Planning in the City: My Summer Internship at the Chennai Metropolitan Development Agency

By Chaithra Navada, MURP ’23

As an international MURP student, I have been curious about the stark differences in my planning education here, and my experience in cities of the Global South. Most of what I know as formal planning in India can be limited to the physical planning process here. We still follow the master planning-based regime that has been replaced by more integrated and decentralized practices in California. The extremely procedural planning processes that I have learned about, including environmental analysis seem to only have weak counterparts in India. Despite these differences, the Indian cities seem to have avoided the pitfalls of planning here – expansive single family housing zones, housing shortages, and overwhelming car ownership. My internship with the Chennai Metropolitan Development Agency (CMDA) in the summer of 2022 allowed me to engage with these contrasts.

CMDA is the metropolitan planning agency for Chennai, a metropolis with a population of 11 million, undertaking macro and micro level land use planning. I was fortunate to join CMDA amidst the third master planning preparatory work, allowing me to be part of simultaneous projects that spread across the domains of transportation, land use, and economic development. Having spent a good part of my undergraduate years in Chennai, the opportunity to learn and contribute to planning practice in the city was beyond exciting. My role within the projects was to integrate academic and empirical knowledge to real-world projects in planning at CMDA. The internship was greatly flexible, allowing me to work on topics of my choosing from under the projects available at CMDA. I was able to work under the guidance of the Member-Secretary, the bureaucrat leading the statutory agency.

I worked on two major projects during my time at CMDA. I developed a land value determination methodology for Tamil Nadu’s upcoming Land Pooling Scheme. This scheme will systematize land pooling as a way to promote planned development peripheries, a major impetus to a 5-fold expansion of Chennai Metropolitan Area that is being undertaken prior to the third master plan. My role in this project was to analyze land pooling, and land value capture strategies in practice across the world. I presented my findings along with the relevance of different methods, and provided recommendations for a methodology for Chennai. The project where I believe I made the most impact was in developing a draft terms of reference (ToR) for a World Bank-funded study on the Employment and Incomes in the Chennai Metropolitan Area. The results of this study would provide critical data to the assumptions and projections in the upcoming master planning. This was a task that allowed me to deeply engage with the discipline of urban economics in developing the ToR. I am most proud of including a section on stakeholder engagement in the ToR. In the process of drafting the ToR, I was also able to modify my otherwise academic research and writing styles to fit the needs of a practitioner organization.

Beyond these specific projects, I also got the opportunity to contribute inputs to Tamil Nadu’s 25-year urban vision, team discussions, and consultant meetings on studies under progress at CMDA. I also got to be with a community of interns, who were planning, architecture and engineering students in India. This internship gave me insights into the process of planning in contexts and communities so different from the ones I study about at Luskin. Being associated with the city planning agency, I perhaps saw the most powerful form of planning that takes place in Chennai. While the privilege of being part of the vision for Chennai through the planners at CMDA helped in my work, the blindfold when it comes to comprehensive datasets even within the organization perplexes me. For a city that is slowly growing in affluence and rapidly expanding, the polycentric, integrated vision of planning that I saw at CMDA makes me excited. I believe some of my work will outlive my internship and have an impact in the real-world.

My time in Chennai was incredibly rewarding and helped me grow both personally and professionally. While it took me back to familiar places, the internship will be a great opportunity to learn and simultaneously experience the lived reality of planning for someone new to Chennai. I am grateful to the Global Public Affairs Luskin’s International Practice Pathway Summer Fellowship for providing me with the opportunity to intern in India.