#6: The 15-Minute City | Urbanisation in Gujarat | Negative Externalities | Arbitrary Lines
An essay critiquing the idea of the 15-minute city, an insight on growth in built-up area in Gujarat, an explanation of negative externalities, and a recommendation to read a book on zoning in the US.
Essay
The 15-Minute City: Myth and Reality
Author: Alain Bertaud
The 15-minute city was first promoted with much fanfare during the Paris mayoral re-election of Anne Hidalgo in 2020. In 2024, her leading urban planning adviser, Carlos Moreno, published the modestly titled The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, further defining the new concept. Moreno's main argument is that we need a competent urban planner to organise neighbourhoods where everything we need, including our jobs, is within a maximum 15-minute walk from every home. More books were published to reinforce Moreno's argument, notably Shrink the City: The 15-Minute Urban Experiment and the Cities of the Future by Natalie Whittle (2024).
Nobody could possibly object to the concept of a city where everything we need is within a 15-minute walk from home. Critics of Moreno's ideas argue that it would require excessive government interference in the urban economy and might create gentrification by driving up rents in these ideal neighbourhoods. Some have even hinted that the 15-minute city is a dark conspiracy to establish government control over the urban population.
I do not think the 15-minute city is a conspiracy; it is just a disarmingly naïve utopia; like all utopias, it is an unfortunate distraction from the real problems affecting cities.
Here are my arguments.
The proponents of a 15-minute city make two promises:
First, planners can ensure everything we consume – food, clothes, appliances, leisure, culture – is within a 15-minute walk of our home and,
Second, the same planners will be able to locate the job that we prefer, among the many available within a large metropolitan area such as Paris, within a 15-minute walking distance from our home.
All daily consumption should be within a 15-minute walking distance.
Let us start with the most typical daily consumption: groceries, bread, and services like barber shops and beauty salons. In a market economy, private enterprises create and operate these types of commerce. Entrepreneurs decide on the locations of these shops based on the prospective number of customers they can attract.
In a 15-minute city, these entrepreneurs would have to rely on the number of clients living within a circle of about a 1-kilometre radius, corresponding roughly to the distance a pedestrian could cover in 15 minutes at a speed of about 4 kilometres per hour. The average household income within this 15-minute accessibility circle will determine the type of shop and the kinds of products they sell. The more people within the accessibility circle, the more likely shops are to compete, and the more attractive they will be to prospective customers.
The possibility of having products and services of daily consumption within 15 minutes of one's home depends on the residential density within a circle of about 314 hectares[1]. To be financially viable, each type of business will require a different number of potential consumers. A fast food restaurant and a high-end Japanese restaurant, for instance, need different numbers of customers with differing income levels to be economically feasible while attracting customers from the surrounding 314-hectare area.
Therefore, the ability to create a 15-minute neighbourhood doesn't depend on a planner allocating the right area of land at the right place for a bakery, restaurant or bar. It depends entirely on the population density of the neighbourhood, its income level, and private entrepreneurs’ assessment of how many potential customers are needed for their business to survive. Urban planners cannot control any of these variables. Densities, household income, and entrepreneurs' decisions to open a business are all part of the spontaneous order that contributes to the very existence of cities.
Because both densities and incomes vary widely between neighbourhoods within the same city, instead of 15-minute cities, we should talk about 15-minute neighbourhoods.
The Paris Municipality has an exceptionally high density, with an average of 210 people per hectare, with some neighbourhoods reaching 411 people per hectare and a high median household income of $42,260. Consequently, when it comes to consumption, we can expect many daily consumption stores, restaurants and services serving a walkable area of about 314 hectares. Indeed, the data provided by the Atelier Parisien d' Urbanisme (APUR) confirms that Parisians have access to around 59 bakeries and 197 food shops within a 15-minute walking distance of their residence. The abundance of shops is not due to clever urban planning; rather, it is a consequence of Paris's high density and high income.
Besides high density and high income, Parisians benefit from a benign regulatory regime regarding land-use segregation. Retail businesses can operate anywhere in a residential area without the zoning rules restricting land use, as is the case in the United States. In Paris, only heavy industries are banned from residential areas. While urban planners cannot create 15-minute cities, they can prevent them through regulations.
The location of social facilities – such as daycare centres, primary schools and health clinics – is also dependent on neighbourhood density.
A school cannot operate without a minimum number of children attending. The French ministry of education recommends at least 200 children for a primary school. In Paris, the average is 180 students per primary school, with a total of 657 schools or an average of about 23 primary schools within a 15-minute walking radius.
