Production of Fit City: Physical (In)Activity,Body and Everyday Space in Delhi

Working Out in the Open: Studying Everyday Fitness Practices and Urban Space

‘One day, I was pedalling in the park’s gym (open gym), and a few loafers were laughing at me, so his father asked me just to take a walk in the park’ was one of the many responses I received from the women while doing fieldwork in Chirag Delhi village in South Delhi in 2017, nearly four years after the implementation of the first open gym project in Delhi. The assemblage of equipment popularly known as open gyms—identified as the outdoor fitness equipment (Chow, 2013) in the academic registers—generally consists of 12–18 pieces of equipment that have been installed in public parks of Delhi for light, medium and heavy exercise. They are aimed at increasing physical activity among the ‘population’ in order to make them healthy, fit and productive. I was investigating the ways in which ‘citizens’ of Delhi access the newly installed open gyms in its public parks. The statement mentioned above by a gym user lays out the entanglements of socio-spatial dialectic (Soja, 1980) with physical activity and the body. Additionally, it decodes the different ways in which gender and place play a crucial role in shaping the experience of women involved in physical activity in an urban space (Coen et al., 2018). Despite being embedded at an individual level in concerns that amount to the expression of identity, social and spatial justice, issues of liberty and surveillance, physical (in)activity has emerged as a ‘legitimate policy issue’ in the recent past with significant implications (Piggin, 2019, p. 5). For example, Lancet Global Health reported 34 per cent of Indians as lacking the required levels of physical activity, the highest in South Asia, with women being less active than men globally (Guthold et al., 2018). Although narratives of physical activity have always been predominantly laden with a deficit (Piggin, 2019), the Lancet study not only found women to be less active than men, it also reported that the prevalence of insufficient physical activity among women in South Asia was one of the highest in the world. Physical inactivity has been identified as one of the leading risk factors of noncommunicable diseases (World Health Organization [WHO], 2010), and the gendered nature of insufficient physical activity among women makes it compelling to investigate and unpack the ways in which physical activity is organised, performed, practised and nudged ¹ upon in everyday life. In addition, the launch of the Global Action Plan on Physical Activity 2018–2030 by the World Health Organization (WHO) has provided a continuous push to recognise physical inactivity not only as an important health issue (WHO, 2018) but also as a pandemic (Kohl et al., 2012). This recognition produces cities as critical sites whose particular responsibility and opportunity in attaining the required target of physical inactivity reduction cannot be undermined. In response to the Global Action Plan on Physical Activity 2018–2030, the member states are obliged to formulate national and subnational action plans to increase physical activity and reduce sedentary behaviour among the ‘population’. Such national and subnational action plans are not only a response to the calls of the WHO but are equally determined by nationalist imagination and aspirations surrounding the health and fitness of ‘citizens’.

While the interplay of international calls for reducing physical inactivity and the national response determined by nationalistic imaginations is predominantly noticeable in the cities, particularly interesting are the solutions that are often prescribed to enhance physical activity or to nudge adults towards enough physical activity. These solutions include encouraging non-motorised modes of transportation like walking and cycling and promoting participation in active recreation and sports in leisure time (Guthold et al., 2018), where cities emerge as the primary sites for such interventions and solutions. Such trends inspired by global best practices are also evident in Indian cities. The promotion of physical activity in urban areas is evinced in the retrofitting projects of the ambitious Smart City Mission of the Government of India, which was launched in 2015 in order to build 100 smart cities in India by 2020 (Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, 2020). While there is burgeoning evidence (McCormack et al., 2010; Ries et al., 2009) to support the relationship between various factors of urban built-form such as availability of parks, green spaces and open spaces and density of physical activity, the focus of recent literature in urban studies in the field of physical activity and sports has been on organised physical activity such as sports and associated mega-events like the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games (Baviskar, 2020; Chen, 2012; Reis et al., 2014; Sengupta, 2017). Therefore, there is a need to shift the focus from the study of ‘sporting mega-events’ (SMEs) to decoding the mundane yet important everyday fitness activities (Latham & Layton, 2019) and the ways in which they are mobilised as part of nationalistic imaginations of fitness and health. This call to shift the focus from SMEs to everyday physical activities also fits well with the recent southern turn in urban studies popularly termed as southern urbanism (Oldfield & Parnell, 2014; Schindler, 2017). Southern urbanism argues that cities of the global south are not only characterised by a disconnect between capital and labour, but their metabolic configurations are also discontinuous and contested (Schindler, 2017). This means that there are a variety of formal and informal actors involved in the provisioning of services in these cities, which in turn posits challenges to urban planning in the global south (Roy, 2009) and associated challenges in the planning of fit cities.

