# The City Keralam Forgot to Build

Author: Pramod Prasanth
Published: 2026-08-27
Canonical: https://pramod.ch/essays/the-city-kerala-forgot-to-build
Description: Keralam has the raw material most cities would pay to manufacture: backwaters, canals, forest edges, coastal frontage. Its cities are spending that asset down instead of building on it. From a series asking what Keralam 2040 would have to be.

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The Thevara-Perandoor canal runs about ten kilometres through the middle of Kochi, past Panampilly Nagar, Kadavanthra and Kaloor, and near the city centre it is now a drain. You can follow where it goes by the smell before you reach the water. Concrete has crept to both edges. Near Ernakulam Junction station it shrinks to a few metres across, and a survey along its whole length found heavy encroachment, worst along the middle stretch, each encroachment either legal enough or ignored long enough to become permanent. People once used it to move goods by boat. In May 2025 the state approved a plan to widen it, and five other Kochi canals, to at least 16.5 metres.[^15]

Most cities in the world would build a network like this from scratch if they could. Keralam inherited one, spent years narrowing it, and has now approved a plan to widen part of it again. The pressure that narrowed it, one parcel at a time, has not gone away.

The city is where everything the series has argued for so far either lands physically or does not land at all. Talent, clusters, research, capital. Each gap the series has named assumes a place where the work happens, where the people doing it choose to live, and where the firms that employ them can plan. That place is the city, and Keralam has not built it.

> Keralam's cities are consuming the very asset that makes Keralam worth living in.

### The wrong goal

The problem is not that Keralam plans its cities badly within the rules. The problem is the goal the rules serve.

The dominant planning paradigm in India, Keralam included, minimises harm. How little ecology can a project damage. How few people must it displace. How short can the clearance timeline be. Compensatory planting after the trees are cut. Setbacks measured from the waterway. Permitted floor-area ratios. These are all do-less-harm interventions, and they all assume the same thing: that the city exists to extract, and that limiting the damage is a side constraint bolted on afterwards. In much Indian urban policy, sustainability has become the polite name for that assumption. It softens the paradigm without changing it.

A regenerative paradigm asks a different question. Not how little harm can these cities cause, but what kind of life, ecological and social and economic at once, could they be designed to make flourish, and what would have to be true for that to happen by 2040. The goal of the system changes. Damage minimisation stops being the ceiling and becomes a trivial floor.

Changing the word changes nothing on its own. Changing the goal of the system is a different and far more powerful intervention, and there is a developed theory of why. Donella Meadows, in her essay on leverage points, ranked twelve places to intervene in a system in increasing order of power.[^1] Near the bottom sit constants and parameters: subsidies, taxes, setback distances, FAR limits. Most urban policy debate in Keralam lives down there, arguing about the numbers in a master plan. Near the top sit the goals of the system, and above them the paradigm the goals come out of. Meadows' point was that effort spent at the bottom of the list moves almost nothing, while a shift at the top reorganises everything below it. Keralam's cities are an unusually clean illustration. Decades of fighting over parameters have not changed the trajectory, because the trajectory is set by a goal nobody is contesting.

In practice, a regenerative Keralam city would make four choices in the opposite order from today's development model: protect water before allocating frontage; map and restore canals before treating them as drainage; concentrate new density around transit and services rather than extending the ribbon settlement; and treat tree cover, shade, and flood absorption as public infrastructure with enforceable standards. The argument is not for less development. It is for development that leaves the place more capable than it found it.

> Sustainability is the polite version of the paradigm Keralam's cities have been operating under. Regenerative thinking is what would happen if the paradigm changed.

The regenerative paradigm is also a better fit for Keralam than any imported template, which matters because the reflex when discussing city quality is to reach for Singapore or Zurich and copy. Keralam already has the three things regenerative planning depends on and most places have to manufacture: an ecological asset base of genuine richness, a dense social fabric, and an unusually strong attachment between people and specific places. The planning system has been treating all three as constraints. They are the power source.

### Place attachment is the engine, not the friction

Every planning agency in Keralam that has ever tried to acquire land has run into the same wall and given it the same name. Land acquisition is hard in Keralam. People will not sell. A road widening stalls for a decade over a few hundred metres. A waterfront project meets organised local resistance. In the standard account this is Keralam's congenital planning disease, the reason nothing large gets built, the cost of a politically mobilised population.

