Archives - Question of Cities

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…

“Mumbai’s housing laws maximise real estate potential, ignore people’s health”

The regulations are rooted in the building codes that were drawn up for the city after the plague of 1896 but, over time, they have been reduced to merely quantifying real estate. With the state making them convoluted and opaque,…

(de)Coding Mumbai: A study of the city’s housing regulations

Architect Sameep Padora and his team “decoded” Mumbai by extensively studying houses and residents through Development Plans. The 18 case studies, spanning across a timeline of 1896 to the present, were part of his exhibition, (de)Coding Mumbai, and revealed the…

Housing rights: Mill workers continue struggle for a roof

Forty years and counting – that’s how long the mill workers in Mumbai have been fighting for their dues. The mill strike in 1982 was for bonus and wage hikes, but it eventually turned into a historic struggle for housing.…

Patrick Geddes: Urban planning for social and cultural renewal

Scotsman Sir Patrick Geddes has been considered as the father of city planning in modern times. He brought his belief that town planning was not mere ‘place’ planning but essentially ‘people’ planning, to the nearly 50 plans he drew up…