older towns.
• Unplanned towns:
  • They dominate the urban scene. Many are villages turned towns, internal functions and slums keep multiplying, and people prefer to live near the CBD.
  • Grew by accretion through history, migration and the absorption of villages. Infrastructure came after settlement.
  • Narrow winding lanes, irregular plots, mixed land use and no setbacks: old Varanasi, Patna, Meerut and Jodhpur’s old city.
• Planned-cum-unplanned (quasi-planned) towns, the commonest type:
  • The mark of colonial cities: planned parts have a colonial history and unplanned parts are the older town, as with Connaught Place and the Red Fort area in Delhi.
  • Kolkata, Mumbai and Bengaluru also belong here.
  • A planned zone (civil lines, cantonment or a modern colony) sits beside an unplanned old core within one municipal boundary.
  • Delhi (Shahjahanabad and New Delhi), Lucknow (Chowk and Hazratganj) and Hyderabad (the Charminar area and Banjara Hills).
  • Jaipur combines a planned indigenous city, British civil lines and post-1947 Malviya Nagar.

Morphology of Small and Medium Towns

• Most Indian towns are small market and administrative centres. Their form is simpler but follows a common pattern:
  • An old bazaar around a chowk, temple or mosque, with the grain mandi and wholesale shops nearby.
  • Linear growth along the highway, with a bus stand, petrol pumps, repair shops and hotels strung along the road.
  • A railway station area with goods sheds and godowns, and sometimes a small railway colony.
  • The tehsil or district headquarters with courts, offices and a small civil lines of officers’ bungalows.
  • New colonies and schools on the edge, and villages absorbed as census-town outgrowths.
• Cantonments remain distinct islands in over sixty Indian towns: low-density, green and closed to the land market under the Cantonments Act (2006). They are now being excised from some towns and merged with the municipality.

Functional and Morphological Types

• Function leaves its own stamp on form. The main functional classes of Indian towns each have a typical morphology:
  • Religious towns (Varanasi, Puri, Madurai, Haridwar): a temple or ghat core, pilgrim lanes, dharamshalas and a seasonal floating population.
  • Administrative towns (New Delhi, Chandigarh, Gandhinagar): large government estates, ceremonial axes and low-density official housing.
  • Industrial towns (Jamshedpur, Bhilai, Bokaro): a works at the centre or edge, company townships in grades by rank, and later unplanned bastis outside.
  • Port towns (Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Visakhapatnam): docks, warehouses and rail yards on the waterfront, and a CBD next to the old fort.
  • Cantonment and railway towns (Mhow, Secunderabad, Kharagpur): rigid grids, barracks or quarters, and parade grounds or workshops.
  • Hill stations (Shimla, Darjeeling, Mussoorie): a Mall road along the ridge, bungalows on terraces, and bazaars below on the slope.
• Urban villages and unauthorised colonies add an informal layer. In Delhi, old village settlements (lal dora land) were engulfed by the city, and unauthorised colonies grew on farmland outside the plan. Both have dense, unregulated building.

Models of the Indian City

Why Western Models Fit Poorly

• John E. Brush (1962), after studying over eighty Indian cities, found no basic unity of layout or function. He showed that population density peaks in the old core instead of forming the Western “crater” at the CBD.
• The rich often live near the centre, the reverse of Burgess.
• Caste, religion and community sort residence more than income does.
• The state (cantonments, railways, government estates) controls large blocks of central land outside the land market.
• Historical inertia keeps old forms alive long after their function has gone.

Testing the Classical Models on Indian Cities

• Concentric zones (Burgess): fit small, old, single-centred towns such as Varanasi, Gaya and Kanchipuram, where the core-to-edge gradient is clear. The status gradient runs the other way: the well-off live near the core.
• Sectors (Hoyt): fit cities that grew along rail lines and highways: industrial wedges along Delhi’s Mathura Road and Kolkata’s river and rail banks, and high-income wedges along Bengaluru’s and Gurugram’s main roads.
• Multiple nuclei (Harris–Ullman): fit the metropolises, where the old bazaar, the colonial CBD, district centres, industrial estates and satellite towns act as separate nuclei.
• None fits alone. The old core follows the pre-industrial pattern, the colonial layer follows administrative logic, and the newest layer follows the land market.