Read it through a different lens and it is the most valuable planning input the state has. The affective bond between people and the places they live in, what the planning literature calls place attachment, is a well-documented motivator of community participation and neighbourhood improvement.[^2] Most planning practice treats public participation as a procedure to be designed and a box to be ticked. The research points elsewhere: caring about a specific place can help inspire people to act.

Keralam has this in unusual depth. The Gulf return migrant who builds a house in the exact panchayat he grew up in when cheaper and more convenient land was available. The diaspora that names a school or a hospital after a home village few outsiders could find on a map. The local body that defends a stretch of backwater from a resort project past the point of economic rationality. The current paradigm reads every one of these as resistance. A regenerative paradigm reads them as civic energy that, engaged honestly, would defend canals, restore waterfronts, and steward forest edges at a scale no planning department could ever staff or fund.

> Keralam's place attachment has been read as friction by every planning agency that ever tried to acquire land. It is not friction. It is the civic energy a regenerative city would actually run on.

The institutional implication is specific and it is uncomfortable for the current model. It means planning processes that take residents' material and emotional relationships to particular places as inputs, not as obstacles to be consulted away. Not the stakeholder consultation as currently practised, which informs people of a decision already made and minutes their objections. Processes where the place-bond shapes the plan. This is slower at the front end and far more durable at the back end, because a plan that the people attached to a place helped write is a plan they will defend rather than fight.

### What taking the city seriously actually looks like

It helps to have seen the alternative working, because otherwise the argument sounds utopian.

What I watched in Singapore is a city treated as a product the state is responsible for, and none of it is accident or climate luck. The Singapore River was cleaned over ten years. The money went into the water and into the access to it, not into building over it.[^3] The new towns, Tampines and Punggol among them, were planned comprehensively, as whole towns, by the Housing and Development Board. A single statutory authority, the Urban Redevelopment Authority, held city-wide planning power and the capacity to enforce it.[^4] The city is good because someone decided it was a competitive asset and built the institution to make it one.

What I know from Basel is quieter and more relevant. Basel is a city of under two hundred thousand people on the Rhine, and it is also where Roche and Novartis are headquartered, which makes it a centre of pharmaceutical research and close to the kind of economy this series has been arguing Keralam should build. It is not spectacular and does not try to be. The Rhine runs through the middle of it as an actively used public commons; on a warm day half the city swims home down the river. Cycling infrastructure runs continuously and goes where people actually ride. Building codes preserve the character of streets. Public transport runs to schedule precisely enough that people plan their lives around it. Zurich has owned the Sihlwald forest since the fourteenth century and, instead of continuing to log it, had it protected: since 2010 it has carried federal designation as a nature discovery park of national importance.[^5] None of this is glamorous. All of it adds up to cities that hold mobile international talent through functional quality of life, without spectacle.

Neither Singapore nor Switzerland started with what Keralam already has. Basel's beauty is built, civic, maintained. Keralam begins with backwaters, canals, forest edges, coastal frontage, and a climate that grows things whether you ask it to or not. A Keralam city that treated its waterways and forest edges as design inputs instead of obstacles would have an offer that no landlocked industrial city could replicate at any budget. That is an economic argument before it is an aesthetic one.

### The failures not yet locked in

Some of the damage is reversible, but only if the state acts before today's parcel-by-parcel decisions become tomorrow's permanent geography. Four failures stand out. Each was a decision.

The waterfront is being privatised and concreted in ways that are hard to undo. Singapore cleaned up its river and opened the banks to the public within the same plan that redeveloped the city centre around them. The public edge and the commercial density were designed together.[^3] Once water frontage is in private hands and built over, reclaiming it for public use is politically and financially brutal. What this requires is not a guideline but planning law: a zoning category that prevents residential and commercial construction within a defined setback from water, paired with active public programming inside the protected zone so the space is used and therefore defended.

