Walkability, Urban Spatial Justice, Conspicuous Consumption, Cultural Capital, Karmic Meritocracy, Lefebvre's Spatial Triad, Defensible Space, Tragedy of the Commons, Right to the City, Smart Cities Mission, Impression Management, Relative Deprivation, Inverted Maslow, Gated Urbanism, Pedestrian Exclusion, Class and Public Space, Tlawmngaihna, Participatory Planning, Postcolonial Urbanism.
India's urban crisis is not merely infrastructural, it is philosophical. This paper argues that the inability of Indian cities to produce walkable, shared public space is the physical consequence of layered cultural, economic, and ideological systems that have collectively organised urban life around the avoidance of equality. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's theory of space as social product, Thorstein Veblen's framework of conspicuous consumption, Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, and Erving Goffman's model of social performance, the paper traces how the Indian city has been produced not for its inhabitants but for the performance of class distinction a performance in which the car is the primary prop and the shared street its rejected stage. The shift in Indian aspiration from roti, kapda, makan to car, house, and connectivity is identified as a philosophical transition, not merely an economic one, a transition that rendered public transport shameful, the footpath residual, and walking a mark of failure. The paper further examines how karmic theology functions as a spatial ideology, legitimising inequality by rendering it cosmically deserved, and why drawing on Manu Joseph's observation about relative deprivation this has historically suppressed urban revolt even under conditions of extreme spatial injustice. Adapting Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the Indian urban context, the paper demonstrates that Indian planning systematically inverts the pyramid: directing political capital and public budgets toward aspirational interventions at the peak smart city infrastructure, aesthetic upgrades, global rankings while the base layers of mobility, safety, and basic infrastructure remain chronically broken for the majority. The Smart Cities Mission is examined not as a solution to this inversion but as its most recent intensification, producing governance structures accountable to corporations and central targets rather than to the pedestrian, the vendor, or the commuter whose daily life they reorganise. The paper concludes with an ethical demand rooted in Iris Marion Young's theory of spatial justice and the Mizo philosophy of tlawmngaihna: that genuine urban development requires not the delivery of infrastructure to communities but the collective, participatory production of space by them. The walkable city, this paper argues, is not an aesthetic preference. It is a political test and India is failing it.
Volume 4
Issue 6,
June-2026
Pages : b159-b164
Paper Reg. ID: JETNR_235053
Published Paper Id: JETNR2606142
Downloads: 00054
Research Area: Others area
Country: Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India
ISSN: 2984-9276 | IMPACT FACTOR: 9.87 Calculated By Google Scholar | ESTD YEAR: 2023
An International Scholarly Open Access Journal, Peer-Reviewed, Refereed Journal Impact Factor 9.87 Calculate by Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar | AI-Powered Research Tool, Multidisciplinary, Monthly, Multilanguage Journal Indexing in All Major Database & Metadata, Citation Generator
Publisher: RJPN (IJPublication) Janvi Wave
