In Focus: Making Cultural Access a Planning Priority in Delhi
by Mahima Kaul
Delhi’s current master-planning framework, MPD-2021, was notified in 2007 and has remained in force for nearly two decades. While its successor was long drafted and discussed as the Master Plan for Delhi 2041, receiving around 33,000 public objections and suggestions, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) formally shifted the horizon year in August 2026. Re-framed as MPD-2047 to align with the central government’s Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, the revised master plan has now been approved by the DDA and sent to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs for final notification. In June 2026, the Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Shri. Manohar Lal said the plan would be notified soon.
Once notified, it will become the city’s principal strategic framework for land use, infrastructure, mobility, housing, and spatial development through 2047. This masterplan includes a chapter titled “Heritage, Culture and Public Spaces”. It has a relatively developed framework for protecting and activating existing heritage; however, it is less explicit about planning equitable access to everyday cultural infrastructure across Delhi’s residential areas. It identifies cultural hubs and facilities, but it does not establish a city-wide accessibility standard for everyday cultural infrastructure.
That distinction is what this week’s In Focus sets out to explore. Delhi is not short of cultural assets. The question is whether access to them is planned with the same spatial intent as access to other essential public amenities.
Delhi’s Cultural Institutions
Cultural infrastructure can be defined more broadly than just museums and heritage sites. It includes everyday places where cultural activity takes place, like theatres, libraries, community halls, rehearsal and performance spaces, galleries, cultural centres, and public spaces used for artistic activity. These spaces are not only places where culture is consumed but also where people create, practice, and participate in it. In India’s urban context, this distinction matters because cultural provision is often discussed through the lens of institutions and heritage assets, while the smaller neighbourhood-level spaces that enable participation receive less attention in spatial planning.
In line with this thought process, the MPD 2047 takes a city-wide approach to public space. It calls for improved availability of public spaces across the city, a hierarchy of local parks in both greenfield and brownfield areas, and public plazas as part of new layouts. It also brings cultural activity into this public realm through provisions for public art, performance, and accessible public uses such as libraries.
Delhi has an unusually strong concentration of national cultural institutions and major cultural venues in central areas, and it is home to institutions like the National School of Drama, Sangeet Natak Akademi, Sahitya Akademi, etc., among others. However, the MPD 2047 draft does not provide a city-wide assessment of how these cultural facilities are distributed relative to residential populations, nor does it set a benchmark for residents’ proximity to them. Delhi already has a constituency-level approach to library provision, but the MPD 2047 lacks a comparable spatial framework that treats cultural infrastructure more broadly and integrates it into urban planning.
There is a current Delhi initiative for the defunct Rajghat power plant, with ideas to create a unique cultural/night-time hub. Reports suggest that the proposal includes performance spaces and would involve resolving ownership and agency issues among DDA, the Delhi government, and the Centre.
Drawing on data from more than 120 countries, UNESCO’s 2026 Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity report points to a wider policy challenge. One such challenge alludes to the standard pitfalls administrations face, i.e., ‘recognising culture in development planning is not the same as setting measurable goals for it’. Delhi’s draft MPD-2047 illustrates this distinction. It provides for new recreational and cultural spaces, but it doesn’t set a comparable spatial standard for cultural access.
Why Cultural Infrastructure Matters
Cultural spaces—from community arts centers and performance venues to local libraries—do not merely hold intrinsic value; they serve as fundamental anchors of social, economic, and civic infrastructure. For social cohesion, theatre, art workshops, performances, and local libraries bring together people of different ages, backgrounds, languages, and faiths, much like a park or a local market does. As public investment increasingly leans toward STEM education and digital skills, cultural infrastructure provides a crucial counterweight for human capital development. Engagement in the creative arts nurtures essential non-cognitive capabilities, including critical thinking, adaptive communication, dynamic problem-solving, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. In an increasingly automated economy, these high-order human skills serve as precise complements to technical proficiency, ensuring a well-rounded and future-ready workforce.
Evidence reviewed by the WHO suggests that these spaces also have a public-health dimension. For instance, it suggests that participation in the arts can contribute to the prevention of ill health and the promotion of physical and mental wellbeing, with arts-based interventions showing promise as relatively low-cost, low-risk approaches. As traditional healthcare systems face escalating operational costs, integrating arts-based, non-clinical interventions offers a high-impact, low-risk, and cost-effective approach to preventive care. The UNESCO report calls libraries “essential cultural infrastructure” alongside parks or transit, a reminder that these spaces are economic assets too.
Possible directions for policy
MPD-2047 already contains several mechanisms that could be extended towards cultural access. The plan provides for a GIS-based system to track heritage assets, updated every five years. The same system could map cultural spaces such as theatres, libraries, and rehearsal rooms, not just monuments, enabling stakeholders to identify areas that are underserved. Beyond this, there is an emphasis on formulating a monitoring framework with indicators to track its progress. It could include indicators for cultural access, for example, population within a defined travel time of a functioning public library or cultural facility.
Shahjahanabad is explicitly designated as a ‘cultural enterprise hub’, with the plan seeking to leverage its tangible and intangible heritage for cultural and economic activity. The policy question is whether similar cultural enterprise opportunities should also be created outside areas that already possess significant heritage capital.
The plan already allows adaptive reuse for heritage buildings. A similar principle could be considered for suitable vacant non-heritage public buildings across the city, turning them into neighbourhood cultural spaces without waiting for new construction.
Conservation and participation as two planning objectives
Delhi has spent decades and considerable institutional effort preserving its cultural past, like its monuments, academies, and heritage zones. This work remains important. At the city level, conservation and participation remain distinct planning objectives, and MPD-2047 is more prescriptive about managing heritage assets than about measuring access to everyday cultural infrastructure.
The next master plan cycle offers an opening to consider a related question: not only how well the city protects the culture it already has, but how deliberately it creates conditions for more residents to make, encounter, and share culture closer to where they live. This is as much a question of governance as culture, and Delhi is well placed to address it.
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