The canals are the clearest case, because the incentive that destroys them is so legible. Filling or covering a canal frees up land, and land has immediate monetary value to a local body and to a developer. Keeping the canal open as a public waterway has ecological and transit value, and that value reaches a budget only as a project, years after the damage: the Inland Waterways Authority of India spent ₹228.60 crore on National Waterway 3 between 1994-95 and 2014-15, and in 2025 the state approved a ₹3,716.10 crore plan to widen six Kochi canals and build the sewers around them.[^15] At the moment a parcel beside a canal is filled, none of that money is in the calculation. So the canals are filled, legally, rationally, one parcel at a time, and a transport and drainage and ecological asset that most cities would build from scratch is converted into plots and booked as growth. The scale of what is being spent down is on the record. Keralam has 1,687 kilometres of inland waterway; 205 kilometres of it was declared a National Waterway in 1993; in 2014-15 freight moved on thirty-seven of those kilometres and the other 168 carried nothing at all. How much of the network has been encroached is not on the record, because the boundaries of the waterways were never surveyed, so when the CAG audited it in 2015, the department responsible could not say. The one eviction it managed covered 7.86 kilometres and took seven years.[^6] The policy task is narrow and concrete: make the canal's value visible in the planning calculation so that keeping it open is not an act of charity by whoever happens to own the adjacent plot.

> A canal is not a drainage problem. It is infrastructure that most cities would build from scratch if they could.

Density is the third, and Keralam's failure mode here is specific. The settlement pattern is already an almost continuous ribbon along the coastal and inland corridors, neither urban nor rural. Permits are granted parcel by parcel, so development sprawls further into agricultural and ecological land without ever producing the concentration that makes urban services, transit, water, sanitation, economically viable to provide. The answer is walkable density concentrated in nodes, with ecological corridors between them. Towers are not the point. This is exactly the problem Singapore's new towns solved deliberately, and the one Keralam fails to solve by default.

Green cover is the fourth, and the one most readily dismissed as decoration. It is not decoration; it is enforceable infrastructure. Singapore requires new developments in designated strategic areas to provide landscaped area at least equal to their site area.[^4] Zurich's city forest is zoned protection. Medellín built a network of urban green corridors that, by C40's account, cut average city temperatures by 2°C.[^7] In Keralam's climate the case is not abstract: Kochi already runs 4.6°C hotter than the rural land beside it before dawn in winter.[^8] The economic case follows directly: green infrastructure cuts urban heat and therefore cooling costs and lost productivity, absorbs stormwater and therefore flood damage, and lifts the value of adjacent property. These are measurable quantities, not sentiments, and a city that treats them as sentiments is leaving money and resilience on the table. Keralam learned the cost of treating water management as optional in 2018, when the floods turned out to be, in significant part, a planning failure rather than a purely meteorological one.[^9]

*Figure: The asset is the top bar. The use is the bottom one. Between them sit boundaries that were never surveyed, which is why the state cannot say how much of the network has been encroached.*

*Figure: The heat in Kochi is measured. Medellín reports a remedy: about two degrees off its average temperature from green corridors planted across the city between 2016 and 2019.*

### Backcasting a city from a future worth having

Keralam has done this once already, and the second essay in this series leaned on it for a different argument. God's Own Country took Keralam's natural beauty, which had not changed, and rebuilt the narrative around it. Kerala Tourism adopted the phrase in the late 1980s, and by 2019 the state counted more than 19 million tourist visits a year and put tourism's total revenue at about ₹45,000 crore.[^14] The same essay carried the warning that applies even more sharply here: the brand succeeded and the ecological management did not keep pace, and the cities are now the clearest evidence of that gap. The lesson is about sequence. A narrative reframing works when the institutional infrastructure follows it, and fails when it stands in for it.

If the paradigm is the leverage point, the method that follows from it is backcasting, and Keralam does not have to invent it.

Forecasting starts from current trends and asks where they lead, which for Keralam's cities is a depressing exercise. Backcasting starts from a desired future state and asks what would have to be true at intermediate years for that state to become plausible. The same method works at the scale of a single company or of a whole city.

