Built Environment - Question of Cities

Night heat: The silent crisis of summer for the marginalised

Rising night temperatures are playing havoc with people’s lives in cities. In Delhi’s Seemapuri, a colony of waste pickers, unusually warm nights compound the day’s heat stress. Mumbai and Chennai have unusually warm nights too. The burden of rising night…

Built form worsens unbearable heat in Mumbai’s SRA buildings

Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) buildings in Mumbai’s Goregaon East record higher temperature than surrounding areas because of the built form – tiny…

Mapping heat stress shows Delhi street vendors’ precarity

Street vendors, indispensable to cities but structurally excluded from urban planning, infrastructure and legal protections, are forced to deal with continuous, unavoidable…

Rising heat makes cool
Kashmir history

As Srinagar and other parts of Kashmir turn hotter than ever in summer and winters become warm, discussions revolve around declaring heat…

Shade as infrastructure for Hyderabad’s vendors in scorching sun

The city’s tree cover has shrunk, taking away the natural shade that would have provided some respite for thousands of vendors forced…

Let’s transform Kolkata into a care-based feminist city

In its bid to ‘develop’ into a modern metropolis, the city’s everyday rhythms are fading. Kolkata must hold on to its essence…

Clean air and water in Thrissur. Breaking barriers in Chennai

Drawing a circle from Thrissur to Chennai, Mumbai, and back to Thrissur, this multi-city letter weighs in to reminisce what used to…

Imaginations, protests and politics for better cities in 2026

The rapid development and redevelopment in cities in the business-as-usual mode has meant an extractive cost to nature with millions of people having no say. Cities built this way have led to unimaginably high levels of pollution, rising heat and…

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…

‘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…