Colonial and Bazaar Models

• Arthur E. Smailes (1969) described the binary colonial city:
  • An indigenous town of bazaar and mohallas.
  • A civil station and cantonment linked to it by the railway, the administration and the army.
• Ashok K. Dutt proposed two models of the South Asian city:
  • Bazaar-based city:
    • Centred on the bazaar, which is commercial, residential and social at once.
    • Organised in concentric zones, peripheral wedges and cultural (ethnic and caste) enclaves, thus combining the three Western approaches.
    • Its elements: a temple or mosque at the most central point, bazaar streets radiating from its gate, havelis of rich merchants, community lanes for each craft, and chowks, kunds and ghats as public spaces.
    • Rich and poor live close together around the core, unlike the class-sorted Western city.
    • Newer middle- and high-income colonies extend as wedges along roads at the edge. Slums and squatters fill gaps and peripheries.
  • Colonial-based city (the presidency port cities):
    • A fort and port nucleus, with a European CBD and White Town beside a dense native bazaar town (the Black Town).
    • Cantonment, civil lines and railway colony as planned extensions, and docks, warehouses and rail yards along the waterfront.
  • A hybrid of the two fits many large cities today.
• Dutt’s study rested on two questions: the nature of the CBD and residential segregation.
• Dutt’s findings on the Indian CBD:
  • It has a large residential component: merchants live above and behind their shops.
  • Only the CBDs of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai come close to the Western type, busy by day and empty at night.
  • Elsewhere the CBD is a weak centre: commerce is spread between the old bazaar, the colonial shopping street and new centres. Congestion and the norm of living near work hold back a purely commercial core.
• Garrison’s fused-growth model, an American study built on modern metros of South Asia such as Jakarta, reads three trends:
  • Up to 1900: concentric growth.
  • 1900–1950: sectoral growth, following transport.
  • After 1950: multi-nuclei growth.
  • Varanasi and Kolkata agree with it. Critics say it suits large towns only.
• The CBD of a large Indian city, in brief:
  • Also called the downtown, commercial core or city centre.
  • It has the highest land values, the tallest buildings and the focus of transport routes.
  • Floors differ in use: retail at street level, with wholesalers, offices and some homes above.
  • It need not lie at the geometric centre, and most million-plus cities have more than one. Delhi has Connaught Place, Karol Bagh and Chandni Chowk.
• Other Indian studies built city-specific schemes:
  • Ram Lochan Singh’s (1955) zones of Varanasi.
  • Manzoor Alam’s study of Hyderabad–Secunderabad.
  • Ujagir Singh’s study of Allahabad.

Case Studies

Varanasi: The Ancient City

• Varanasi (Kashi) is the best Indian example of a concentric pattern in an ancient, unplanned city. It shows features of Hindu urban form that Western models miss.
• Core: temple, ghat and bazaar.
  • The Vishwanath temple precinct and Dashashwamedh Ghat form the heart, with the Chowk as the wholesale and retail centre.
  • Residential and commercial uses coexist in the same buildings.
  • The lanes are narrow and meandering, with poor drainage.
  • Shops of one trade cluster in one lane: brass, cloth, Banarasi silk and utensils.
  • The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor (2021) cleared and widened the approach from the temple to the river.
• Transition zone: silk weaving (the Banarasi sari), bidi-making and handicrafts. Dense weavers’ housing of the Ansari community is interspersed with looms, toy-making adds to the crafts, and the roads are narrow and congested.
• Working-class residential zone: strong social cohesion and little class differentiation, with local mosques, temples, wells and markets, as at Kabirchaura and Beniyabag.
• Middle-class colonies (Sigra, Lanka, Sunderpur) and the outer fringe (institutions, industry, the airport at Babatpur).
• Independent nuclei grew around the city:
  • Banaras Hindu University (1916) to the south.
  • The cantonment to the north.
  • The Banaras Locomotive Works (formerly the Diesel Locomotive Works).
  • Sarnath to the north.
  • Ramnagar Fort across the river, with the Shahi Chemicals works nearby.
  • The BHEL unit and Orderly Bazar.

