Archives - Question of Cities

Policing in Cyberabad: India’s techno dystopia encroaching on people’s rights

Hyderabad’s policing has turned “cop-less” as police personnel were replaced with cameras, traffic offences automated, and smartphones replaced the old batons. For citizens, it is among the most ubiquitous and visible forms of digitalisation. This is a deliberate 24x7 surveillance…

Sustainability and people’s participation in the era of smart solutionism

The Smart Cities Mission was launched to improve the quality of life through digitalisation and data-driven solutions. This included interventions such as installing a multitude of sensors, deploying citizens’ apps, and creating various dashboards and platforms where administrators can monitor…

Digital connect in Smart City Bhubaneswar still has poor network

Odisha’s capital, Bhubaneswar, is transforming itself digitally into a “smart city.” As the city transitions from the traditional to tech-based mode with digitalisation picking up pace, it is worth asking if this has improved citizens’ lives. The experiences on the…

‘We need to ask where our data is being used and who is encashing it’

What does digitalisation look like in the urban periphery, the smaller towns? Urban studies scholars and researchers set out to Bhiwandi, on Mumbai’s periphery and part of the larger Mumbai Metropolitan Region, to try to answer the question. In the…

Water in the city: A matter of ecology, public health, and livelihoods

The importance of wetlands and waterbodies in urban planning has come to the fore after the devastating floods in India’s Bengaluru. They absorb and distribute rainwater and the runoff. As the sceptre of capitalist growth continues to affect the waterbodies,…

‘We need to plan cities for extremes. Climate Change is all about extremes’

The torrential rain and floods in Bengaluru in early September grabbed international attention, showing up wide cracks in the basic infrastructure of the ‘IT capital of India’. Tractors rescued the better off people to safety, the less privileged were left…

Flooded realities of ‘smart’ city Ahmedabad

Most of Ahmedabad was waterlogged and flooded when rains battered the city in July and September, washing away the city’s claims to be ‘smart’ with people scrambling to pick up pieces every time the skies open up. Lakes and waterbodies…

Hyderabad’s high-flood index demands focus on disaster mitigation measures

The heavy rainfall in July in one of India’s IT hubs, Hyderabad, threatened to cause devastation like the 2020 floods. Although it was not as severe as the earlier calamity, the extreme climate laid bare the city’s failure and the…

The myths of ‘public trust’ and ‘affordable housing’ in speculative Mumbai

The development story of Mumbai rests on the routine breach of the ‘public trust doctrine’ which benefits the elite. The Maharashtra government, instead of exercising its protective duty of public land, transforms properties meant for public use through legal alchemy…

Nivara Hakk then and now: The struggle for housing rights

As slums were demolished in massive operations and slum dwellers summarily evicted, often out of Bombay (as it was called till 1995), in the 1980s, a smorgasbord of organisations emerged to protest this. Nivara Hakk Suraksha Samiti, a collective of…