Built Environment - Question of Cities

How children co-created 250 metres of happiness around schools

What started out as a project in one Delhi school to make the area safer for children and meaningful for the community, with children co-designing and reimagining it, has spread to ten schools, touching thousands of young ones. Making children…

Want to invent leisure from leftovers? Laggere shows the way

Pushed into congested homes in the city’s margins, the children of the resettlement colony in Bengaluru’s Laggere have evolved their own ways…

‘In India, play is a luxury…parents and teachers should understand its importance’

As cities expand, the number of open spaces and in-between spaces for play are shrinking. Playgrounds and gardens are an afterthought. Mumbai…

Play spaces for adolescents: The missing link in our cities

Urban spaces are currently spaces of adult hegemony designed for their work and mobility. Even when play spaces are built, they are…

Designing urban spaces for children’s mental well-being

In national emergencies such as pandemics, natural disasters, and war-like situations, it is the physical and social fabric that keeps the society…

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…

Seeing the unseen nature amidst Mumbai’s expanding concrete

A casualty of the build more approach is the erasure of precious natural wealth. Amidst the concrete maze of Mumbai-Navi Mumbai, there…

‘Better dust upon leaves than in the lungs of the citizens’

Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist, conservationist, sociologist and town planner who spent long years working in India, believed it was important that the natural assets of a town, and everyone’s fair share of them, are protected, nurtured, and integrated into…

Wayanad rebuilds but discounts people’s needs and
nature-based development

Nearly nine months after devastating landslides flattened large areas in the northern part of Wayanad district, the process of building back –…

How much has your city expanded its footprint of
built-up area?

In cities across India, people speak of how much more construction they see in familiar areas. But how much exactly has been…