What backcasting at city scale produces is a picture of the place, held in common: what a society thinks the shape of its own territory is. Marshall, after Castoriadis, calls this a spatial imaginary. Keralam holds a vivid picture of its landscape and almost none of its cities, which is why a canal reads as a drain and not as a street. Where no explicit plan exists, Marshall argues, that picture may steer decisions anyway.[^10]

In 2019 a group of citizens in Singapore wrote Vision 2050, a long-horizon climate action plan. What is worth taking from it is the method, not the content. It sketched Singapore as, in their words, a flourishing player in a regenerative and connective global economy in which our descendants thrive. Then it worked backwards from that 2050 picture to the moves required between now and then.[^11] Two features matter for Keralam, and the plan's content, shaped by a city-state's peculiar constraints, is neither of them. The first is that it backcasts from a flourishing future instead of forecasting from present trends. The second is that it was written by citizens: a volunteer group answering a government consultation. It did not wait to be commissioned. It put a full alternative on the table, in writing, detailed enough that the state could adopt it or argue with it but could not simply ignore it.

Singapore is not the only template. France runs a permanent state institution for precisely this, the Commission Nationale du Débat Public, which can open public debate on major projects years before any permit is sought, and which Marshall describes as genuinely independent of government, business, and special-interest pressure.[^12] No other country has copied it, and Marshall's guess at the reason is pointed: business and business-oriented governments perhaps see it as too open and democratic. A Keralam that wanted citizen deliberation to be more than a consultation ritual would not have to invent the institution that carries it.

That second feature is where Keralam's supposed disadvantage turns into its sharpest asset. A literate, civically engaged, opinionated population is exactly the population a citizen-led planning vision requires. The researchers, architects, ecologists, returnees, and residents who care about specific Keralam places already exist, and the place-attachment that the current paradigm treats as friction is precisely the energy that would write such a document.

> A regenerative Keralam 2040 city plan does not need to wait for the state to commission it. It needs citizens to write it first.

#### What Keralam can do now

Within its current authority the state can do three things. It can put planning under one body with the power to hold the whole city, instead of splitting it across several bodies that each plan their own piece. Marshall, writing about sectoral planning in national governments, names the habit: "road engineers will plan road systems, water engineers will plan water systems".[^10] A city planned that way has no one responsible for the whole of it. It can write canal and waterfront protection into planning law, where it binds, instead of into guidelines, where it does not. And it can build one anchor project that shows the regenerative city working, because an argument made in concrete persuades where an argument made in policy papers does not.

The sequence matters as much as the project. Marshall describes one extreme of how projects relate to planning as the "free floating" project, promoted by a local or special interest with no acknowledged link to any wider frame.[^10] An anchor project needs a stated vision above it; without one it becomes the free-floating kind.

#### What requires federal change

Some of the binding constraints are central, and the shape of the money is the clearest of them. The Smart Cities Mission put about 80 per cent of proposed project cost into area-based development: one chosen district in each selected city, which for a retrofit had to cover more than 500 acres.[^13] Kochi's district ran about seven square kilometres, from Fort Kochi through Mattancherry to the city centre, and its plan included a four-kilometre waterway and the rejuvenation of four canals. So the money could reach canals, but only those inside the chosen district. A city's canal network runs through every ward, and a programme built around one district cannot fund it whole. Coastal Regulation Zone notifications, set centrally, govern what Keralam may do along its own coastline, and the matching-fund requirements attached to central urban money fall hard on a fiscally constrained state. None of this makes the state-level moves pointless. It bounds how far they reach.

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For the kind of economy this series has been arguing toward, the city is a precondition. You cannot build a world-class, research-heavy, globally connected firm in a place that talented and mobile people decline to live in, and you cannot build it in a place whose own residents have stopped feeling at home. The tourist who comes for the backwaters and finds a degraded waterfront does not return. The engineer weighing a relocation and finding the same does not arrive at all. A city is not an amenity that follows growth.

A later essay in this series will put a specific company on this ground and ask what the city, and everything underneath it, would have to be for that company to exist.

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### Sources

[^1]: [Donella Meadows, "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System," The Donella Meadows Project](https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/). The twelve-point hierarchy; goals (point 3) and paradigm (point 2) as the highest-leverage interventions.

[^2]: [Manzo, L. C. & Perkins, D. D. (2006), "Finding Common Ground: The Importance of Place Attachment to Community Participation and Planning," *Journal of Planning Literature* 20(4)](https://doi.org/10.1177/0885412205286160).

