Archives - Question of Cities

Delhi’s landfills spread health hazards amid buried promises

Mountains of garbage on Delhi’s borders have plagued the city’s residents for decades. Garbage burning adds significantly to the air pollution to make Delhi the most polluted city in the world. Contaminated drinking water, toxic fumes from methane fires, and…

Make space for rivers in cities, draft policies to protect them

Natural rivers and their ecosystems in cities are being ruined in the name of development with projects stripping away them of their ecology, changing their geographical features, and leave a lasting damage on the marine life as well on people…

The Sabarmati story: A river is more than a usable resource

The redeveloped, concretised, and glitzy Sabarmati riverfront in Ahmedabad is a far cry from the meandering river which flows into the Arabian Sea. A natural river has been transformed into a tank of stagnant water – for commercial and recreational…

Pune’s Mula-Mutha sinks into ecological disaster

The ancient river, Mula-Mutha, has been battered by floods, encroachments, and rampant constructions causing massive environmental damage. Turned into a sewer and a dumping site over the years, the neglected river is heavily polluted and filthy. The plan to ‘develop’…

‘Why do we not see that our cities have come up around rivers?’

There is a severe stress on our rivers when we treat them like a resource which can be exploited instead of protecting them. Across cities in India, the story of rivers is similar -- heavily polluted with industrial and household…

Wanted: Safe and affordable housing for working women in cities

The basic human right to safe and affordable housing eludes most working women in cities. They are forced to submit to scrutinising interviews during their house search and forced to agree with a laundry list of conditions while signing the…

Planning and building gender-inclusive cities is the need of the hour

Women and other genders interact differently with the city from the way men do. What work they do, where they live, how they commute, and how they spend leisure hours are determined by what the city offers them – and…

Ragpickers: Women workers battle poverty, administrative apathy, Climate Change

It’s a continuous struggle for ragpickers, mostly women, to earn even a meagre amount for survival. They have to brace extreme heat and torrential rain to be out scrounging the roads, garbage bins and discarded waste for bottles, wrappers, and…

‘Mumbai Development Plan is not on paper alone, it makes spatial provisions for women’

The talk of incorporating gender concerns into urban plans has been around for decades but it became a reality only when Mumbai’s Development Plan was unveiled with specific provisions to make land available to provide services to women and other…

Digitalisation cannot be an unqualified “smart” solution to urban issues

As many cities become smarter by harnessing digitalisation and technology, sustainable development and ecology have been pushed behind. Smart Cities Mission, offered as the one-stop solution to many urban problems, has a chequered report card. Studies have shown that “smart…