On the food street, a myriad of smells mingled in the air: the sweetness of sugarcane juice, the warmth of freshly baked cakes, the eggy tang of masala omelets, the earthy scent of cow dung, and a faint hint of what one might politely call sewage. At precisely 9 a.m just as we scrambled into site; office-goers quickened their pace with breakfasts in hand and the garbage truck rolled in reeking of last night’s spoils.

The astrologer on this half-dug-up road had recently declared that spotting a garbage truck early in the morning was a blessing from God. In a city running short on luck, the idea caught on. And so, at this most auspicious hour, the shop owners’ association gathered at Mr. Mahesh’s sweet shop to review the Food Street Beautification and Renewal Project now in its ninth month of construction, on what was once imagined as a two-month job.

Everyone drifted in like clockwork: us, the two weary urban designers from a NGO, engineers from the municipality, the traffic police, the contractor, and a young IAS officer far too new for the chaos she had inherited. Last to arrive, the local MLA. Fashionably late, in crisp white dhoti and dark sunglasses, he took a seat on the ‘best’ plastic chair and declared – “Friends! We must finish this soon. People who come here are no longer hungry for food, they are hungry for development!”

Everyone nodded dutifully. We, the urban designers, who had been sitting quietly in a corner, were suddenly thrust into the spotlight. We pulled out our laptops and started a presentation which spoke of creating an identity for the food street, of footpaths lined with tables, street trees offering shade, and the vast infrastructure that needed to disappear underground. That, of course, was everyone’s fear: that the road now dug up would never be put back together again, leaving the promise of the project buried beneath it.

Then came a slide that unearthed a new problem. The vendors, it turned out, washed their vessels late at night, letting grease-laden water run into the new stormwater drains. What seemed like a minor nuisance was in fact polluting the city’s lakes and groundwater. The slide outlined a solution: grease traps in every stall and designated sinks for washing. But as soon as the slide appeared, chaos ensued. The shopkeepers protested that grease traps were too expensive to maintain; municipal officials doubted they could enforce them; and amid the noise, the politician exclaimed, “Always problems, no solutions!” he boomed. “I’ll use the MLA fund to buy an industrial-grade dishwasher for everyone to share. These designers can plan a plaza at the end of the street for it!”

Freebies, after all, were sacred currency in this country and never refused. The man from the water department, however, looked uneasy. “Who will supply the water?” he asked. “This isn’t part of any scheme.” No one questioned how one dishwasher would serve twenty stalls, who would maintain it, or how the vessels would travel to this plaza. Someone from the municipality suggested building public toilets next to it, so water and electricity could be sanctioned for both. The room nodded as if a great solution had been found.

We exchanged quiet glances knowing that we would soon reconvene to make sense of yet another improbable plan. For now, we simply nodded along.

The meeting soon ended with a plate of cakes passed around, peace offerings disguised as refreshments. The contractor, however, was shouted at for delays and shoddy work, but he had developed a thick skin; he was stalling work since the labour union was still protesting.

Meetings like these continued month after month. There was a plaza to plan, a statue to resurrect, a broken planter to rescue from a cow, new tables that turned into garbage points overnight , shopkeepers expanding onto footpaths, and endless debates about bollards, scooters, and lane widths.

To be an urban designer on an Indian street is to stand amid this chaos, part firefighter, part advocate, part reluctant negotiator. When time allowed, we designed, ideated, and continued to idealize a profession that remained as misunderstood in practice as it was in purpose.

Urban design in India, though more than a decade old, still feels nascent, a field practiced by a small band of optimists and discussed in scarce lectures. It exists in the in-between: neither institutional nor grassroot, crafting spaces that must hold everything: the gleaming office tower and the modest municipal housing, bound by the same road, the same pipes, and entirely different realities.The work is often political, ideological, cultural and deeply social.

The discourse on architecture and urbanism often speculates; on culture, gender, politics and the world’s countless problems. It compromises, adapts, and shifts its stance, yet endures with a singular purpose: to better the public realm. The discipline, in its essence, is clean and abstract, drawing masterplans, making imagined worlds, building paper awaiting reality. But in its truest form, design lives in ambiguity and optimism that cities can be made to look, feel, and function better. And so, we often find ourselves five feet underground, examining utilities, mapping invisible networks, and worrying endlessly about how we build our cities.

It is easy to grow disheartened in a profession where so little of what leaves the drawing board ever gets built. Yet over time, I have realised that humour, curiosity and shared laughter that punctuates failed attempts is what keeps the process alive.Allowing one to approach each problem with mindful pragmatism and to continuously renegotiate solutions when faced with conflict.

The story of the food street is not unique. It is a portrait of how Indian cities evolve through improvisation, argument, and unexpected consensus. Urbanism here is about endurance; less about the perfect plan or system, and more about the ability to persist through contradiction, in a quite unyielding faith that the public realm can be better.