India: The Rise of Double Decker Cities
If you want a new outcome you will have to break the habit of being yourself, and reinvent a new self. - Joe Dispenze
The other day, I visited Mumbai, and one feature immediately caught my attention: the large number of flyovers. Mumbai, is not unique in this regard. Across India, flyovers have become a standard feature of urban transport planning. Unintentionally, they have created double-decker cities, where multiple elevated roadways rise above existing streets and envelop the facades of buildings that line them.
The emergence of double-decker cities is closely linked to the history of urban planning in India.
At Independence, the British primarily lived in civil lines, cantonments, and railway colonies. They largely adopted a hands-off approach toward the surrounding Indian neighborhoods, allowing these areas to grow with little formal urban planning.
After Independence, governments sought to plan both these unplanned urban areas and the peripheral land expected to accommodate future growth. They adopted the Master Plan as the principal planning instrument.
Economic liberalization in the 1990s transformed Indian cities into major engines of economic growth. As cities changed rapidly, Master Plans struggled to keep pace. In response, state governments gradually made them more flexible by:
Allowing changes in land use and building regulations, such as permitting commercial activities in residential areas, allowing taller buildings, and compensating landowners who surrendered land to make way for road widening with additional floor space or higher floor-area ratios.
Informally permitting property owners to construct buildings beyond prescribed regulations, with governments periodically regularizing these violations.
This shift replaced long-term, plan-led growth with investment-driven urban development. As a result, cities increasingly relied on “permitted mixed land use” rather than the “planned mixed land use” envisioned in Master Plans.
Permitted mixed land use produced cities with diverse land uses and building types arranged in a seemingly-haphazard pattern. Over time, this transformation turned roads into what urban professionals describe as social zones.
Postmodern urban design distinguishes between traffic zones and social zones. Traffic zones prioritize consistency, predictability, and efficiency in the movement of vehicles and pedestrians. They separate vehicular and pedestrian networks and organize roads into a functional hierarchy based on speed, capacity, and purpose - for example, national highways, arterial roads, and neighborhood streets.
Social zones, by contrast, integrate vehicles, pedestrians, children's play, and everyday social activities within the same space. This approach draws on the woonerf principles developed by Niek de Boer and Joost Vahl in the Netherlands and on related experiments such as the United Kingdom's Home Zones programme.
India has produced a distinctly different outcome. Instead of deliberately designing social zones, the widespread adoption of permitted mixed land use gradually transformed roads that had originally functioned as traffic zones into social zones. Urban planning offers no established textbook solution for restoring these roads to their original traffic function without disrupting the social and economic activities that now occupy them.
The rapid construction of flyovers represents India's response to this challenge. Rather than reclaiming existing roads exclusively for traffic, flyovers create a second transportation layer above them. The elevated roads restore efficient traffic movement while allowing the streets below to continue functioning as social zones. In doing so, flyovers are steadily transforming Indian cities into double-decker cities.
