Archives - Question of Cities

Overturning a burden: Privatisation of land and city building

From the ideological framework that determines how land is acquired, held and distributed to people’s access to housing and amenities, land use is the most critical aspect of urbanisation. It is the motherboard on which urbanisation unfolds. After the liberalisation…

Reforms in Hyderabad: From World Bank to land bank

The erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh was the World Bank’s first sub-national loan experiment. The eventual privatisation of the public sector and projects also meant de-collectivisation of land as the state acquired it for ‘development’. Financial markets used land as…

Mumbai’s contested land use and the jostle for space

The pattern of land use in India’s commercial capital has meant that it is among the most dense cities in Asia. This is Mumbai’s reality – visual reality with tall towers packed so closely that breeze does not move between…

Public housing calls for governments to regulate land prices

High land prices in our cities, which do not follow the supply-demand equation, determine how land is used, what kind of houses are built and in which areas, what amenities and infrastructure are accessible to whom. There’s no way that…

‘Private interests accumulate land through force or power. That’s a big problem’

If governments want equitable, sustainable and inclusive cities, they should understand how policies and planning can influence land use and the creation of the ‘public realm’, especially for the marginalised. “Governments seem to valorise the idea of private interests because…

Focused on flood management, Mumbai lets down Mithi River ecologically

Twenty years after the July 2005 deluge in Mumbai, the Mithi, pivotal to drain the rain, is still choked, silted and disconnected from the city despite thousands of crores spent to clean it, build embankment walls and sewage treatment plants.…

Why Kolkata should be a celebration of the Hooghly but isn’t

The iconic river, immortalised in cinema, songs and art, hardly has a happy relationship with the city. Visible for barely 1.5 kilometres, its banks and the ghats have garbage, debris, faecal matter, crumbling structures of the British era, derelict factories.…

Overturning a burden: Privatisation of land and city building

Reforms in Hyderabad: From World Bank to land bank

Mumbai’s contested land use and the jostle for space

Public housing calls for governments to regulate land prices

‘Private interests accumulate land through force or power. That’s a big problem’

Focused on flood management, Mumbai lets down Mithi River ecologically

Why Kolkata should be a celebration of the Hooghly but isn’t

Rivers are our home (but) what will the waters remember – plastic?

‘Save the Yamuna floodplains from government-sponsored encroachment’

‘Give the river back its space. Give it a new spatial
role in a city’