The possibility of a 15-minute walk accessibility to kindergarten and primary schools depends on the density of children and, by extension, the fertility rate and age profile of women in the neighbourhood. Some Paris neighbourhoods, such as the 16th arrondissement, have a significantly older population than the city average, and therefore fewer school-age children. As a result, some schools are closing due to a lack of pupils. When a school closes, the walking distance to the remaining schools for the children who used to attend the closed school increases.
The time required to walk to school depends not on urban planning but on the age and fertility of women who inhabit the neighbourhood. No brilliant planner can influence this.
More detailed data on the Paris municipality as a 15-minute city can be found in my article The Last Utopia: The 15-Minute City (2022).
I have used Paris to test the feasibility of the 15-minute accessibility to retail establishments selling daily consumption goods. We could test this same feasibility in other neighbourhoods in different parts of the world.
Table 1 shows the density of various neighbourhoods, ranging from a low-density suburb of New York to a very high-density neighbourhood in central Hanoi. The table also includes the number of people within a 15-minute walking distance of any shop. It is easy to infer which neighbourhoods are already likely to be 15-minute neighbourhoods and which are not. However, the type of retail shop will also depend on the neighbourhood’s average household income.
Table 1: Density and 15-minute walk accessibility in different neighbourhoods in selected world cities
Urban planners can provide the job you want within a 15-minute walking distance of your home.
While a 15-minute walk from home to grocery stores and restaurants is possible with the sufficient density and household income, the odds of finding a preferred job within a 15-minute walk from home are vanishingly small in a large metropolis.
We move to large cities – despite higher housing prices and congestion – because they offer a wide range of job opportunities. In my book Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, I argue that cities are primarily labour markets. The critical word in this argument is ‘market’.
Selecting a job within a market means having to choose from a wide range of competing suppliers. While we may be satisfied with a choice of three or four bakeries when buying bread, we would not be content with a choice restricted to only four jobs. The motivation for moving to a large city is precisely to have access to many job options. If the city's transport system is efficient, we can select our dream job in any part of the city – making the location of our home irrelevant. If the transport system is poor, we may decide to limit our search to jobs within a one-hour commute from home, somewhat reducing our options.
Over time, we may want to change jobs. Again, we want to have numerous options to be able to weigh the trade-off between the commuting time and the quality of or interest in the job. While we may not look at jobs beyond a set commuting time, say, one hour, a very short commute of a 15-minute walk will not be the decisive factor compared to salary, interest in the work, career progression, work environment etc.
Looking at commuting patterns within the Paris Metropolitan Area (Figure 1), we see that 30% of employed Parisians work outside Paris, despite Paris offering more than 1.8 jobs for every employed Parisian (Table 3).
Figure 1: Commuting pattern in the Paris Metropolitan Area by place of residence
Because of the high density of jobs available within the Paris municipality, every worker enjoys access to approximately 50,000 jobs within a 15-minute walk from their residence. However, only 12% of workers take advantage of this proximity, and 88% of workers choose to use a mode of transport other than walking to reach their workplace (Table 2). 8% of workers commute for more than an hour, despite the 50,000 jobs available within walking distance. This distribution of commuting time reflects the trade-offs found in every large labour market.
Figure 2: Distribution of commuting time for Paris Municipality residents
As many as 30% of Parisian workers choose to work outside the city, despite the high density of work available within Paris (Table 3).
Table 2: Place of work of the employed population of Paris (2021)
Most jobs located in the Paris municipality (61%) are occupied by workers living in the Greater Paris suburban area – or even further away (Table 4).
Table 3: Employment in the Paris municipality by place of residence
We see that most Parisians and suburban workers make trade-offs between distance to work and job quality that do not seem to prioritise proximity, but rather favour job attractiveness. The 15-minute city concept, when applied to jobs, assumes that proximity is the foremost priority when selecting a job.
Urban planners have the unfortunate paternalist tendency to substitute their own choices for citizens' preferences. A study of commuting patterns can easily reveal workers' preferences when selecting jobs within a metropolitan area. Urban planners can improve commuters' lives by improving transport speed rather than assigning job locations for workers based on their residence.
The 15-minute city: Too good to be true?
While the idea of access to our daily food and services and our job being within a 15-minute walk from our home is an appealing proposal, it is clear that planners do not have the tools to achieve this outcome. In Paris, the availability of daily goods and services is achieved not because of clever planning, but because of the historical high density and high income of Parisian households.