Kolkata: The Colonial Port City

• Kolkata grew on the east bank of the Hooghly from 1690, when Job Charnock set up a trading post. It was the capital of British India until 1911.
• 1750–1850:
  • Growth in two concentric zones: the CBD around Burrabazar and Dalhousie Square (BBD Bagh), and a surrounding transition zone of mixed residence, markets, godowns and social centres.
  • Fort William and the Maidan separated the European south from the dense native town in the north.
• 1850–1900: a third concentric zone of low-income housing developed.
• 1900–1950: sectoral growth of industry along the river and the railways (jute mills on both banks), with middle-class residence to the south.
• After 1950:
  • Multiple nuclei appeared: Dum Dum in the north with the airport and higher-income housing, and Budge Budge in the south.
  • Planned townships arose at Salt Lake (Bidhannagar) and New Town (Rajarhat) in the east.
• The East Kolkata Wetlands (a Ramsar site since 2002), which treat the city’s sewage through fisheries, limit and shape eastward growth.
• This staged growth also fits religious and historical cities.
• Howrah on the west bank, reached by the Howrah Bridge (Rabindra Setu), is the industrial and rail twin. Kolkata’s waterfront of warehouses and trading offices is a classic case of historical inertia.

Allahabad (Prayagraj): Functional Zones

• Prayag, at the Ganga–Yamuna confluence, mattered by the third century BCE. Akbar began the present city late in the 16th century. It grew fastest under British rule: capital of the North-Western Provinces from 1858, with the High Court moved from Agra in 1869.
• Commercial:
  • The Chowk around the Ghantaghar, on the Grand Trunk Road, is the CBD, and roads radiate from it.
  • Second and third centres: Civil Lines, about 3 km north-west, and Katra, about 3 km north-east of Civil Lines.
  • Later additions: the Phaphamau grain market, Transport Nagar, and small markets at Allahpur, Teliarganj and Rajapur.
• Residential:
  • The old city is badly overcrowded: more than 10 people to a house, and over 40% of households in one room.
  • Civil Lines is planned. Most new colonies between the two rivers are haphazard, short of markets, schools, parks, parking and open space.
• Educational: the eastern side, from Phaphamau to Naini, holds the university, medical and engineering colleges, the open university, the agricultural institute and the Indian Institute of Information Technology.
• Administrative: the western Civil Lines holds the High Court, Board of Revenue, Accountant General and education offices. Others lie north and east of the old city.
• Industrial: there is no well-defined zone. Naini, across the Yamuna, has glass, textiles, telephones, Ayurvedic medicine and tools. Mutthiganj and the Chowk have pulse, flour and oil mills, and printing presses are scattered.

Delhi: A Multi-Nuclei City

• Delhi is at once ancient, medieval, colonial and modern. It is a quasi-planned, multi-nuclei city, to which the Harris–Ullman model applies most closely.
• The ruins of its historical cities are embedded in the modern fabric:
  • Qila Rai Pithora, Siri, Tughlaqabad, Jahanpanah, Firozabad, Purana Qila (Dinpanah) and Shahjahanabad.

• Delhi began with two nuclei, the pre-industrial Chandni Chowk and the modern Connaught Place. Later zones added new CBDs (South Extension), heavy manufacturing (Okhla, Nangloi) and residential suburbs (Sonipat, DLF City).

