Team QoC - Question of Cities

Reading cities through stories, writers and lenses

Cities unravel layers in their books through trivia, history, lived experiences captured in books, monographs and other pages. The written word matters even in this digitally-driven age and books bring alive people of a city, its streets and neighbourhoods, hidden…

Community filmmakers tell lesser-known stories of
their cities

Cities are often spoken about through master plans, metrics and futures imagined top down. Often lost in these are how people live every day, adapt and adjust, resist and remake their city. The arts and films are ways to capture…

How changing climate and cities influence people’s lives

When the world is confronted with climate change and its intensifying effects, studies and research give concrete shape to the impacts. International and national reports, some short-term work and others long-term depth work that focus on rising heat, river pollution,…

‘Aesthetics not an after-thought or beautification, it’s harmony of city spaces and environment’

Cities become beautiful not only because of the quality of architecture but how it intermingles with nature, other life forms, and visual expressions of different communities. Advanced engineering and technology seen in flyovers, underpasses, and skyscrapers do not regard the…

Let there be light, but aesthetically

Heritage buildings bathed in thoughtful lighting are a visual delight and also lend character to a city’s night-time aesthetic. Lighting, done correctly, can bring them alive and change the way people see their buildings while shoddily lit-up structures mar the…

‘Ecology and landform give rise to urban form. Town planning flattens it to 2-dimension’

Cities have been turned into a mechanical mode of counting numbers with excel sheets, looking at which plot of land can be sold for what kind of profits. Urban design necessarily responds to landform; without landform, there is no urban…

‘I have a negative sense of the judiciary; conflicting orders are passed’

An important path to protect ecology and seek environmental justice has been through the courts where, in numerous cases, citizens and lawyers have turned crusaders for nature. The Supreme Court noted last April that the right to a healthy environment…

‘Protecting SGNP is people’s movement, has always been’

Despite the onerous task of reading through the 400-page draft zonal master plan for the eco-sensitive zone of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, which the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation published only in English, and the limited time of 30 days to…

‘Ecology is a city’s natural buffer. We don’t see its tipping point, its warning.’

As large swathes of natural ecology in our cities are sacrificed for development and construction, not only do we lose the trees and rivers and lakes, but also the imagination of cities defined by its natural elements. Land use does…

‘Infrastructure and design of buildings matter, not only density’

Density is not the only factor in people in Mumbai’s slum rehabilitation colonies getting tuberculosis; a multi-disciplinary study showed that the built form mattered including light and ventilation, distance between buildings and open spaces. Mumbai’s norms for slum rehabilitation buildings…