I wanted to have this conversation because India is one of the few places in the world where cities are being built at a scale and a speed that genuinely challenges the western world.
Not in the speculative ‘future cities’ way, because India’s cities have deep historic roots, but in the form of concrete, steel, noise, deadlines and political will.
Indian cities are striking, for all the cliches of how they engage all your senses, but also the ambition. Metro lines are threading through dense neighbourhoods, massive infrastructure projects get delivered at pace, and development is not really up for debate, it’s just happening.
Compared to the endless consultation cycles and delivery paralysis we see in much of North America and Europe, there’s something bracing about that momentum.
Depending on who you are, this is not positive for everyone. We are not talking utopia here, not by a long shot. We are not saying this is bad either.
But alongside this massive new generation of formal infrastructure, Indian cities also run on deeply informal systems. Walking, street life, auto-rickshaws, dense mixed-use neighbourhoods, social adaptation, things that have evolved over centuries.
I was so keen to talk to Ruchita Bansal when we connected late last year, and originally I had in mind a conversation about India’s way of building Challenger Cities. But the question we actually explored was more like what happens when those two worlds don’t quite meet.
Ruchita has spent more than fifteen years working inside large Indian urban projects, across planning, infrastructure and government systems. She knows the machinery from the inside, and the thing that comes through with her is less excitement about what was being built, but an unease about what can get missed. As she put it to me, “while we were building for headlines and timelines, the everyday experience of people barely entered the decision-making room.”
That matters because Indian cities are developing fast. The question is whether that speed is carrying the city forward, or contributing to pulling it apart.
One of the most useful ways Ruchita explains this is through the gap between infrastructure and systems. Indian cities are producing modern infrastructure at speed, but often without knitting it into the connective tissue that already exists. “We are building public transport but we are not creating a system,” she says. A metro line appears, but the walk to reach the stations is unpleasant, or even non-existent.
Informal transport often fills the gaps in the official one where journeys seem to begin only when you are into the station itself. Fundamentals like footpaths, street lighting or bus networks fade in allure compared to the shiny metro service. The engineered object arrives, but the overall journey remains unresolved.
This is where India becomes especially interesting as a Challenger Cities case. Indian cities have long established root systems that aren’t reliant on formal set ups. Informal transport, street life and dense mixed-use neighbourhoods are historical, organic patterns as adaptive responses built up over centuries. The frustration, Ruchita argues, is that modern infrastructure often ignores these patterns rather than working with them. “It feels like people have to adopt the system,” she said, “rather than the system adopting the needs of the people.”
The result is a strange duality where on the one hand, Indian cities are extraordinarily resilient, and that adaptability is rightly celebrated. On the other hand, that same resilience has become a safety valve that allows poor integration to persist. People cope, so the system never has to fully learn.
You see this most clearly in how people move. Ruchita can be rather blunt about this where if she has the option, she’ll take her own vehicle based more on practicality than aspiration. “One, I feel safer. Two, I get first-mile and last-mile connectivity.”
This is where the comparison with the West becomes uncomfortable. Indian cities are, in many ways, making the same mistakes that Europe and North America made decades ago by privileging big objects over connective tissues, mistaking mobility for movement, treating infrastructure as an end rather than a means. The difference today is speed, as these mistakes are happening faster, at greater scale, and in cities far denser than those Western models were ever designed for.
Ruchita is clear that this isn’t about copying or rejecting global ideas wholesale. The problem, she says, is misreading what actually made those systems work. “We import highways, parking standards, zoning ideas, smart technologies,” she told me, “but we don’t import the invisible parts that make those systems work.” Think trust in institutions, enforcement and accountability … “We apply solutions from cities where people trust institutions to cities where people survive despite institutions. That mismatch is the real failure.”
Gender, in this context, becomes a powerful diagnostic rather than a side issue. Ruchita points out that cities don’t intentionally design for men, but the male commute is treated as neutral and universal as everything else fades into the background. “We don’t even know that what we are designing is actually for men,” she said. When women’s realities are ignored, fear becomes an individual problem rather than a design failure. And yet, the moment you design for women, cities start to work better for everyone. You may remember similar perspectives in our recent conversation with Melissa Bruntlett.
There’s a similar lesson in her distinction between safety and surveillance. CCTV, control rooms, smart city dashboards etc. are often presented as signs of progress. But “CCTV doesn’t mean an area is safe,” she said. “It means it is surveilled.” Indian cities don’t lack eyes on the street, but they can lack care. What gets made can often be as much about control for the people in power, just different people now compared to a previous wave of colonial urbanisation on the subcontinent.
When I asked her what the world should learn from India, Ruchita has a good lesson. “How to design for messiness,” she said. Indian cities are crowded, informal, adaptive, alive. The challenge is not to tidy that away, but to build infrastructure that respects it rather than overriding it. “Systems are for people,” she reminded me, and “People are not for systems.”
India’s cities will continue to challenge the West, economically, culturally and demographically. Their speed and scale alone guarantee that. But they will challenge us even more if they can combine that momentum with their deep urban legacies, rather than losing them in a rush to look modern.
And for everyone else watching, there’s a second opportunity here. When cities elsewhere see Indian cities making the same mistakes they once made, it’s not only repetition, but a reminder, a chance to learn the lesson again, before speed and spectacle crowd out memory and care.
So this episode isn’t so much a critique, but an exploration.
What can the rest of the world learn from India’s speed and ambition? What risks come with losing sight of historical patterns and connective tissue? And how might Indian cities become even stronger challengers if new infrastructure works with existing systems, rather than overwrites them?
To being Challengers.
