The 13th BRICS Urbanisation Forum, the ministerial-level platform that brings together the urban development establishments of the eleven-country BRICS grouping, formally opened in New Delhi on Thursday, 11 June 2026 — placing India's national capital at the centre of a two-day deliberation on inclusive and resilient urban futures and on the cooperation architecture that the world's largest emerging economies are building around them.

The Forum was inaugurated by Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs Manohar Lal at Sushma Swaraj Bhavan, the new home of the Ministry of External Affairs, on the first of its two days. India is hosting the BRICS Urbanisation Forum for the fourth time — following the previous editions in New Delhi in 2013, Visakhapatnam in 2016, and a virtual edition in 2021 — making it the most frequent host nation of this BRICS workstream.

What is the Forum

The BRICS Urbanisation Forum is one of the ministerial-level workstreams within the broader BRICS cooperation architecture, focused specifically on urban development, municipal governance, and city-level policy challenges. It is convened by the BRICS chair nation each year, with ministerial-level participation from each member state. The 13th edition, now under way in New Delhi, is the first major BRICS ministerial event to be hosted by India during its 2026 chairship of the grouping.

The 2026 Forum is being held under the theme "Cities for People: BRICS Cooperation for Inclusive and Resilient Urban Futures" — a framing that emphasises the human-centric orientation of urban policy rather than a purely infrastructure-led approach. The theme sits within the broader India BRICS Chairship 2026 theme, "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability", which is in turn guided by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's articulated vision of "Humanity First".

Who is participating

Delegations from ten member nations of the expanded BRICS grouping have arrived in New Delhi for the Forum. The original five — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — are joined by the more recent additions to the bloc: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia. Each delegation has been led at ministerial or senior officials' level.

The participation reflects the broadening of BRICS over the past three years. The original 2009 BRIC grouping (with South Africa joining in 2010) was widely understood as a coalition of large emerging economies. The post-2024 expansion has added four West Asian and African members alongside Indonesia, transforming the grouping into a substantially more geographically and economically diverse coalition. The Urbanisation Forum's 2026 participant list reflects this broader composition.

The four priorities

The Forum has organised its deliberations around four substantive priority areas. The first is inclusive urban development — the question of how cities can grow without leaving large sections of their populations on the margins of urban prosperity. The second is climate-resilient and disaster-resilient infrastructure — the planning, design, and financing of infrastructure that can withstand the climate-related shocks that all BRICS cities are increasingly exposed to. The third is stronger municipal institutions — the governance and capacity questions that determine whether urban policy translates into actual outcomes at the ground level. The fourth is digital innovation — the use of digital technologies for better urban planning, service delivery, and citizen engagement.

These four priorities reflect a recognisably contemporary urban policy agenda. They also reflect themes that India's own urban development trajectory over the past decade has engaged with substantively — through the Smart Cities Mission, the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban), and a series of related programmes.

India's urban story, on offer

During the inaugural session, Mr Manohar Lal released a publication titled "India's Urban Transformation: Stories of Change" — a curated document presenting selected urban practices and experiences contributed by India's states and Union Territories across the four Forum priority areas. The publication is, in effect, India's submission to the wider BRICS urban-policy conversation — a record of what India considers to be replicable or noteworthy from its own urban development experience.

That India is hosting this Forum for the fourth time, and that its 2026 hosting is being treated as the platform to bring "the urban agenda more firmly into the global development conversation" (in Mr Manohar Lal's framing), reflects a positioning India has worked to develop over more than a decade. Indian cities house roughly 480 million people, with urbanisation projected to take that figure beyond 600 million by 2036. The scale of the urban policy questions facing India — on housing, mobility, water and sanitation, climate resilience, employment, and municipal finance — is unusual among major economies and gives Indian practice a particular weight in international urban-policy conversations.

The Russia track and other bilaterals

A significant element of the Forum's first day was the bilateral meeting on the sidelines between India and the Russian Federation. The meeting was co-chaired by Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs Tokhan Sahu on the Indian side, and by Mr Yury Mutsenek, Deputy Minister of Construction, Housing and Utilities of the Russian Federation. The two delegations reviewed the progress of discussions on a proposed Memorandum of Understanding on Sustainable Urban Development between the two governments and expressed commitment to its early finalisation.

The agenda of the India-Russia urban cooperation track covers a substantial range — urban planning, affordable housing, municipal infrastructure, sustainable construction technologies, capacity building, and the exchange of best practices in urban governance. The two countries have, in different domains, found cooperation easier to organise than with many other partners; the addition of an urban-development MoU would extend that pattern into a fresh sector.

Beyond India-Russia, three other bilateral meetings were held on the sidelines of the inaugural day: between Iran and Russia, Iran and China, and Russia and the United Arab Emirates. The bilateral architecture around the Forum reflects how plurilateral platforms increasingly function — not just as venues for the formal multilateral agenda but as concentrated occasions for parallel bilateral diplomacy.

The field visits

In the afternoon of the inaugural day, the delegations were taken on a curated field visit to select urban interventions in and around New Delhi. The itinerary included the New Parliament Complex — the centrepiece of the Central Vista redevelopment project that has reshaped the capital's symbolic precinct over the past several years — and the India Gate-Kartavya Path precinct, the redeveloped ceremonial avenue that now anchors the centre of Lutyens' Delhi.

These choices were not incidental. The New Parliament Complex and Kartavya Path together represent India's most visible recent investment in monumental urban infrastructure — projects that combine architectural ambition with civic-space programming, and that have been deployed in India's international urban-policy diplomacy as exemplars of contemporary Indian urban development.

What it means for India's BRICS positioning

The 13th BRICS Urbanisation Forum is, in many ways, a stage-setting event for the broader 2026 India BRICS Chairship. India is using the year to host a calendar of ministerial-level events — covering finance, agriculture, science and technology, energy, environment, health, education, and others — culminating in the BRICS Summit later in the year. The Urbanisation Forum is among the first of these ministerial gatherings and establishes the tone, the substance and the diplomatic style of India's chairship.

The substantive contribution of an urbanisation track to BRICS as a whole is also worth noting. Many of the world's most rapidly urbanising regions — South Asia, Africa, South-East Asia — sit either inside the BRICS grouping or in its immediate neighbourhood. The policy questions BRICS countries face on urban housing, transit, climate resilience and municipal capacity are, in many ways, the policy questions of the early-to-mid twenty-first century. A serious, sustained BRICS engagement on urban issues has the potential to influence how cities are designed, financed and governed across a substantial part of the developing world.

The road ahead

The Forum's second day, on 12 June, is dedicated to thematic panel discussions on the four priority areas, with each panel structured around the experience of multiple member states. The day will culminate in the adoption of a joint Forum outcome document — typically a Joint Declaration or Ministerial Statement — that will articulate the collective BRICS position on urban policy priorities for the year ahead.

For the broader Indian BRICS Chairship calendar, the Forum's successful conduct serves as an early credential — a demonstration that the ministerial track is being managed substantively and at the diplomatic standards the grouping expects. Subsequent BRICS ministerial events through the year will build on this foundation.

For Indian cities themselves, and for the citizens who live in them, the value of the Forum lies less in its declarations than in the policy and practice exchanges it makes possible. The "Stories of Change" publication, the Russia urban-development MoU, the bilateral conversations on the sidelines, and the working relationships among ministers and senior officials that the Forum brings into being — these are the inputs that, over time, shape how Indian urban policy evolves. The headline events take a single news cycle; the working relationships they enable shape decisions for years afterwards.