Archives - Question of Cities

Architecture of walls in the neoliberal remodelling of Bengaluru

The city once known for balancing gated enclosures with open, tree-lined, planned neighbourhoods has turned alienating and disquieting with business parks, gated communities, and flyovers fragmenting it. Neoliberal architecture favours interiority and fragmentation. The obvious built form are flyovers which…

How development rules reshape childhoods in Mumbai’s rehab colonies

In Mumbai’s Lallubhai Compound, a resettlement and rehabilitation colony, children co-created the 13,000 square feet of derelict land strewn with trash into the Indradhanush Garden that they now use and care for. Play and education are integral to the overall…

Urban imaginaries and spatial inclusion in Kozhikode’s
Gujarati Street

Once the hub and home of traders from Gujarat, the street has been transformed into an ‘art street’ with a new heritage-cultural entrepreneurship, and repurposed walls and structures turned into aesthetic cultural establishments. Those who own or curate the street…

What New Town did not take from the old city

All Indian cities have characteristics which could be adopted into the design of new towns but Rajarhat New Town neither referenced them from Kolkata nor followed any hierarchy of or accessibility to open spaces. An example is Kirchsteigfeld, after the…

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…

Plan not for riverfronts, plan
for natural edges and ecology
of rivers

Regulatory systems for urban rivers prescribe fixed distances for riparian or buffer zones which contradict the very nature of rivers whose edges are never fixed. Policies oversimplify the fluid boundaries into hard lines. Rivers vary across space as well as…

How Chennai can – and must – rebuild its relationship
with water

The way the city has been built – hard infrastructure encroaching on water bodies – denies it the ability to safely move its waters across the landscape during the monsoon, and to store and use them during the drier months.…

Kochi: Notes on unequal ecologies of inhabitation

The city that water made is being unmade by water, at an accelerated pace. But the unmaking is uneven and reflects the fractured violences of caste, class, and feudal-mercantile-colonial spatial logic. In places along the coast like Chellanam or wetland…

Shimla and Kullu mountains send feedback; we ignore
and build

The hill town with the old water system built in tune with gravity now has water anxiety and private rooftop reservoirs, covered in iron grills to protect them from monkeys. In Kullu, the market dances to the tune of the…

Nagpur’s rivers and lakes see huge construction,
Rs 200-crore fountains

Nagpur’s water network – Nag River, Pili and Pora flowing into it, Ambazari and Futala lakes – was its natural cooling infrastructure. Construction and pollutants have shrunk it from 5.76 percent to barely 1.08 percent of the city’s area in…