Representative image
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On a humid August morning, Washington DC awoke to the sight of National Guard convoys rumbling through its avenues. United States President Donald Trump had invoked a rarely used clause of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, taking direct control of the capital’s police and declaring a ‘crime emergency’. The justification was contested, the imagery deliberate: the State flexing muscle over a city it did not fully trust.
A few months earlier, Istanbul’s elected mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was arrested under charges of ‘terrorist links’. Across Türkiye, thousands poured into the streets, seeing his detention as a symbol of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s long campaign to neutralise local democratic power. And in India, cranes continue to rise above New Delhi’s Central Vista Redevelopment Project — a monumental corridor of the State designed and executed with little municipal consultation, sold as the visual signature of a ‘New India’.
At first glance, these episodes seem unconnected — three leaders, three cities, three political systems. But together they reveal a deeper pattern of our age: the capture of urban space and institutions by centralised power, where the city becomes both a stage for political spectacle and a site of capital extraction. In Washington, Istanbul, or New Delhi, the same script unfolds — State overreach wrapped in the rhetoric of modernisation.
Politics behind the skyline
Cities are not just physical landscapes; they are repositories of power, culture, and wealth. Governments have always sought to shape them in their image. But in the 21st century, with cities producing over 60% of global GDP, the incentive to control them has intensified.
Urban governance, once a matter of sanitation and services, has become a high-stakes political theatre. The cranes and bulldozers symbolise not only ‘development’, but also control over revenue streams, land values, and the social rhythms of urban life. Modern authoritarianism often prefers the skyline to the ballot box: build something monumental, and call it ‘progress’.
This phenomenon — described as ‘neo-Haussmannisation’—has global reach. From Paris’s 19th-century boulevards to today’s waterfront promenades in Shanghai or Mumbai, the aesthetics of order serve the politics of discipline. Securitised public spaces, sanitised tourist zones, and speculative real-estate enclaves have become hallmarks of power projects dressed as urban renewal.
But for the millions who inhabit the unglamorous underbelly of these cities — street vendors, tenants, waste workers, informal transporters — the cost is invisibility. Their displacement is rarely photographed; their voices seldom heard in the language of ‘smart cities’.
The silent casualty: local democracy
What truly distinguishes the new urban politics is not just architectural scale but administrative centralisation. Municipalities — the closest democratic institutions to everyday citizens — are being hollowed out or bypassed altogether.
In India, this tension is stark. Urban areas generate nearly two-thirds of national income, yet city governments command less than 1% of total tax revenues. The 74th Constitutional Amendment of 1992 promised decentralisation, but in practice, the purse strings remain tightly held by states and the Centre. After the Goods and Services Tax (GST) subsumed local levies such as octroi and entry tax, city finances became even more dependent on transfers from above.
In Haryana, for instance, development powers were recently concentrated in bureaucratic commissioners rather than elected mayors. In Chandigarh, the municipal budget for 2026 leans heavily on grants-in-aid from the Union Territory administration. This fiscal and institutional asymmetry leaves Indian cities politically disempowered and administratively fragile — even as they are held accountable for everything from garbage collection to climate resilience.
Compare this to Europe, where municipalities enjoy predictable revenue streams and shared tax bases, or China, where cities exercise significant control over land-value capture and industrial policy. Fiscal autonomy does not guarantee equity, but its absence guarantees dependence.
Spectacle vs the slow work of democracy
Why do leaders persist with grand, centralised projects that repeatedly fail to address social and ecological realities? Because spectacle sells. It is immediate, televisual, and politically rewarding.
The inauguration of a boulevard or a monument offers visible proof of decisiveness. Participatory planning, in contrast, is slow, messy, and often invisible. Yet, it is precisely this slow work — building local capacity, nurturing municipal institutions, enabling citizens’ voice — that sustains cities over time.
When cities lose autonomy, they also lose resilience. Centralised projects routinely misread local ecologies and social fabrics. They uproot informal economies that provide livelihoods and everyday stability. By turning land into speculative assets, they financialise the very foundation of urban life. The result: inequality deepens, and the promise of sustainability recedes.
Cities that work differently
There are, however, counter-stories worth celebrating. In Shenzhen, a city-level initiative created the world’s first fully-electrified public bus fleet — a transformation born of municipal leadership — later scaled up nationally. In Barcelona, the ‘Superblocks’ movement began with neighbourhood assemblies reimagining mobility and public space. In Freiburg’s Vauban district, co-operative housing and community energy networks emerged from sustained civic engagement, not central decree.
These cases demonstrate that urban innovation flourishes when decision-making is local, iterative, and accountable. The solutions that endure — on housing, transport, or climate adaptation — are rarely born in ministries. They grow from alleyways, neighbourhood councils, and community boards.
The city as a battleground for democracy
We are living through a moment when democratic backsliding is global, but the frontlines are often urban. From Istanbul’s protests to Delhi’s housing movements, from US sanctuary cities defying federal orders to climate networks of mayors worldwide, the struggle for democratic space increasingly unfolds in the city.
Urban power is no longer only about who plans or who builds; it is about who decides what kind of society the city will embody. The street protest and the zoning meeting are, in their own ways, acts of citizenship.
The challenge, therefore, is not to romanticise localism but to restore balance: to ensure that the national state enables rather than overwhelms municipal democracy. That requires concrete reforms — predictable city finances, participatory planning laws, and stronger protections against arbitrary central takeovers.
The deeper question is moral: should cities be governed as communities or conquered as commodities?
A politics worth building
The cranes of Central Vista and the tanks on DC’s streets may belong to different political systems, but they point to a shared anxiety — a fear of the unruly, self-organising city. Yet, history shows that democracy’s pulse often beats strongest in these spaces: in local assemblies, tenants’ unions, and neighbourhood collectives.
If we are to reclaim the idea of the city as a democratic common rather than a theatre of control, the task ahead is slow but urgent — to rebuild from below, empower from within, and insist that urban modernity serve its people, not just its masters.
(Tikender Singh Panwar is former deputy mayor, Shimla, and member, Kerala Urban Commission.)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.