Built Environment - Question of Cities

Private space and public interest in the Indian city

How we choose to imagine the city fundamentally affects whether democratic urban governance serves public interest or gets compromised by increasing privatisation. We tend to imagine it as a conceptual model translatable into technical frameworks such as a master plan.…

Gurgaon and its private
city-making model crumble. What next?

Promoted as a haven of urbanisation and India’s showcase of private entities building a city, Gurgaon turned out to be a case…

Mumbai’s healthcare system shows the public, not the private, matters

With its tertiary and secondary hospitals hardly functioning, the pressure falls on the large public hospitals, most of which are located in…

How healthcare privatisation undermines population health in cities

The privatisation of healthcare in low- and middle- income cities from Delhi and Mumbai to Nairobi and Lagos means shiny private clinics…

From public good to private control: Land governance and urban exclusion in India

As India’s urban governance changed from mixed-use neighbourhoods to gated colonies, cities transformed reshaping land into a tradable asset disconnected from its…

Lessons for Mumbai from New York’s social housing of 1930s

Cities around the world have adopted social housing as an inalienable aspect of city-making. Understanding it as an ecology within cities will…

Overturning a burden: Privatisation of land and city building

From the ideological framework that determines how land is acquired, held and distributed to people’s access to housing and amenities, land use…

Reforms in Hyderabad: From World Bank to land bank

The erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh was the World Bank’s first sub-national loan experiment. The eventual privatisation of the public sector and projects also meant de-collectivisation of land as the state acquired it for ‘development’. Financial markets used land as…

Mumbai’s contested land use and the jostle for space

The pattern of land use in India’s commercial capital has meant that it is among the most dense cities in Asia. This…

Public housing calls for governments to regulate land prices

High land prices in our cities, which do not follow the supply-demand equation, determine how land is used, what kind of houses…