Jashvitha Dhagey - Question of Cities

From St. Inez Creek to Goa’s stories of water systems

The short film, Avnati, tells the story of the degradation of the St. Inez Creek that flows through Panaji through the lives and memories of people around it. From an idyllic place where people recall floating paper boats, the water…

‘Waste pickers are treated like step-children but the formal sector can’t work without them’

Most of Bengaluru’s waste used to be dumped in the villages nearby and waste pickers invisibilised despite their critical role. Hasiru Dala has been working to organise them, get government identity cards for them, and make them stakeholders in the…

To record and remember changing cities is to resist their erasure

As cities transform with breath-taking speed and the shiny new replaces the fading old, resisting the physical change is impractical and untenable. Resistance then takes other forms such as documenting, recording, collecting stories, organising walks, logging the everyday life, and…

Small but significant changes for gender-inclusive cities

Safe and clean public spaces, accessible convenience areas and toilets at regular intervals, areas that they can rest for a while, streets and footpaths that do not threaten even in the dark, responsive mechanism to complaints are some of the…

‘Urban planning tends to be driven by money, not natural ecosystem’

Once known as a salubrious city with abundant green, Pune has transformed into a crowded and chaotic city grappling with rapid urbanisation, poor infrastructure, and depleting natural resources facing the brunt of extreme weather events. The failure to cope with…

India’s changing monsoon patterns demand shifting gears in preparedness

There is empirical evidence to show that changes in the monsoon or heavier rainfall is not merely our imagination. The tehsil-level study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water maps, like never before, the many changes across India. As…

Why Mumbai has failed to become flood-ready

The city of dreams is wading through a flood of problems. The rain photos are the same every year — people negotiating knee-deep water, traffic jams, stationary trains in submerged waters. The rainfall has intensified over the years, increasing the…

Verse on water: Monsoon’s many languages

The monsoon lends itself to poetry and rhyme. But how to capture its majesty, its melancholy, its morbidity in a few lines? Which language captures the different rhythms of rain, from the gentle and soothing needed in overheated cities to…

Monsoon walks
reintroduce cities to people
in refreshing ways

Walking is the best way to look at precincts, localities and neighbourhoods in cities from a different perspective. In the monsoon, walking to discover different dimensions about places takes on an added hue, giving people new ways to ‘see’ cities.…

Climate disasters are connected to the way our cities are planned

Cities have completely ignored their natural areas. If mapped and made available on a public database, people can be empowered with the knowledge about them and can decide to protect them. Mapping a city’s ecology can radically change the way…