Apart from the realm of policy and public health, where the rationale for the promotion of physical activity is driven by a deficit narrative, at an individual level, the motivation to be indulged in physical activities or exercise beyond working hours can be understood from the works of Baudrillard on modernity and the body. Baudrillard (1998) asserts that principles of private ownership and capital accumulation, which are central to capitalist systems, also extend to the human body. Individuals under the framework of capitalism treat their bodies as mere objects that can be used as instruments for capital accumulation. Consequently, maintaining a healthy body becomes crucial for productivity and for capital accumulation, even during leisure time. Thus, not only does the body need to work to produce, but it must also work out to prepare for production and accumulation. This trend is exemplified by new initiatives in the industry and by the state. They include the launch of India’s first wellness index by ICICI-Lombard (ICICI-Lombard, 2018) and the Fit India Campaign by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that aims ‘to take the nation on a path of fitness and wellness’ (Sports Authority of India, 2020). The emergence of physical fitness as a mass movement is driven not only by the desire to maintain a healthy body but also by the influence of body image, masculinity and nationalistic imaginings. The promotion of muscular bodies in public spaces and popular media suggests that physical appearance is increasingly associated with socio-economic success (Baas, 2017). This means that the body image in public spaces and its physical appearance are discursively produced, which represents the relationship between the physical body and the construction of the body, which is social and political. The muscular physical body is not only representative of socio-economic success but also a marker of an ideology linking masculinity and nationalism. Given that ‘the physical body is seen as a representation of the social body’ (Tiwari, 2010, p. 19), and thus, the ways in which the physical body is imagined in public space and the nationalist discourse are defined by its social and nationalist significance. The muscular body in public spaces and associated body image defines manliness in a particular manner situated in a specific cultural and historical context, such as Hindu nationalism (Banerjee, 2005), which reinforces the promotion of physical activity by the nation-state aiming to maintain a ‘fit political body’. Thus, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India has significantly impacted the micropolitics of bodily practices, specifically in everyday and mundane public spaces (Mcdonald, 2003) which include the realm of everyday physical activity. Similarly, in the case of gender relations, the woman’s body in public space and in the nationalistic imagination is rendered with meanings that also control and define the function of that female body in public space. Thus, space in its diverse forms, material, metaphorical, discursive and emotional, is both a product and productive of gender norms and relations (Myrdahl, 2019) and consequently, the publics and public spaces of the city are also gendered in nature (Massey, 1994; Ranade, 2007).

Thus, the present study, which stands at the intersection of physical activity, gender and the everyday, aims to explore the ways in which physical activity, fitness and health are conceptualised and mobilised at the global, regional, national and local levels. It will also attempt to understand how and why people and communities are nudged and encouraged to be physically active and the ways in which such activities are prescribed, organised and performed in the urban spaces that we inhabit. It employs fit city as a heuristic device to map the emerging critical geography of physical activity (Coen et al., 2018), everyday spaces and the body (Longhurst, 2001) in Delhi in the context of open gyms which are being installed in the public parks of the city since 2014. The data was collected over a period of eight months between September 2020 and June 2022 using the technique of in-depth interviews as it allows an active interaction between the researcher and the participant leading to ‘negotiated, contextually based results’ (Fontana & Frey, 2005). The interviews, along with the participant observation, were conducted at three sites in Delhi, selected keeping in mind the agencies involved in the implementation of the open gym project.

Fit City and the Healthy Nation: Producing the Governed Subjects

The notion of a fit city was first proposed by Herrick (2009), while interrogating the two design guidelines in the context of policy thinking in the United Kingdom, which aimed at enhancing physical activity in the urban spaces by making the environment ‘welcoming, attractive, interesting and even inspirational’ (Herrick, 2009, p. 2451). However, any definition of a fit city has not been proposed in the study; instead, it argues that there is a need to move beyond the instrumental understanding of urban space in order to realise the potential of such policies and design guidelines. This section makes an attempt to map the concepts and other similar conceptions of a healthy city, active city, kinaesthetic city and liveable city, which might be helpful in developing the understanding of practices that leads to the production of a fit city. Additionally, it looks at the role these frameworks play in the nationalistic imagination of the fit national body.

