Can Political Advertising Make Better Cities? Rethinking OOH During Election Season

Introduction: When Cities Turn Into Billboards

Every election season, Indian cities transform. Flyovers, medians, and roundabouts are draped in banners, flags, and flex. Political messaging becomes the dominant street language.

Most of this out-of-home (OOH) media is treated as a necessary visual mess—something we tolerate until it is cleared away. But what if we used this enormous investment differently? Instead of asking only “How do we remove clutter?”, we can ask: how can all this visibility also serve public space?

Exploring how OOH can move from visual noise to public asset in Indian cities.

From Disruption to Contribution

In her talk at South India Talks OOH 2025, our co-founder Garima Dubey described a future where OOH is not an interruption but a quiet character that changes the plot. Applied to election season, this could mean hoardings that provide shade, structures that include seating or rain protection, and media elements that double as wayfinding or civic information.

Election Media as Temporary Urban Infrastructure

Election cycles pour enormous money and materials into the city surface—poles, frames, gantries, flex, lighting, kiosks. Instead of treating all of this as single-use visual noise, cities could demand that OOH structures contribute physically to public life.

• Design guidelines that require media structures to provide shade, seating, bike racks, or planters
• Modular systems that can be re-skinned with new campaigns but remain as public amenities
• Party-agnostic infrastructure where the structure stays, but messages change over time

What This Could Look Like

Imagine election banners mounted on a continuous shaded walkway with seating every 50 metres; gantry frames over intersections that incorporate safe pedestrian crossings and legible wayfinding; or party flags mounted on solar-powered light poles that stay as improved lighting long after the campaign ends.

Risks and Design Responsibilities

This vision is not simple. It comes with real risks: visual dominance of one party in critical civic spaces, the danger of normalising permanent political messaging, and questions of maintenance and ownership once campaigns end.

• Clearly separate time-bound messaging from long-term infrastructure in design and regulation.
• Ensure equitable access to prominent sites via transparent policies.
• Build removal, reuse, and retrofitting into every OOH structure brief.

From OOH as Expense to OOH as Investment

For political parties and brands alike, OOH is a recurring cost. If every major campaign left behind better-lit streets, cooler shaded sidewalks, clearer wayfinding, or small but meaningful amenities, that spend would become part of the city’s public good.

OOH vendors, designers, and urban bodies could co-create a catalogue of dual-use formats: each media type paired with a physical benefit.

Conclusion: Designing the Democracy We See

Election seasons reveal what our cities look like when visibility becomes the only priority. As urban and landscape designers, we cannot simply wish advertising away—but we can insist that if it occupies our shared air and ground, it should also give something back.

At Ukiyo Habitat, we see this as part of a larger question: can every layer of the city—even the most temporary—be designed to support climate, community, and dignity?