Other Plans: Mumbai, Chandigarh, Jaipur

• Mumbai:
  • A linear port city on a peninsula formed by reclaiming the gaps between seven islands.
  • Its old core is the Fort area at the southern tip. The mill lands of Parel and Lalbaug lie in the middle, and Dharavi at the old northern edge of the island city.
  • Reclamation from the late 18th century joined the islands and later added Back Bay and Nariman Point. The sea on three sides forces a linear form.
  • Suburbs stretch north along the Western and Central railway lines. A new CBD has grown at the Bandra–Kurla Complex, and Navi Mumbai lies across the harbour.
• Chandigarh:
  • A grid of self-contained sectors (about 800 m × 1,200 m), each with its own shops, school and green belt.
  • A hierarchy of seven roads (the 7 Vs): from V1 highways to V7 footpaths.
  • The Capitol Complex at the head of the plan against the Shivaliks, and the city centre in Sector 17.
  • The plan was built on the neighbourhood unit: each sector meets daily needs within walking distance, and through traffic stays on the V roads at its edge.
  • The Capitol Complex (Secretariat, Legislative Assembly, High Court and the Open Hand monument) is part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing of Le Corbusier’s works (2016).
  • Green spaces run through the city as the Leisure Valley, with the Rock Garden and Sukhna Lake at its edge.
  • Building form, height and materials (exposed brick and concrete) were controlled, and a periphery belt was protected by law from 1952 to stop haphazard growth.
  • It also has problems: low density, sprawl into the neighbouring towns of Mohali, Panchkula and Zirakpur, and service villages left outside the plan.
• Jaipur:
  • A walled city on a grid of wards and wide bazaar streets, built of pink-washed buildings.
  • The British civil lines lie to its south-west. Post-1947 colonies (Malviya Nagar, Vaishali Nagar) and industrial areas (Sitapura) spread beyond.

Changing Morphology of Million-Plus Cities

• Census 2011 counted 52 million-plus cities and urban agglomerations (final tables). Their form is changing fastest.
• Driving forces:
  • Economic liberalisation (after 1991): FDI, office demand and IT growth created new corporate nuclei at the periphery. Gurugram, Whitefield and Electronic City (Bengaluru), Hinjewadi (Pune) and HITEC City (Hyderabad) are examples.
  • Metro rail and transit-oriented development:
    • Delhi Metro opened in 2002. Metros now run in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and others.
    • They densify land along corridors and extend the commuting city.
  • Real-estate markets and vertical growth:
    • Rising land values in cores force high-rise redevelopment. Mumbai’s mill lands became towers, Dharavi is being redeveloped, and BKC grew into a vertical CBD.
    • Old inner areas remain horizontally dense. Cluster redevelopment (Bhendi Bazaar in Mumbai) replaces old chawls and lanes with towers and wider streets.
  • Sprawl and peri-urbanisation:
    • Growth spills beyond municipal limits: Bengaluru towards Devanahalli, Yelahanka, Dobbaspet and Hoskote, Delhi into Faridabad, Ghaziabad and Greater Noida, Mumbai into Thane and Vasai-Virar.
    • The result is mixed rural–urban landscapes with severe infrastructure deficits. This is the subject of urban sprawl.
  • Gated communities and social segregation: privatised enclaves with their own services, separated from the city outside, such as DLF Magnolias in Gurugram, Prestige City in Bengaluru and Lodha Palava near Mumbai.
  • Government missions:
    • The Smart Cities Mission (2015) redeveloped core areas, and AMRUT upgraded infrastructure.
    • Heritage corridors (Kashi Vishwanath) and greenfield cities (GIFT City, Dholera, Naya Raipur) were added.
  • Informal settlements: slums fill leftover land along railways, drains and hill slopes, and at the edge.

• New CBDs form outside old cores because of better connectivity, initially lower land costs, planned infrastructure and nearness to IT and corporate campuses.
  • Bengaluru’s Namma Metro station areas and Hyderabad’s Genome Valley pharma cluster extend these chains.

Problems Arising from This Morphology

• Congestion in old cores built for pedestrians, and mixed land use that mixes noxious workshops with housing.
• Decay of heritage buildings and pressure for redevelopment.
• Infrastructure deficits in water, sewerage and drainage, worst in old cores and new peripheries.
• Segregation, both old (caste and community mohallas) and new (gated enclaves beside slums).
• Fragmented governance, as cantonments, railways, development authorities and municipalities each control parts of the city.
• Traffic and parking: road networks laid out for walking and carts carry cars and buses. Metro and bus systems reach old cores with difficulty.
• Housing shortage and overcrowding: in old cores many households live in one room, while the outskirts grow without services.
• Floods and heat: lost tanks and drains flood low-lying areas, and dense building with little greenery deepens urban heat islands.