The healthy city concept is based on the health for all policy of the WHO, which views health policy as an instrument to raise awareness and mobilise community participation and capacity building for the local government (Kezner, 2000). The WHO defined healthy city as ‘continually creating and improving the physical, social, and political environments and expanding the community resources that enable individuals and groups to support each other in performing all the functions of life and in developing themselves to their maximum potential’ (WHO, 1995, p. 1). The key principles on which such an approach is based on are equity, health promotion, intersectoral action, supportive environment, accountability and right to the peace (Corburn, 2009). The focus of the healthy city approach is public health promotion by the instruments of urban planning. WHO revisited the healthy city approach to redefine a healthy-active city as ‘continually creating and improving opportunities in the built and social environments and expanding community resources to enable all its citizens to be physically active in day-to-day life’ (Edwards & Tsouros, 2008, p. 3). Thus, the thematic focus of a healthy-active city is on everyday physical activity, improving the environment and well-being through the instruments of planning. A healthy, active city recognises the value of active living, physical activity and sports. It aims to provide opportunities for physical activity and active living where built and social environments are critical focal points.

Apart from the concepts of healthy city and a healthy-active city, the third concept which is closely related to the conception of a fit city is kinaesthetic city. Kinaesthetics is the ‘awareness of bodies in motion, focusing on skilled manipulation of material elements’ (Latham & Layton, 2019, p. 6). The thematic emphasis of the conception of the kinaesthetic city is on sociability, liveability and aesthetics. It also necessitates an in-depth understanding of the affordances of the space that facilitates everyday fitness activities. In contrast to the conceptions of a healthy city and the healthy-active city, which are influenced by toolkit thinking, kinaesthetics presents a conceptual and theoretical terrain to understand everyday physical activities. The last conception of a liveable city is driven by the conception of liveability. Despite the evolving usage of the term liveability (Kaal, 2011) and its subsequent foregrounding in urban geography (Pacione, 1990), one of the earliest references to liveability can be traced back to The Electors Action Movement, a reform party in Vancouver (Ley, 1980). For third-world countries, the liveable city in the international policy arena can be linked to the urban development programme of the World Bank whereby liveability is specifically used to refer to the provisioning of basic infrastructure such as slum improvement programmes, reducing the burden of urban environmental problems on human health and financing for such basic provisions (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1996). Although the World Bank considers the urban environment as part of the efforts to enhance urban liveability (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2004), it does not provide any definition for liveable cities. With the focus on its measurement (Southworth, 2003), a liveable city is a complex concept to define but generally refers to an overall enhancement in the quality of urban life, with significant challenges and opportunities for planning and planners (Massey, 2005). While these approaches are employed through the developmental frameworks aimed at the health, fitness and well-being of the urban residents, they are often co-opted by the nationalist imaginations of the fit and healthy nation maintained and geared through techniques of governmentality. In addition, these approaches tend to rely on exclusionary and reductionist definitions of physical activity which focus on bodily movement involving skeletal muscles resulting in energy expenditure (WHO, 2018). Such anatomical and physiological conceptualisation of physical activity ignores its multi-dimensional nature. Scholars such as Piggin (2019) present an alternative conceptualisation of physical activity involving ‘moving, acting and performing within culturally specific spaces and contexts, and influenced by a unique array of interests, emotions, ideas, instructions, and relationships’ (p. 8). This not only broadens the scope of physical activity but also affirms connections between sport, physical activity and health that are not merely neutral but rather are shaped by intricate struggles over political power, social and nationalistic ideologies, policymaking and policy implementation that occur across various temporal and spatial contexts (Mansfield & Piggin, 2016). Moving away from the instrumentalist understanding of physical activity allows one to critically scrutinise its mobilisation for nationalist ideologies. Given that everyday remains on the margins, the spatialisation and politicisation of everyday physical activity promotion particularly in cities magnify the role they play in nationalistic imaginations of the body and corporeality. The interventions promoted under these frameworks of the fit city, healthy city and active city geared toward individual bodies posit these bodies as the primary site for transforming the (in)active nation into a healthy fit nation through disciplining and governing these bodies. This link between bodily practices and national identity centres on the imagination of a fit body which is not only a symbol for the body politic but also represents the social body of the nation. Such an imagination is evinced in recent initiatives such as the Fit India Movement which envisions making fitness an integral part of daily lives by promoting it as fun, free and easy. At the same time, such initiatives are extended to institutions like schools whereby the aim of these interventions like open gyms is defined as ‘channelising the boundless energy of students into a positive act of building self-esteem and engaging body and mind in the healthy pursuit of staying fit’ (Government of NCT of Delhi, 2020). Thus, these frameworks of a healthy city, active city and fit city located in the developmental frameworks get intricately tied to the nationalist imaginaries of achieving a healthy-fit body politic, whose promotion requires critical scrutiny.

