Jashvitha Dhagey - Question of Cities

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…

‘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…

“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…

By leaves we live: Finding Patrick Geddes in Mumbai’s Aarey

As trees are cut and trimmed in the lush green expanse of the Aarey forest for the Metro car shed paving the way for more construction, it marks yet another rupture in the relationship between people and nature which informed…

How Vadodara’s citizens joined forces to save the iconic Vishwamitri river

The highly polluted Vishwamitri river in Gujarat’s Vadodara was dying and the municipal corporation floated the idea of a riverfront which would have spelt the death knell for the river. From academics who first woke up with the alarm bells…

“The NGT order on Ennore, though important, is a paper victory. The fisherfolk, primary protagonists of this struggle, have to be involved in its implementation”

Ennore wetlands are key to Chennai's flood mitigation and preservation of fresh water aquifers, and home to fisherfolk. Over the years, the fishing community lost the natural area to several infrastructure projects, their children show six times the incidence of…

The rural in the urban: Warli women of Mumbai’s National Park

The women of the Warli tribe living in the protected forest, the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, are a unique lot negotiating their pastoral lives with the demands of India’s commercial capital. They have seen their lives and livelihoods…

‘We get flash floods but we have never experienced this type of flood’

Assam, and its neighbouring region, was lashed by the harshest monsoon rain in years, resulting in massive inundation and floods across 32 of the state’s 36 districts, displacing lakhs of people and destroying crops and property. Weeks later, people continued…

If Aarey shrinks, Mumbai will gasp for breath

Aarey Colony, also called Aarey Forest, at the northern end of the city has long functioned as its lungs, providing the city with fresh air and a vast expanse of green amidst grey concrete. A portion of Aarey was finally…