Can Indian cities be made to look beautiful, more organised, and less chaotic?

Yes, cities can be beautiful, but that beauty is not the same as the beauty of a work of art. A city is not a painting, and observers easily mistake its order for chaos.

Judging a city’s beauty from a hundred feet up, or two hundred, or certainly a thousand, does not work. That vantage point produces symmetric blocks laid out from architectural design principles and turned into master plans. Such plans have drawn admirers for decades, but they never capture what a real city feels like.

A city amounts to nothing more than the sum of its streets, and each street contributes its own character to the whole. Diversity offers the best measure of a street’s beauty: diversity in its buildings, diversity among the people who use it, and diversity in the forms and functions packed along it.

Symmetry and consistency serve art and architecture well, but cities gain little from either. A city built for symmetry ages into a boring relic of the canvas it came from. Cities instead build their beauty from patterns that emerge organically, out of countless strange and unique combinations that no planner designs directly. Those patterns reward a viewer who walks the street at eye level, one street at a time. They rarely survive translation onto a master plan drawn on paper.

Any city holds both kinds of street side by side, the remarkable and the boring. Planners often reach for a quick fix to turn a boring street into an interesting one, patching its layout with repairs and small improvements meant to invite the diversity that makes a street worth walking.