In the future, because of changing consumer tastes and delivery technology, planners may not even be able to determine which densities would allow food to be found within a 15-minute walk. More and more of our purchases are made online, and food and other types of products are delivered to our home without us ever needing to walk to a restaurant or a store.
Will this trend continue to reach a point where food factories distributing meals directly to homes will replace many existing restaurants? I hope not, but we don’t know yet. It will be consumer preferences, income levels, and supply constraints from food producers that will decide – not urban planners.
Planners promising desirable jobs within a 15-minute walk from home are being even more disingenuous. The concept overlooks the way labour markets actually work. In the case of Paris, when Carlos Moreno claims that he will create a desirable job within a 15-minute walk, what exactly does that mean? Will he create new jobs in Paris, in addition to the ones that already exist? In reality, most of the jobs in Paris are already taken by suburban residents. And in any case, planners cannot create jobs in specific locations. Their regulatory tools only allow them to prevent job creation in particular places. Will creating more employment in the Paris municipality make commuting even longer and more congested for suburban workers?
Suppose urban planners want to decrease the distance to shops and restaurants; they can relax zoning laws, which in many cities constrain the location of commerce within residential areas. This regulatory constraint does not exist in Paris.
As in many other metropolitan areas, long commutes are undoubtedly a problem in Paris. To reduce commuting times, planners can improve the speed of various existing modes of transport and possibly introduce alternative modes. Removing regulatory constraints that are freezing land and floor space for residential consumption would enable the private sector to build affordable housing for a larger number of workers in desirable locations because of their accessibility to jobs.
In a nutshell, the 15-minute city concept serves as a distraction that diverts attention from other complex problems – those of metropolitan transport and affordable housing supply.
Alain Bertaud is a senior research scholar at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, New York University
[1] A pedestrian walking at a speed of 4 km/h covers a distance of 1 km in 15 minutes. The area potentially covered corresponds at a circle of 314 hectares (1KM2*PI).
Insight
Urbanisation in Gujarat - Recent Trends
Author: Prajwal Parmar
The figure shows built-up area expansion from 2017 to 2024 in Gujarat with the highway network overlaid. When visualised alongside the highway network and analysed district-wise, the built-up growth data reveals several spatial and infrastructural trends. The dataset used for this analysis was retrieved from ESRI Land Cover Explorer. The exercise was carried out using the following steps:
1. Extracted the built-up layer data for the years 2017 and 2024
2. Summarised the built-up area for each district
3. Calculated the growth rate from 2017–2024
The table shows the growth in built-up area for all the districts of Gujarat during this period. According to the data, districts such as Dang, Dahod, Panch Mahals, Valsad and Mahisagar demonstrate a high growth rate in terms of built-up area, indicating rapid urbanisation. In contrast, districts like Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Rajkot, Vadodara and Surat – which have already experienced a certain level of urbanisation – show a relatively lower growth rate.
The growth of built-up areas is happening mostly around rural settlements and along highways. This growth appears to be unplanned and haphazard – calling for a quick response. Fast growing rural settlements need to be designated as ‘urban’, and their growth needs to be regulated in accordance with rudimentary expansion plans. Such plans need not propose anything more than a robust grid of streets. Once orderly growth is ensured, the newly developing areas can be provided with infrastructure and amenities.
Prajwal Parmar is a Research Associate at CUPDF, a Centre of Excellence at CEPT University
Explained
Negative Externalities
Authors: Suyash Rai and Bimal Patel
City life is a life lived in proximity with others. It also requires much sharing with strangers, rubbing shoulders in public spaces, navigating overlapping uses of land and infrastructure, and constantly negotiating a web of interactions. These interactions often produce negative externalities – when an individual or organisation engages in an activity that imposes unintended costs on others without compensating them. In cities, these spillovers are ubiquitous – from the late-night music from a restaurant to the air pollution from backup diesel generators.
Public economics frames these in terms of market failure. They are also social and spatial phenomena.
Living in a city inevitably means accepting some nuisances and, in turn, inflicting some on others. Cities are not cloistered monasteries. They are places where cooking smells drift between homes, where music and laughter spill onto streets, and where people walk, drive, and sometimes park where they shouldn’t. A city that tries to eliminate all discomfort resulting from the spillover of nuisances would also eliminate much of its life and vibrancy.
