Benefits of urban planning are generally unevenly distributed among areas and populations within cities. The articulate classes (richer and middle income groups) are able to benefit more from planning efforts involving provision of housing and utilities. The luxurious mansions and moderately constructed high income habitats not only contrast between them, there is even greater contrast between higher income habitats and lower incomes residential areas. Slums and squatters therefore are never far away from rich and middle class habitats. Physical proximity however is no guarantee of spatial integration of these areas. On the contrary, physical proximity accentuates segregation because of unbridgeable economic, social and physical differences.
However, inclusive urban planning intends to spread the net wider and promotes inclusion of the groups such as ‘urban poor’ by installing processes, which are capable of bringing about social transformations in terms of institutions and outcomes. Here interventions in the built environment are intended to benefit all citizens but with a focus that each household among the urban poor are provided with a bundle of ‘primary goods’ above a certain minimum threshold so that everyone could live a dignified life. While inclusive planning practice accepts a certain level of inequality in the distribution of land and properties among the city dwellers, it intends to close this gap in the medium and long run. The primary feature of inclusive urban planning is that it involves democratization of planning practice invoking principles of empowerment and emancipation of all citizens of a settlement or region. Needless to say that democratization warrants participation. But participation in planning decisions without empowerment is tokenism because of the very inability of such practices to bring about social transformations permitting changes in the nature of decisions benefiting intended groups, particularly the excluded groups.
Apart from its egalitarian nature, inclusive urban planning is also aimed at addressing the issues of understanding the questions of distribution of power within the society, planning organizations and the public policies. It presumes that power could reside in institutions; dominant ideologies only reinforce these norms. It is expected that inclusive urban planning does not allow any particular ideology to dominate the planning practice. Therefore, it tries to overcome the dualism between neoliberalism and socialism by keeping a check on dominant ideologies. Equity among social classes is promoted but the first concern remains with achieving provision at a certain level of threshold for all social classes.
Justice remains pivotal concern of inclusive urban planning. Needs of the poor citizens have priority over neoliberal capital accumulation without getting into the debate whether capitalism is superior to socialism. State may help the private sector but local governments would let the people know what is being offered by the private sector to the city and citizens in return. For example, urban renewal projects may be good for the city, but the citizens (particularly poor) must benefit from such projects in the form of employment, housing, new shopping areas, enhanced accessibility, etc.
By taking inclusive turn, planning practice also becomes more concerned with the issues of identity based on gender, caste, ethnicity and religion. How policies on built environment promote integration of different social classes remains one of the chief concerns of inclusive planning. Exclusionary master plan and zonal plan policies are not encouraged at all. Efforts are made that criminalization does not get associated with certain kind of people living in certain kind of areas. Slums and squatters become more than ‘physical improvement exercises’ for the urban planners.
Inclusive cities may be vulnerable to various human and natural disasters, but these cities are not scared because the built environment in these cities is not divisive. Fewer gated communities and squatters dot such cities. Inclusive urban planning practice is at peace with itself and its citizens are peaceful.