Archives - Question of Cities

Shade as infrastructure for Hyderabad’s vendors in scorching sun

The city’s tree cover has shrunk, taking away the natural shade that would have provided some respite for thousands of vendors forced to work in the harsh summer sun. As vendors focus on finding spots on roads and pavements, severe…

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…

Mapping heat stress shows Delhi street vendors’ precarity

Street vendors, indispensable to cities but structurally excluded from urban planning, infrastructure and legal protections, are forced to deal with continuous, unavoidable and hazardous heat. A longitudinal action-research study in Delhi found that vendors suffered monetary losses due to heat,…

Built form worsens unbearable heat in Mumbai’s SRA buildings

Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) buildings in Mumbai’s Goregaon East record higher temperature than surrounding areas because of the built form – tiny windows, lack of cross ventilation and open spaces. Residents are forced to cope in buildings not designed for…

Rising heat makes cool
Kashmir history

As Srinagar and other parts of Kashmir turn hotter than ever in summer and winters become warm, discussions revolve around declaring heat waves in a region known to be bitterly cold to cool. Heat is no longer an aberration but…

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…