Archives - Question of Cities

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…

‘People being picked up and cases slapped; who listens
to the poor?’

It has been around three weeks that tens of protesting workers from Manesar and Noida were arrested. Their demands were basic – revision of minimum wages, improved working conditions, double pay for overtime, mandatory weekly offs, medical coverage, and timely…

The great AI debate: Taking all jobs, some jobs or being used as cover for layoffs?

Artificial Intelligence may not be the only factor for the restructuring seen in work and job markets, but it cannot be overlooked that it is drastically changing the way people work. Generative AI is reshaping, not uniformly erasing, white-collar work,…

‘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…

Pune riverfront work narrows the Mula-Mutha, slashes
green to grey

The network of rivers in Pune have created and sustained life; their banks, riparian zones, and channels (not canals) have been functional spaces for humans and flora-fauna, nurturing an eternal ecological truth. The riverfront development will turn it from a…

Musi riverfront project for real estate, sidelines people
and river

Only the first phase of the Musi riverfront development project in Hyderabad will be around Rs 7,000 crore; the total cost is estimated from Rs 56,000 crore to allegedly Rs 1.5 lakh crore—the most expensive riverfront work in India. Several…

Copy-paste riverfront model discounts Godavari’s ecology and heritage

Real estate over ecological restoration, multiplicity of agencies, and Kumbh Mela-driven deadlines are three faultlines of Nashik’s Godavari riverfront development, based on the Sabarmati model. The Namami Goda project worth Rs 2,800 crore has two phases—Phase I covers sewage treatment,…