This whole thread is 100% correct. Zoning, rezoning, related points are all correct. One minor correction though, the megacities where the comment mentions zoning being better is in most cases only true definitionally. For example, there are portions of chennai which are by the book, not part of chennai, but for all practical purposes, are. e.g, the new major city-wide bus stand is definitionally outside the city, but practically it is the bus stand to go to if you want to travel to the rest of the state, is not at all zoned properly and faces the same issues.
The only exception where rezoning has actually been done properly is hyderabad.
Here is the reason for this:
- The 74th amendment in india only calls for a _planning commitee_ (reminiscent of india's past) for any area with a population of over 10 lakh. But this MPC is completely distinct from the organisation that does the actual service delivery. In Chennai's example, the CMDA are the planning guys, and the GCC (greater chennai corporation) are the execution guys who actually employ garbage collection folks, buy cleaning machines, fix storm water drains, etc etc,.
CMDA covers ~6000 sq. km. and all that is practically chennai, and they plan bus stops and FSI and roads and all that across this region. However, the GCC is _still_ limited _to this day_ to just 500 sq. km and this is the "chennai" that appears in reports. So all your sanitation workers and clean roads, tree lined roads, good storm water drains, etc, that you see in say besant nagar, are completely absent in the remaining 5500 sq. km. Instead, you have multiple different corporations, Tambaram, Avadi, Kanchipuram, etc, and the coordination problems here are just insane. It also absolutely does not help that political fracturing happens due to dominant castes differing across these regions. You also lose the simple concept of rich people cross subsiding poor people - which is essential in any public service. The taxes paid by boat club road residents, remain with the GCC, and does not contribute even a little bit towards better roads on land under the Tambaram corporation, ironically leading to worse infrastructure for even the boat club road resident making a trip to Trichy. So you get nice parks and heart-shaped traffic lights in nungambakkam before even a road is paved in thoraipakkam.
In hyderabad, they did a very nice thing. They merged 27 ULBs directly into the GHMC, tripling its area from 650 to 2000 sq. km. So its the same thing CMDA did but through a merger. Those 27 bodies - with their staff, their ward councillors, their budgets - are now part of GHMC. The sanitation workers who used to report to, say, Medipally Municipality now report to GHMC. The property tax collected there now goes into GHMC's budget. The roads there are now GHMC's responsibility to maintain.
This unified thing devoid of coordination problems and with great cross subsidisation seems to work much better. It will be a good model for other cities to follow.
I don't know about amdavad and pune but I am willing to bet they are also good for similar reasons.