PK Das - Question of Cities

The ‘build more’ way has failed. How to build better cities?

The construction industry, India’s second-largest contributor to the national GDP, rules the roost in cities, determining housing and other basic amenities, turning natural areas and common property resources into buildings or highways, and yet failing to address the shortfall in…

Three trends in cities we will closely watch in 2025

As curtains come down on 2024, the hottest year on record, building sustainable cities has become more urgent than ever. What kinds of cities are being built across India as urbanisation picks up pace? What core ideas inform urban development?…

From nature in cities to imagining cities in nature, for our future

Nature shapes and defines cities, but the prevailing model of city-making equates development with construction at the cost of ecology, purely for profit. This has led to a serious rupture in nature and segregation of nature from people. As the…

For better cities, map and integrate all open spaces into urban planning

Gardens, promenades, boardwalks, wetlands, salt pans, beaches, promenades, green connectors amid a city’s concrete, are vital open spaces which make it more liveable. The most iconic open spaces combine a multitude of urban functions: ecological, social, public health, public safety,…

Streets are sutradhars of people’s lives, first units of neighbourhoods

Streets, as living and meeting spaces for people, are more than roads. Street-based neighbourhoods reflect social cohesion and inclusiveness in cities but streets are being transformed into roads where people’s presence matters the least. Shop-fronted roads, built for consumptive economy…

Mumbai: The way forward from slums to affordable housing

That Mumbai’s slums are a perpetual feature of the city and there is not enough land for affordable housing are manufactured myths. It is possible to use slum land to make affordable houses. A scheme for the redevelopment of slums,…

India’s urban housing crisis: Chasing the affordable dream

Cities in India are centres of commercial activity and infrastructure development. The urban poor, often employed as informal labour, live in informal settlements because they cannot afford houses in cities. With the urban population set to increase, the shortage of…

Jane Jacobs’ focus on people and everyday lives in cities resonates in India

Jane Jacobs, the American journalist and barefoot urban planner of the 1960s, was often dismissed as a ‘housewife’ and her creatively built community of protestors as ‘nothing but a bunch of mothers’ by professional planners. However, Jacobs kept her focus…

How Bhubaneswar’s master plan was overtaken by unsustainable development

German-Jewish architect Otto Koenigsberger adopted a linear approach in building Odisha’s capital Bhubaneswar in which the neighbourhood unit would be “an attempt to transplant into the city one of the healthiest features of country and small-town life.” This, he argued,…

How development control regulations erode the idea of cities

City-making has come to epitomise exclusion and commodification where open spaces and natural environment have been sacrificed to benefit private interests. City planning is given the short shrift and the Development Control Regulations (DCR) approach is used by politicians and…