Built Environment - Question of Cities

City looks: Not facades and boulevards, but people’s lives and creative expressions

Urban aesthetics has been either historically inspired or drawn from the post-industrial city’s grand geometry of imperial worlds, mercantile splendour, and cruising pathways. But the way a city looks is shaped by people in the everyday rituals of living, cultural…

‘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…

The numb-erred aesthetic of India’s financial capital

Without an aesthetic vision, the visual quality of the built environment deteriorates. Mumbai and Delhi present two approaches to aesthetics. While the…

Mumbai’s old textile market is on the edge of a new aesthetic

The Moolji Jaitha Market is a maze of lanes and gullies that culminates in small chowks; a grid of entrances and intersecting…

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,…

Influencing change in cities through urban design interventions

Design holds incredible power to influence change in cities, address climate crises, break the prevailing order of exclusion, and renew nature-people relationship.…

‘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…

Lighting, shadows, and cognitive dissonance in
urban spaces

This essay presents an emerging concern about how urban environments should be understood and designed in terms of lighting, and shows how people experience cognitive dissonance when exposed to fragmented lighting, uncoordinated shadows, and over-illumination in cities such as Mumbai…

‘Cities that care’: A blueprint for feminist cities

A city is the ultimate act of an inclusive democratic society, a political act. It is also an important vehicle for the…

How ecologically-sound is Kolkata’s New Town?

Designated a Platinum Rated Green City in 2020, New Town chalked out sustainable measures within the constraints of an already planned city…