Archives - Question of Cities

Urgent call: A new imagination of cities with abundant trees

Vast acres of tree covers and forests are being ruthlessly hacked for infrastructure projects and urban development even as extreme heat rises in cities. Research shows that the mean urban temperatures in India’s cities may rise by an additional 45…

‘What’s the strategic component in Great Nicobar? The logic is entirely financial’

The dense forest of 130 square kilometres in the Great Nicobar, an area equivalent to 38 percent of Mumbai, faces total erasure by a Rs 92,000-crore mega development project of a transshipment terminal, port and airport. “We are signing off…

Call it a forest or not, Dwarka matters beyond the definition

Between the Dwarka forest and the road outside, there was a staggering difference of 17 to 21 degrees Celsius on the thermal camera, underscoring the need for trees. But Dwarka was not legally tagged a forest and did not appear…

India’s war on trees

How many hundreds or thousands of trees have been chopped down across India, where has the tree-felling been, and what would the destruction look like on a map? Researching, collating and analysing the answers to these and related questions led…

Do not touch our trees: Citizens echo across cities

From Pune to Hyderabad, citizens are protesting large-scale tree cutting linked to roads, metros, flyovers, mining and real estate projects despite worsening urban heat. In Pune, activists say decades of infrastructure-led concretisation have devastated tree cover, even as the city…

Paris shows the cool way to prioritise nature over concrete

Paris went from grey car-centric to green and tree-filled, planting nearly 1,00,000 trees and creating 531 gardens, and two urban forests with Mayor Anne Hidalgo leading the transformation. To make the city more liveable and breathable, and to reduce excessive…

The mall view: Cities, workers and the crisis of citizenship

For millions of informal workers, life in cities is a perpetual cycle of poverty and precarity with low salaries, inadequate housing, deprivation of basic amenities, and spatial and social marginalisation. The burgeoning inequality in cities underscore the harsh truth that…

Economies of exhaustion: Women, work, and
climate action

Nearly 168 million women do informal work in India’s cities as street vendors, domestic workers, construction labourers, home-based workers, waste pickers, but most have no contracts or safety nets. They carry an unequal burden, often higher than that of men…

Unfair, unjust work: The
nine-hour ordeal of a woman delivery rider

In the estimated 7.7 million workers in the gig economy in 2020-21, women make between 10-28 percent of the workforce. Question of Cities shadows Zomato delivery rider, Lata, on Delhi’s roads to map their lives. The earnings are as little…

Remember Bhilai? The workers’ township now lies abandoned

The Bhilai Township, built across 16 sectors to house workers of independent India’s first major steel plant, had nearly 65,000 in the 1980s but now lies abandoned. The structural shift from permanent employment to contractual labour has meant a shift…