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Edition 100: Letter to the City

Edition 100:
Letter to the City

Delhi like the dhau: A city of co-existence and kinship

Nidhi Batra

Mumbai, our city, is being snatched from us

PK Das

Bengaluru re-imagined through its incredible water network

S. Vishwanath

Let’s transform Kolkata into a care-based feminist city

Srestha Chatterjee

This Edition

Rawta: Rural- urban tensions

Mumbai 3.0 interviews

News Digest

Edition 114: Better cities - The erasure of the local

Bricks and stones breathe, Hyderabad is forgetting this

Older homes tend to be 6-8 degrees Celsius cooler than the outdoors which can be traced to their thick lime-plastered…

The erasure of balcaos and sopos from Goa’s architecture

Hills, canals, and the changing form of Dehradun

Ladakhis hastily adapt to rainfall, abandon mud
and flat roofs

Leh’s concrete turn and masons who read the soil with hands

The cold desert faces a dilemma – whether to build coherent with climate and geography or conform to a standardised vertical development model imported from the plains. Leh developed a precisely calibrated, uniquely vernacular architecture with walls made of rammed…

‘We need to go beyond literal application of vernacular designs’

Local building materials such as mud, brick, bamboo, local tiles, clay, stone are losing out to steel, concrete, glass and other materials. Romanticising the old does not help; thoughtful application to the current context does. Question of Cities speaks to…

The Etawah design: An 123-acre urban forest as its lungs

AI can design cities. Ten ways to keep humans in control

Modern planning forgets traditional, eco-sensitive designs

A reality-based, sustainable urban planning order

The abysmal living conditions and perpetual stress for millions in cities like Mumbai are not accidental but the intended outcome of planning that’s increasingly skewed towards exclusive city-making and profiteering. The prevailing approach to planning has manufactured social and ecological…

Night heat: The silent crisis of summer for the marginalised

Rising night temperatures are playing havoc with people’s lives in cities. In Delhi’s Seemapuri, a colony of waste pickers, unusually warm nights compound the day’s heat stress. Mumbai and Chennai have unusually warm nights too. The burden of rising night…

‘Riverfront development is the murder of rivers, turning rivers into drains.’

“The Aravari taught me to flow like water,” says Dr Rajendra Singh, renowned water conservationist, in this interview, explaining how the work of turning it perennial influenced his life’s work and methods. Riverfront development, now unfolding across India’s cities, is…

Halla bol: Why protests are intrinsic to city-making

Resistance and protests are increasingly framed as undesirable, even anti-national. Yet, they have always defined the character of cities. Protests seem to be thinning out in cities across India but it may have more to do with how the governments,…

Delhi owes the Yamuna an ecologically-sound river-led city plan

The deterioration and shrinking of the Yamuna in Delhi have worsened over the decades despite thousands of crores spent. Constructions on its floodplains were ignored earlier; now, the Yamuna Action Plan itself includes riverfront development with concretisation even as long-time…

City looks: Not facades and boulevards, but people’s lives and creative expressions

Urban aesthetics has been either historically inspired or drawn from the post-industrial city’s grand geometry of imperial worlds, mercantile splendour, and cruising pathways. But the way a city looks is shaped by people in the everyday rituals of living, cultural…

The final straw: The plan that endangers Mumbai’s
National Park

The draft zonal master plan for the eco-sensitive zone of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park seeks not to protect the forest but to open parts of it for construction. In doing so, the plan ignores the web of life between…

Why governments promote private profiteering and undermine public goods

The increasing trend towards privatising public goods and services under the pretext of making them cost-efficient has, in fact, come at a cost to people. The difference between the cost to the government of providing a public service and the…

Focused on flood management, Mumbai lets down Mithi River ecologically

Twenty years after the July 2005 deluge in Mumbai, the Mithi, pivotal to drain the rain, is still choked, silted and disconnected from the city despite thousands of crores spent to clean it, build embankment walls and sewage treatment plants.…

The ‘build more’ way has failed. How to build better cities?

