Cities are not only sites of movement, production, and administration. Historically, they represented the highest stage of human settlement: places of certainty, safety, and shared civic life. They also shape the surroundings in how people feel about everyday life. An ideal city must therefore strike a balance between utility and aesthetics, between efficiency and comfort, function and form. Sociologist Dipankar Gupta has repeatedly argued that a city that merely works but does not feel livable fundamentally fails its citizens. Utility allows a city to function; aesthetics allow people to belong. Indian cities, however, have largely abandoned this balance. Urban planning has become overwhelmingly utilitarian. Roads are built to move vehicles quickly, not to encourage walking. Flyovers rise while pavements crumble. Spaces are designed for transactions rather than interaction. Infrastructure is assessed by speed, capacity, and output, not by comfort, beauty, or sensory ease. As long as the city “functions, questions of how it looks or feels are treated as secondary, even indulgent. This imbalance has consequences that are rarely acknowledged. When cities neglect aesthetics — clean public spaces, coherent design, shade, and safe waiting areas — the responsibility for creating aesthetic order quietly shifts from city policymakers to its inhabitants. In Indian cities, this burden disproportionately falls on women. Women are often expected to compensate for a city's aesthetic failures through their appearance, behaviour, and self-presentation. In chaotic, noisy, and visually cluttered environments, women’s bodies frequently bear the symbolic weight of having to look beautiful. Their clothing, grooming, and conduct are read as indicators of how “cultured” or “modern” a space is, even when the space itself offers little dignity. This is not accidental. It is the outcome of a city that prioritizes utility over aesthetics and then attempts to compensate for aesthetic order informally. Where pavements are broken, women are expected to look composed. Where streets are harsh and uninviting, women are expected to soften them. Where the city lacks visual coherence, women are asked to supply it  quietly, individually, and at their own cost. Personal appearance becomes a substitute for public design. This outsourcing of aesthetic functions occurs through subtle yet persistent social pressure. Women are expected to appear presentable, modern, and visible. These expectations intensify precisely because the city does not provide an aesthetic environment of its own. What appears to be a personal choice is often a response to collective demand. The effort involved is significant, though often unrecognized. People invest time, money, and emotional energy into maintaining appearances that are seen as natural attributes rather than social obligations. This effort is rarely recognized as work; instead, it is seen as a preference or self-expression, even though the expectations are ongoing and unevenly enforced. The burden is not uniform. Middle-class women face pressure to constantly curate themselves as markers of order and respectability, not always by choice, but to gain acknowledgement from the market in the form of a job. Working-class women face moral scrutiny when they fail to conform to these modern expectations. In both cases, women’s visibility in public space is far more regulated than men’s. Men, by contrast, are rarely expected to compensate for the city’s aesthetic deficits. Urban disorder does not translate into demands on their appearance or comportment. The asymmetry is revealing. It suggests that aesthetics is not treated as a civic responsibility, but as a gendered one. This dynamic also shapes how safety is understood in Indian cities. Instead of designing environments that feel safe through lighting, walkability, maintenance, and public presence, safety is frequently reframed as a matter of women’s self-regulation. What women wear, how they move, and how they present themselves are emphasised over the quality of urban design. Aesthetic discipline becomes a substitute for civic accountability Dipankar Gupta’s insistence on balancing utility and aesthetics helps clarify this failure. When cities focus only on utility, they produce efficiency without dignity. When aesthetics are neglected at the civic level, they do not disappear; they are privatised. Women become the medium through which cities attempt to recover a sense of order they have refused to build structurally. This has deeper implications for urban citizenship. Public space becomes a site of performance rather than participation. Women do not simply inhabit the city; they manage it symbolically. Ease of movement gives way to constant self-monitoring. Belonging becomes conditional. The solution does not lie in cosmetic beautification drives or isolated “beauty projects”. It lies in recognising aesthetics as a public good. Benches, shade, clean streets, coherent signage, walkable pavements, and humane public spaces are not luxuries. They are essential to how a city communicates respect for its residents. A city that restores a balance between utility and aesthetics does not require its women to compensate for its failures. It allows dignity to be shared rather than outsourced. Until Indian cities take responsibility for how they feel, women will continue to bear the silent burden of making broken urban spaces appear civilized.   (Author is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UILS, Chandigarh University, Punjab. Feedback: ashwinsociology@gmail.com)