[^3]: [Public Utilities Board, "The Story of Singapore River and Marina Barrage"](https://www.pub.gov.sg/-/media/PUB/PDF/Story-of-Singapore-River-Marina-Barrage.pdf); [National Library Board Singapore, "Clean-up of Singapore River and Kallang Basin"](https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=21837345-389f-4856-a82d-a5415c7bb55b) (ten-year plan announced February 1977 and completed 1987, about S$300 million, more than 46,000 squatters and nearly 5,000 hawkers resettled); the cost and the resettlement figures are also in [Joshi, Tortajada & Biswas, "Cleaning of the Singapore River and Kallang Basin in Singapore: Economic, Social, and Environmental Dimensions," *International Journal of Water Resources Development* 28(4) (2012): 647–658](https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2012.669034).

[^4]: [Urban Redevelopment Authority, "About URA"](https://www.ura.gov.sg/about-ura/) (statutory board established 1974; Singapore's land use planning and conservation authority) and [URA, "Master Plan"](https://www.ura.gov.sg/land-planning/master-plan/) (the statutory land use plan guiding development over the next ten to fifteen years); on the new-town model, [Housing and Development Board, "Our Role"](https://www.hdb.gov.sg/about-us/our-role) ("We plan and rejuvenate HDB towns comprehensively"); on greenery, [URA, Development Control Handbook, "Greenery"](https://www.ura.gov.sg/guidelines/development-control/development-control-handbooks/non-residential/commercial/greenery/) ("Developments in identified Strategic Areas shall provide LRA that is minimally equivalent to the development's gross site area").

[^5]: [Wildnispark Zürich](https://www.wildnispark.ch/en/); [Swiss Parks Network, "Wildnispark Zürich Sihlwald"](https://www.parks.swiss/en/the-swiss-parks/overview/wildnispark-zuerich-sihlwald) (owned by the City of Zurich since the fourteenth century, designated a nature discovery park of national importance in 2010; the park lies in the municipalities of Hausen am Albis, Horgen, Langnau am Albis, Oberrieden and Thalwil, not inside the city boundary). The Basel observations in this paragraph are the author's own.

[^6]: [Comptroller and Auditor General of India, "Inland Water Transport," Report No. 4 of 2016, Economic Sector, Government of Kerala](https://cag.gov.in/en/audit-report/details/22674) (Keralam has 1,687 km of waterways including the 590 km West Coast Canal; 205 km was declared National Waterway 3 in 1993; in 2014-15, 99.60 per cent of NW-3 cargo moved on the Champakkara and Udyogamandal canals, 37 km in total, and the remaining 168 km was "not being utilised at all". The Irrigation Department held no comprehensive data on the location or extent of encroachment because waterway boundaries had never been surveyed or demarcated; 1,128 families were recorded along 36.70 km in Thiruvananthapuram and Kollam and 832 families in Thrissur, and the only eviction carried out was 7.86 km, which took seven years).

[^7]: [C40 Cities and Nordic Sustainability, "Cities100: Medellín's interconnected green corridors" (October 2019)](https://www.citego.org/bdf_fiche-document-4122_en.html) (over 30 green corridors covering 65 hectares, about US$16.3 million across 2016 to 2019; a reported fall of 2°C in average city temperature, and "a 10°C drop in some places").

[^8]: [Thomas, Sherin, Ansar & Zachariah, "Analysis of Urban Heat Island in Kochi, India, Using a Modified Local Climate Zone Classification," *Procedia Environmental Sciences* 21 (2014): 3–13](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.proenv.2014.09.002) (urban heat island defined as the near-surface air temperature contrast between urbanised and adjoining rural areas; twelve mobile surveys from January 2011 to March 2013; winter intensity 4.6 °C pre-dawn and 3.7 °C early night, with summer weaker and not given numerically).

[^9]: [Comptroller and Auditor General of India, "Preparedness and Response to Floods in Kerala," Report No. 6 of 2021, Government of Kerala](https://cag.gov.in/en/audit-report/details/114526) (Kerala has not enacted flood plain zoning legislation and its flood plains have not been identified or demarcated; audit recorded 913 encroachments on four rivers and water bodies in Thrissur, Idukki and Alappuzha which obstructed free flow and contributed to inundation of adjacent land).

