How Goa’s Interim Plans mock its cities and peripheries
Goa adopted the language of comprehensive planning but not the practice. Regional Plans and Comprehensive Development Plans were to guide…
Edition 100: Letter to the City
Edition 100:
Letter to the City
This Edition
For whom private Gurugram?
Reports on urban exclusion
News Digest
Edition 115: Better cities – Peripheries
An expanding Bengaluru and Ramagondanahalli’s experiences
The planned layout modes of urban expansion have (re)produced new forms of spatial inequality, ecological stress, infrastructural fragmentation, and socio-economic uncertainty. As Ramagondanahalli shows, peri-urban land is not merely a productive asset but an inheritance of memory, labour, and identity,…
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Modern planning forgets traditional, eco-sensitive designs
Of the many design elements that have fallen out of favour is the jharokha, especially in hot places. The enclosed stone window projecting from the outer wall allowed ventilation inside, ensured privacy, and was a climate device. From Assam’s flood-resilient…
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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…
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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…
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‘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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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‘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…
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‘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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 –…
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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…
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‘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…
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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…
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‘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…
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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…
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People of Dharavi nonchalant and apprehensive about redevelopment
What was once a small cluster of huts on a marsh in 20th century Bombay is now 595 acres of cramped houses, workshops, factories, tannery and pottery units, schools and more packed into inhospitable living conditions. Infamous for years as…
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