Governmentalities of Physical Activity in the Case of Open Gyms in Delhi

Governmentality refers to governmental rationality which means shaping, guiding, effecting and regulating the lives of individuals by the means of ‘procedures, analyses, calculations, and tactics’, allowing for the exercise of power through the governing of others (Foucault, 1991, p. 102). Various solutions such as the installation of open gyms, which are prescribed for enhancing physical activity among the citizens, are operationalised through the instruments of urban planning, action plans, programmes, policies and incentives which are to be understood as the ‘procedures, analyses, calculations and tactics’ employed to exercise power over individuals and populations in order to maintain a healthy and productive population. Here, the analysis of the mode of this power exercised over individuals and the population dislocates the state from the centre from where this power emanates and allows us to focus on variegated practices and procedures through which individuals and populations are ‘governed at a distance’ (Rose & Miller, 2010, p. 279). Thus, as a result of this knowledge, an understanding based on self-surveillance is developed regarding the body and its conduct. As one of the women who is a regular user of the open gym at the Lodhi Garden in central Delhi stated, ‘If one wants to live longer, it is important to know your body and it is more important to keep a check on it. One should measure their weight regularly, and a fat body is certainly an unhealthy body’. This woman who works in a nearby central government office has not only downloaded mobile applications to document her heart rate and other vitals but also measures the footsteps she takes daily as prescribed by the health application on her mobile. This understanding developed on the basis of self-surveillance is crucial in order to evaluate the programmes, policies and interventions which aim to promote physical activity and health because, in doing so, an implicit understanding of a fit and healthy body is produced, employed and reinforced. Although the concept of governmentality has received negligible attention from the scholars of sports studies (Markula & Pringle, 2006), this concept is useful in understanding the dynamics of physical activity, gendered body and urban space.

The elevation of physical (in)activity as a ‘legitimate policy issue’ (Piggin, 2019) is the result of a global assemblage of scientific studies measuring, analysing and producing levels of physical (in)activity worldwide such as the Lancet, global action plans by the WHO and their subsequent national action plans at the country level followed by the implementation of interventions such as open gyms in the city at the local level. The New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) which is a centrally administered urban local body, initiated installing open gyms in 30 of the 124 parks which are under its jurisdiction under its ‘Go Green, Open Gym’ Project. This idea of open gyms was a response to the failure of its earlier project on closed gyms which were established at various locations but were found to be inaccessible to a majority of the population, especially women. Subsequently, senior NDMC officials conceptualised open gyms as an alternative to closed gyms and installed the first set of equipment in public parks. In a follow-up to this, the other urban local body, South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC), also passed a resolution in its standing committee held in August 2014 to establish open gyms in every ward as a pilot project. The NDMC further expanded the project to 18 more parks in 9 other areas, resulting in at least 1 park in each area under it. The earlier parks included 12 pieces of equipment as compared to the recent ones, which comprised 18 different pieces of equipment. Later on, SDMC decided to expand the facility of open gyms to 400 more parks as compared to 121 parks in December 2016. As reported by SDMC, it has opened nearly 424 open gyms in the last five years. Subsequently, the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority also decided to set up open gyms in its parks. Thus, the idea which was started by NDMC in 2014 has become popular now and has been adopted by other cities as well, such as Mohali, Chandigarh and Hyderabad. As each municipality in the city of Delhi competed to install open gyms by projecting them as a service provision for the citizens for enhancing their health, a politics of provision (Latham & Layton, 2019) came into play. The localisation of the intervention resulted in multiple forms, such as the instrumental understanding of the urban space of Delhi due to which open gyms were even installed in public schools just in order to meet the criteria of having an open gym in each ward. Additionally, the installation of open gyms has also led to the normalisation of an idea of public space in the parks to be used only for health-enhancing purposes, while in reality parks in Delhi are sites of multiple social, economic and political practices. In my field work, I found citizens of Delhi using parks as an extension of their everyday activities such as drying clothes, children studying with their families, evening gossip sessions, picnics, romantic adventures and various leisure activities which varies in each park as per the social topography of Delhi. The usage of parks by people belonging to different caste, class, social groups and gender categories often went beyond health-enhancing activities of walking, jogging, running and exercising in parks. The interventions such as open gyms tend to produce parks at the sites exclusively meant for health-enhancing physical activity, thereby undermining the range of activities practised in parks of Delhi.