[^10]: Tim Marshall, *Planning Major Infrastructure: A Critical Analysis* (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013): on sectoralism and the resistance to comprehensive spatial planning, pp. 70–71, 253; on the range from the "free floating" project to integrated strategising, pp. 67–72; on spatial imaginaries, after Castoriadis, pp. 59–60.

[^11]: [350 Singapore, *Vision 2050: Towards a People's Climate Action Plan for Singapore*, response to the National Climate Change Secretariat consultation, September 2019](https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://www.nccs.gov.sg/files/docs/default-source/publications/350%20singapore.pdf) (quoted phrase verified verbatim in the document; the original nccs.gov.sg copy now returns 404, so this is the Internet Archive capture).

[^12]: Tim Marshall, *Planning Major Infrastructure: A Critical Analysis* (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 135–136, 254–255, 261, on France's Commission Nationale du Débat Public.

[^13]: [Prachee Mishra, "Making Smart Cities," PRS Legislative Research (23 January 2018)](https://prsindia.org/theprsblog/making-smart-cities) (area-based development covers one chosen district per city, more than 500 acres for a retrofit, and takes about 80 per cent of proposed project cost, pan-city proposals the remaining 20 per cent; PRS notes the Mission "will only impact few selected areas, and not necessarily help with development of the entire city"). Retrofit threshold: [Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, "Smart City: Enhancing Urban Life" (PIB, 25 June 2024)](https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documents/2024/jun/doc2024625344301.pdf) ("Retrofitting involves enhancing a built-up area (over 500 acres)"). Kochi's proposal: [NIUA SmartNet, "The Smart City Challenge Stage 2: Smart City Proposal Kochi" (archived)](https://web.archive.org/web/20260311170852/https://smartnet.niua.org/content/701c22c1-bbe1-47f8-b8d5-1e9675a6daec) ("~7 sq km of Fort Kochi-Mattancherry-Central City linked by waterway"; "Waterway(4 km)"; "rejuvenation of 4 Canals").

[^14]: [Susheela Nair, "A brand voyage," *Deccan Herald* (27 June 2015)](https://www.deccanherald.com/features/a-brand-voyage-2136577) ("In the late 80s, when the late Walter Mendez, National Creative Director of Mudra, scripted the tagline, 'God's Own Country', Kerala Tourism initiated a trend in state tourism marketing"); [Department of Tourism, Government of Kerala, *Kerala Tourism Statistics 2019* (PDF)](https://www.keralatourism.org/tourismstatistics/tourist_statistics_2019_book20210306071249.pdf) (19,574,004 tourist visits in 2019, Table 3.5; total revenue from tourism, direct and indirect, ₹45,010.69 crore).

[^15]: [Neethu Joseph, "Thevara-Perandoor canal in Kochi turns into a nightmare even during light rains," *The News Minute* (5 November 2019)](https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/thevara-perandoor-canal-kochi-turns-nightmare-even-during-light-rains-111742) (the canal's route through Panampilly Nagar, Kadavanthra and Kaloor; a NATPAC survey that "revealed massive encroachments over the years, especially along the mid-way"; its former use "for navigation, transportation of goods, irrigation and even fishing"); [PTI, "Kochi Metro unveils ambitious canal revamp to boost transport tourism," *The Week* (11 May 2025)](https://www.theweek.in/wire-updates/national/2025/05/11/mes4-kl-kochi-metro-canals.html) (the state's approval of the ₹3,716.10 crore Integrated Urban Regeneration and Water Transport System; six canals, "Each canal will be widened to at least 16.5 metres"); [Onmanorama (15 May 2025)](https://www.onmanorama.com/news/kerala/2025/05/15/kochi-canals-iurwts-budget-increase.html) (the revised sanction also covers "establishing sewage treatment plants (STPs), sewer network, sanitation facilities and solid waste management"); [Kochi Metro Rail Limited, IURWTS](https://kochimetro.org/iurwts/) and its [EIA report](https://kochimetro.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IURWTS_EIA_Report.pdf) ("Thevara-Perandoor canal (9.88Km)").