The use of state power to protect ourselves from every nuisance can create a zero-sum logic of control rather than coexistence. A better starting point is the recognition that living with others means accepting some level of mutual imposition. As Jane Jacobs put it, “To make a city safe and liveable, you don't segregate everything neatly apart; you let different people with different purposes and timetables cross paths. That’s what generates the economic and social energy of a city.”
Such an attitude requires planners to see nuisances as existing on a spectrum, not as a binary – nuisance or not, permitted or banned. Some, such as toxic emissions from an industrial plant, present a clear and present danger. Others, like the occasional barking dog or a noisy party, are more ambiguous. What counts as intolerable in one context might be acceptable in another. The key is to assess not just the harm caused, but also the context, the frequency, the reversibility, and the feasibility of mitigation. It is also important to consider who performs this assessment. There is no algorithm to tell planners which nuisances to prohibit, which to mitigate, and which to tolerate.
Externalities, or the spillover of nuisances, can be addressed in two broad ways: through top-down planning and regulation, or through bottom-up resolution. The state can intervene directly – via public systems, zoning, regulation or fines. But equally, it can enable conditions under which people resolve conflicts among themselves.
Public systems
When using public spaces, we may inflict externalities upon others simply because we lack a way to coordinate with others. The government can instate systems that help mitigate such coordination problems. For instance, traffic signals and some traffic rules help mitigate the externalities of using the roads.
Fines and penalties
One common approach is to levy fines on those who generate nuisances. If set at the right level, this can internalise the cost – making the polluter pay the full social cost of the pollution. This can limit such activities and create a deterrent effect. But over-reliance on penalties can breed resentment, encourage evasion, or require enforcement capacity that local authorities may lack.
Zoning
Zoning is planners’ traditional response to externalities. By separating land uses – residential from industrial, or commercial from institutional – it aims to prevent nuisances before they arise. While zoning appears to have a sound preventive logic, it also has many drawbacks that make it highly problematic. It presumes that planners can anticipate all the activities that people will undertake in a city and the nuisances that they are likely to generate. This is impossible and therefore zoning cannot be an effective tool for dealing with nuisance. It tends to freeze urban form, limit mixed uses, and often reflects arbitrary or outdated assumptions about what belongs where.
Moreover, zoning often excludes rather than integrates. It pushes ‘undesirable’ activities to the periphery, sometimes disproportionately affecting the poor. And once zoning maps are drawn, they are difficult to change, locking cities into suboptimal patterns. In developing countries, this rigidity can choke the adaptability and informality that cities need to thrive.
Technology-specific regulations
Some cities tackle externalities by prescribing specific technical remedies – such as requiring acoustic insulation in apartment walls to reduce noise transmission from one apartment to another. This has the benefit of providing clear standards and ensuring mitigation at source. But it also risks one-size-fits-all mandates that ignore cost, context, or user needs. For example, requiring all builders to install expensive insulation may reduce housing affordability. Moreover, it can stifle innovation by prescribing methods rather than outcomes. It assumes that planners know the best solution, when better or cheaper options may exist.
Outcome-based standards
An alternative is to regulate outcomes rather than means. Instead of requiring insulation, a rule might state: Noise levels at plot boundaries must not exceed 40 decibels. This encourages problem-solving and innovation – residents or developers can choose how to comply. Monitoring compliance can be difficult, and enforcement requires accurate measurement. Still, this approach has the merit of being goal-oriented and adaptable.
Negotiated remedies and enabling institutions
Ronald Coase posited that well-defined property rights and low transaction costs enable private parties to negotiate solutions to externalities without state intervention. In this approach, the key to solving externality problems lies in clarifying entitlements and reducing the cost of negotiation. For example, when an establishment emits noise that disturbs nearby residents, and the residents have a right to a quiet environment, the factory can either negotiate a compensation or invest in noise-reducing technology to avoid paying compensation. The outcome can be efficiency if bargaining is feasible. If transaction costs of bargaining are high, litigation can become the fallback mechanism for enforcement – this is where tort litigation comes in.
Another approach is to create institutions that enable people to resolve externalities without state micromanagement. For example, housing societies or neighbourhood associations can be recognised and empowered under law to set rules, collect charges, or penalise members. Their functioning can also be constrained by law to ensure they do not misuse their powers. Such institutions can then decide which nuisances to ban, mitigate or tolerate, and how to do this.