The construction industry, India’s second-largest contributor to the national GDP, rules the roost in cities, determining housing and other basic amenities, turning natural areas and common property resources into buildings or highways, and yet failing to address the shortfall in…

Mumbai’s BEST is being killed, political will to revive it is absent

The BEST Museum as Mumbai’s memoir – and more

Shab-Parak: Night fliers of Delhi bus that’s a community

‘BEST is a municipal responsibility, it’s stupid to
think of profit-loss’

‘Coping with heat isn’t an individual problem, it’s a systemic challenge’

The unequal impact of heat on the marginalised in India’s cities is no longer in question. The chasm is deepening between those who can escape heat stress and those forced to work despite extreme heat. Apekshita Varshney, founder of non-profit…

‘Deep flaw or blind spot in Indian environmentalism is that it largely ignored cities’

Cities built at the cost of ecology are becoming uninhabitable and unsustainable. Between the Gandhian perspective which is hostile to city life and the other that cities are engines of growth, both flawed, cities face ecological crisis and issues of…

How urban plans can, and must, value trees

Urban development plans and master plans have traditionally seen trees as impediments to ‘development’, rarely acknowledging them as natural wealth of cities and hardly making provisions to protect and preserve them. This will no longer work in the time of…

Move the air pollution needle to smaller and neglected cities

Conversations and policies on air pollution are mostly centred on Delhi and Mumbai but other cities and towns have been facing toxic air too. These are, at best, footnotes in national conversations on air pollution. Authorities here go in for…

We want safe cities, we want feminist cities

The heinous rape-murder of a doctor in Kolkata sparked off heated discussions on women’s safety in cities. Safety of women anywhere is non-negotiable, it is the bare minimum, and it is not entirely women’s responsibility. Women also need to be…

Pune’s growth story reminds us that nature does not send an invoice

As Pune amalgamates larger non-urban areas into the city limits, expanding in all directions, the frenzy of development has also meant fast-depleting natural areas. The frequent floods and harsh summers are alarms that can no longer be ignored. As the…

Urgent heat conversations and actions we need in India to cool down cities

As millions of Indians struggle through an relentlessly scorching summer with never-before high temperatures, Heat Action Plans have become critical to people’s lives and livelihoods. Although states and cities have prepared plans – and some have fitfully implemented them –…

Centring climate justice in rapidly urbanising cities of South Asia

The region is among the most vulnerable to climate change. With nearly 2.5 billion people and a limited capacity to adapt to climate change, South Asia shows how inequity and injustice lie at the heart of climate action. Billions in…

Ladakh: The meltdown in the cold desert as people fast for nature

What Shimla’s construction in defiance of its mountain ecology means

Sinking city: Climate risk, adaptation and urban governance in Mumbai

QoC Specials

QoC takes a powerful idea to The Nature of Cities festival: Join us on this journey

‘By leaves we live, the world is mainly a vast leaf colony’

They are everywhere, although hidden sometimes, but provide a layer of comfort amidst the grey concrete. Lush green landscapes not only soothe the eyes but allow people-nature bonds to form in cities. As a business place for hawkers, resting place…

Streets are sutradhars of people’s lives, first units of neighbourhoods

Streets, as living and meeting spaces for people, are more than roads. Street-based neighbourhoods reflect social cohesion and inclusiveness in cities but streets are being transformed into roads where people’s presence matters the least. Shop-fronted roads, built for consumptive economy…

‘We are scared that the polluted Mithi might flood again’

As Mumbai’s most prominent river and natural drainage channel, the Mithi has mostly been struggling to flow despite the restoration work after the destructive 2005 floods. The pollution, concretisation and encroachment that led to Mithi’s pathetic state have also impacted…

The green does not have to lose the battle to the grey in our cities

Large swathes of green cover are being cleared to make way for construction and infrastructure across cities in India. Trees are being cut, large canopies felled, old trees badly and unscientifically pruned. Urban plans and projects do not take trees…