Three Logics to Open Gyms

The article argues that the installation of open gyms in the parks of the city of Delhi can be understood by the following three logics—open gym as a social infrastructure and its provision, open gym as a social space and open gym as a device for the body. Following a governmentality approach (Foucault, 1991), it can be argued that the installation of open gyms has become one of the ways through which everyday spaces of the city, such as parks, open spaces and streets, are manoeuvred to produce the realm of nudging ‘population’ towards a healthy lifestyle. Given that non-motorised mode of transportation and active recreation, leisure becomes the policy mode for enhancing physical activity, the lifestyle emerges as the principal technique of governance. And, the logic to open a gym as a provision of social infrastructure, as a social space and as a device for the body becomes the techniques through which governance of lifestyle is being performed.

Given that the urban local body installs open gyms, their particular locations in the city get intricately tied to the urban politics of Delhi. I call this ‘politics of provision’ as the decision to install an open gym in a particular location is determined by the local power networks of the Residents Welfare Association, the nexus of party politics and other factors. For example, when the first open gym was sanctioned for the park near the Chirag Dilli village by the respective Member of Parliament through the Members of Parliament Local Area Development (MPLAD) Fund, the local member of the Legislative Assembly for the area also sanctioned another open gym for same park, resulting in two gyms in one park. It is also to be kept in mind that open gyms have become a populist intervention in Delhi supported through public funds such as MPLAD and the Members of Legislative Assembly Local Area Development Fund due to the visibility of infrastructure in parks leading to claims of development work being done in the constituencies of the elected representatives. However, the Resident Welfare Association of the nearby planned locality of Sheikh Sarai also mobilised the same elected representatives to install one open gym in each of the small parks located in the colony. As a result, Chirag Delhi residents have access to one park and two open gyms, whereas the comparatively lesser populated locality of Sheikh Sarai has one open gym in each park which is often underused. Thus, the existing inequality of distribution of parks which determines the accessibility to parks for populations of different income groups in the city gets further entrenched by the politics of provision. Similarly, issues of gaze, the embodied experience, class location and micro-geographies of power produce the sites of the open gym as distinct social spaces. While women in veils exercising in the open gym located in the park near Chirag Dilli village have become a common sight, it remains a site of ethnographic encounter. Due to their affordability, accessibility and convenience, open gyms have emerged as a popular choice for working out for women. The women from the village try to wrap up their domestic work during the morning and evening to come to the park, which not only gives them time to exercise but also socialise. As one of the respondents noted, ‘It is the only time I get to come out of the house and take some fresh breath. Although in Delhi’s air pollution, I doubt I get any fresh air, at least I get to talk to other women and share things while exercising’. For some other women, exercising becomes an excuse to be able to come out of the house. Another woman observed, ‘At times, I enjoy chatting and gossiping more than exercising, but I cannot tell this thing to my family members’. While open gyms do provide opportunities for socialisation to women, it is only available to women who come from a particular class group. While interviewing a resident of Chirag Delhi, who works as a domestic worker in Sheikh Sarai, she said, ‘this luxury is only available to a few women; I rarely get time to even go for a walk. My walk to the houses I work in is sufficient exercise for me’. While men from the same village sit in the park and mostly play cards, a few younger women find it uncomfortable to exercise in front of them. The access to open gyms for women of the Chirag Delhi village and the liberty to work out is also negotiated based on belongingness to the village. As one of the women residents who has been living in the village for nearly 20 years reported, ‘We are from outside and I do not belong to the village so I can easily do whatever I want in the park in front of elders of the village. But the same is not true for the women of the village. They will have to cover their heads while working out and some are not even allowed to work out in front of everyone’. Thus, open gyms emerge as a fractured social space where micro-geographies of power operate through caste, class and gender identities.