Many housing colonies, for example, are plagued by noise from loudspeakers deployed by individuals for private functions. A duly empowered housing society can regulate such a nuisance by banning the use of loudspeakers. They can also charge for the use of loudspeakers as a way of compensating others for tolerating the nuisance. A well-structured housing society can become a forum for dialogue and negotiation, and a mechanism for levying charges, peer enforcement or local mediation – allowing cooperation to flourish.
The role of norms
Finally, many of the most effective responses to nuisance do not come from laws or penalties, but from the silent emergence of social norms. In some cities, for example, it is considered rude to honk even in the middle of traffic jams. In others, there is a quiet expectation that construction activities will pause during afternoon hours when elderly residents are resting. These norms are not legislated – they are lived.
Such patterns emerge when communities repeatedly interact, observe each other, and develop shared expectations. They are powerful precisely because they are subtle – creating order without coercion. For planners and policymakers, the lesson is this: fostering norms of mutual respect, cooperation and restraint may sometimes do more to reduce externalities than any formal rule.
A portfolio of remedies
Each approach has its strengths and limitations, and their choice must consider local context, feasibility, and unintended consequences. In practice, policy approaches may also combine several instruments. Solving the problem of externalities is less about picking a perfect tool than about building an adaptive, multi-layered system of interventions that reflect the complexities of real-world economies and societies. The best cities don’t rely on silver bullets – they use a portfolio of tools: some rules, some norms, some penalties, some negotiations. They mix and match depending on the type of nuisance, the capacity of local actors, and the broader goals of inclusiveness and liveability.
The aim is not to eliminate all friction, but to manage it wisely. The ideal city is not one where everyone lives in silence behind sealed walls, but one where people learn to live together, negotiate differences, and share the air, space, and sounds of urban life.
Suyash Rai is Chair of Research and Bimal Patel is Chairperson of the Board at CUPDF, a Centre of Excellence at CEPT University
Reading
Arbitrary Lines
Author: Suyash Rai
As India’s cities struggle with soaring housing costs and poor mobility, many of the tenets and instruments of our planning systems warrant closer scrutiny. Zoning is one such instrument. It is a central pillar of master planning. Planners are required by law to make plans with land-use zones accompanied by extensive tables of permitted and discretionary uses and restrictive floor-area caps. In Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, M. Nolan Gray calls zoning ‘the most destructive law you’ve never heard of’. His critique resonates as much in Mumbai or Manila as it does in Minneapolis. This is not just a tale of American missteps, but a cautionary mirror for cities in the Global South.
Arbitrary Lines is history, critique and manifesto. Gray, a city planner and researcher, traces zoning’s US origins to the early 20th century. Ostensibly created to separate conflicting uses and manage growth, zoning was also a tool of exclusion. Berkeley’s 1916 single-family zoning, for instance, was explicitly motivated by racial bias – a city planner feared that ‘undesirable industries’ would attract ‘negroes and Orientals’. By the 1970s, zoning had tightened, and housing costs began to far outstrip incomes. Gray acknowledges that zoning appears dull on the surface, but its consequences run deep. Seemingly innocuous rules end up shaping nearly every aspect of urban life. Gray reveals zoning’s political roots, uncovering how it served to entrench racial and economic privilege rather than just separate smokestacks from homes.
The book’s core critique lies in its middle chapters. Gray shows how zoning has inflated housing prices, fostered sprawl, and institutionalised segregation. In most US cities, about three-quarters of the land is reserved for single-family homes, banning apartments outright. This artificially restricts housing supply in high-demand areas, causing predictable scarcity and unaffordability. Gray notes that the US is ‘systematically moving from high-productivity cities to low-productivity cities’ mainly because zoning blocks housing where it’s needed most.
Zoning has also reinforced social and racial divides. Under the banner of preserving ‘neighbourhood character’, local authorities have used it to block affordable housing and entrench privilege. Gray argues that suburban zoning is often designed to exclude the less privileged and protect public resources for affluent residents. This exclusion pushes low-income households to distant, poorly served areas, further deepening segregation.
Environmental hypocrisy is another theme. Cities celebrated for environmentalism often enforce zoning that mandates car-dependent sprawl. Gray cites a telling contrast: the average Vermont resident, in a state known for green policies, consumes 3.5 times more gasoline than a New Yorker. Why? New York’s pre-zoning density supports walking and transit; Vermont’s sprawl does not. Zoning reform, then, is not just a housing issue – it is central to sustainability. Removing apartment bans, eliminating parking minimums, and allowing mixed-use development can significantly reduce vehicle travel and emissions. Gray’s argument reinforces an emerging consensus in urban policy – that compact cities are greener cities.
