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India

How CNOTA is redefining online privacy through VOIDEX

VOIDEX is an invite-only platform created by CNOTA without advertisements, designed organically on a post-quantum standard to ensure lasting security. It combines private communication and a public arena, featuring an encrypted messenger for calls and media, community channels, and a…

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,…

From fields to fences: The rise of gated peripheries

As cities evolve outwards, they engulf villages and their agricultural lands, leading to concerns about, among other things, environmental sustainability and fragmented landscapes. Delhi has 357 “urban villages” since the 1962 Master Plan with historical residential clusters and agricultural land…

Mumbai 3.0: ‘The new city is completely uprooting communities’

Third Mumbai, or the proposed Karnala-Sai-Chirner (KSC) New Town project, aims to decongest Mumbai while also creating a major economic hub across 124 villages of Raigad abutting the Navi Mumbai International Airport and Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority. Locals are not…

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 urbanisation but Outline Development Plans (ODPs), a temporary measure, are now holding sway. The ODPs are repeatedly extended and revised…

Rural Rawta on the brink of Delhi’s urbanisation

Urban expansion in the national capital has meant re-classifying hundreds of ‘rural villages’ as ‘urban villages’ to integrate them into the city. These become a peculiar mix of the lingering rural and the advancing urban in their built form, people-place…

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…

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 walls, masonry roofs, louvred teak shutters, courtyards, ventilators, and shaded openings. Climate-responsiveness was not a property of the building alone…

The erasure of balcaos and sopos from Goa’s architecture

What is celebrated today as Goa’s architecture hardly tells its pre-colonial and colonial history, or is rooted in the local culture, folklore and dynasties which gave it a unique coastal vernacular blend. Like the balcaos – large entrance staircases with…

Hills, canals, and the changing form of Dehradun

Dehradun’s architectural character was a unique blend of native Garhwali traditions, British colonial interventions, Tibetan Buddhist influences, institutional footprints and post-independence developments. Its canals once shaped its urban life, serving as infrastructure, ecological corridors, public spaces and climate regulators. Their…

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