Like sports have emerged as an important part of contemporary popular culture, driven and mobilised by the neoliberal structures which result in the corporate commercialisation of sports (Andrews & Silk, 2018), enhancing physical activity through open gyms also produces individuals as entrepreneurial self. With the extent to which open gyms have come to be a part of the publics of Delhi, it can be argued that these techniques aimed at enhancing physical activity have also become a part of the physical culture of the city. Given that physical culture does not also produce exercises of the body like open gyms, but it also requires a separate environment in which it can be practised, which gives rise to specialised places of fitness such as gyms (Eichberg, 1997), which open gyms are a peculiar typology given their location in the public parks. Since the techniques, tools and physical exercises used today in gyms all over the world are the results of a physical culture developed and refined during the twentieth century, the body ideals, exercises, techniques and the pedagogy of fitness have become an increasingly international enterprise (Andreasson & Johansson, 2014). This international enterprise of fitness is also simultaneously governed by the nationalistic body ideal driven by ideologies such as Hindu nationalism in India. The impetus of the states to maintain a fit, healthy national body is not only a response to the global calls for reducing levels of physical inactivity but also ideology-driven agendas where disciplining of the body to the nationalist goals is in operation. Thus, following the logic to the open gym as a device for the body produces a body that is locally contingent yet global in the ways in which it is made docile, productive and healthy.

While due to the impact of neoliberalism on physical culture, urban spaces are increasingly subjected to ‘neoliberal ideologies of healthism, active living, and consumerism’ (Laverty & Wright, 2010, p. 74), open gyms in the public parks of Delhi have become the sites where such neoliberal governmentality plays out on to the bodies of the ‘population’. As Sassateli (2010) argues, ‘the human body has been invested with instrumental rationality, being disciplined as an instrument for work and labour and the fit body has in many ways replaced body decoration as a potent symbol of status and character, both for men and women’ (Sassateli, 2010, p. 1), open gyms are those devices through which bodies are disciplined for work and labour and a fit body is idealised which may or may not supersede with a healthy body. Located within the ethno-nationalistic project of Hindutva that imagines a particular social transformation of Indian society, the production of an ideal, healthy citizen is essential. Given that body is understood to be individual, as well as social and political (Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987), initiatives like open gyms highlight the role of the body as an accumulation strategy, and when cities emerge as the sites of capital accumulation and nationalistic imagination, bodies and cities become constitutive and mutually defining (Grosz, 1999). It is important to note that the relation between cities and bodies is neither causal nor representational; instead, corporeality and metropolis are constitutive in nature. It can be understood that there is a porous relationship between bodies and the urban environment (Solomon, 2016) and embodied urban environment, which is reproduced and reinforced through open gyms, is crucial for laying the foundation to develop a diverse and conflicting understanding of political subjectivities (Anjaria, 2017). The ways in which people and communities are nudged to be physically active through interventions such as open gyms in the cities of the global south should not only be seen through the lens of preventive health initiatives; rather, these are complex practices through which autonomous activities of health and fitness are pushed to align with the goals of the political authorities to achieve a docile social and national body. The interlocking of the international apparatuses with the national assemblages driven by nationalist ideologies such as Hindutva and woven with the fractured fabric of cities needs critical scrutiny in the emerging field of physical culture.

Conclusion

It is evident that physical (in)activity is multidimensional in nature, and this understanding has peculiar spatial connotations, especially in reference to urban spaces. Physical activity is not only multidimensional but inherently political and spatial in nature. Despite its elevation as a policy problem, it remains grounded and socially embedded, which calls for critical scrutiny of the motives behind its promotions and informed analysis of the strategies, tools and techniques that are employed for its enhancement. By looking at the case of open gyms in Delhi, it is clear that physical activity remains connected to the urban spaces in which it is practised, organised and performed; thus, it is important to question how and why people and communities are nudged and encouraged to be physically active and ways in which such interventions are driven by ethno-nationalistic tendencies. The conceptions of a fit, productive, healthy and disciplined body are central to the production of a fit city, and they get reproduced through initiatives such as open gyms. On the one hand, the discourses of the fit city result in piecemeal interventions such as open gyms in the cities, thereby proving counterproductive to the radical re-imagination of cities. On the other hand, nationalist ideologies co-opt such discourses to produce docile national bodies. While planning for an active-fit city might be significant for attaining the required levels of physical (in)activity, it is critical to recognise that it remains entangled in the everyday spaces and practices of fitness and leisure where lifestyle is ‘governed at a distance’.