Gray is not content to merely critique. The final chapters offer alternative frameworks: form-based codes that regulate physical form instead of use, performance zoning that targets outcomes such as noise or pollution, and flexible planning that relies on negotiation.
Gray’s stance is radical: zoning is not a flawed tool but a fundamentally exclusionary institution. ‘Zoning is not a good institution gone bad,’ he writes, ‘it was designed to inflate property values, slow development, segregate cities, and promote single-family homes as the urban ideal.’ Reforming the margins won’t suffice.
Gray highlights real-world reforms. In 2018, Minneapolis abolished single-family-only zoning, permitting duplexes and triplexes on former single-house lots. Such steps, alongside ending minimum parking requirements and excessive lot size or floor area requirements, are meant to ‘move beyond zoning’ toward a more flexible planning regime. Gray also illustrates alternatives by looking abroad – notably at Japan’s zoning system, which is far more permissive of mixed land uses.
Japanese zoning is set nationally, limiting local Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY) pressures. Gray argues this top-down approach offers lessons: centralised frameworks can prevent parochial interests from blocking needed urban growth. In contrast, US zoning is highly localised, with thousands of municipalities setting rules. This fragmented control, Gray contends, creates dysfunction – each suburb’s resistance to growth fuels regional housing shortages, congestion and inequality. Some planning decisions, he argues, are better made at regional or national levels. For countries like India, where planning is already centralised, the lesson is not to embrace rigidity but to ensure higher-level policies promote flexibility and inclusion. As in other areas of governance, the key is striking a suitable balance between local discretion and constraints placed from higher levels.
A key strength of Arbitrary Lines is its accessibility. Gray synthesises complex economic studies and urban planning research into vivid, readable prose. He mixes data with storytelling – from outlawed LA apartments to thriving Houston restaurants in a no-zoning regime – to make his case compelling.
Gray’s arguments resonate strongly in India. Housing supply is constrained by low Floor Space Index (FSI) limits and arbitrary development rules. Delhi, for instance, permits an FSI of around 2 – very low by global standards. Add setbacks, parking mandates and common area requirements, and the result is stifled urban growth. Simply avoiding the zoning label doesn’t guarantee better outcomes; it’s the logic of regulation that matters.
Patchwork solutions like designated affordable housing zones often miss the mark. These zones are politically expedient but economically flawed – homes in such zones frequently cost more than expected because underlying market dynamics remain unaddressed. Gray’s work implies that an overall liberal approach to planning is more effective than selective exceptions or deregulation.
Gray’s critique is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The legal and institutional contexts differ: US zoning is hyper-local; Indian planning operates under state laws and intersects with national policies. Still, Arbitrary Lines offers incisive takeaways.
First, the universal insight that cities are dynamic systems best governed by adaptable, enabling rules. Heavy-handed zoning can backfire – worsening affordability, inequality and sprawl. Second, reform is politically feasible when coalitions of renters, builders and climate advocates unite. Third, Gray emphasises the power of default rules that allow by-right construction – legalising ‘missing middle’ housing by right unlocks more supply than any concessionary scheme. Fourth, performance standards often regulate externalities more precisely than blanket prohibitions. As discussed in the Explained section of this newsletter, other instruments are also available. And fifth, planners must shift from being gatekeepers and enforcers of rigid codes to being enablers and mediators of urban transformation – a cultural change aligning with Indian debates on building municipal capacity. This demands more than technical know-how; it calls for institutional reimagination.
In essence, Arbitrary Lines is a call for humility. Cities are too complex to be governed by rigid, top-down codes. Planners must recognise the limits of control and embrace flexibility, responsiveness and co-creation.
The book succeeds as both a critique of zoning’s American roots and a manifesto for its reform. It is clear, empirical and engaging – accessible to planners, activists and engineers alike. More importantly, it equips urban thinkers in places such as Delhi, Dhaka or Dar es Salaam with a critical lens to question the regulations that undermine affordability, mobility and sustainability.
Indian planners should read Arbitrary Lines not for ready-made answers but for better questions. How do our rules shape who lives where? Do they enable or constrain opportunity? Are we planning for the city as it is or as we wish it were? What unintended harms do our controls produce?
Planning decisions today shape urban futures for decades. Gray’s book reminds us that we can no longer afford to draw arbitrary lines. It’s time to plan differently.
Suyash Rai is Chair of Research at CUPDF, a Centre of Excellence at CEPT University