Chennai as a Transition City: GIS Evidence on Faith-Sensitive Medical Value Travel and Urban Health Equity

Despite Chennai’s advent as a global healthcare hub, the city lacks an urban health governance framework capable of accommodating culturally differentiated medical demand, particularly for international Muslim medical travelers. The present study is based on a two-phase mixed-method design involving a systematic literature review of 58 peer-reviewed articles as well as a GIS-based spatial analysis of 56 super-specialty hospitals and 35 international/mid-scale branded hotels. The results show that faith-sensitive places like halal food and prayer areas are institutionally clustered and spatially dispersed, having little integration among hospital catchments, hotel clusters, and transport corridors, and associated with creating unequal access landscapes of mobile patients. The study contributes to the discussion by reframing medical value travel as an urban health equity and access governance issue, in which the city of Chennai is recognized as a transitional city where culturally responsive healthcare is practiced as an isolated phenomenon, not as a systematically designed urban health activity.