Built Environment - Question of Cities

A reality-based, sustainable urban planning order

The abysmal living conditions and perpetual stress for millions in cities like Mumbai are not accidental but the intended outcome of planning that’s increasingly skewed towards exclusive city-making and profiteering. The prevailing approach to planning has manufactured social and ecological…

What do Mumbai’s buildings owe the street?

Modern architecture has become mesmerised by the skyline and silhouette, and forgotten the human scale, the intimate two metres at which people…

Woh kuche, woh galiyaan, mohalle kahan hain?

The narrow streets, winding lanes, and intimate localities were once the social spaces at the threshold of public and private life. Beyond…

The vertical Panopticon: Architectural violence in
rehab towers

The multi-storeyed rehabilitation towers for slum dwellers, by their design, are nothing less than the intensification of the very conditions in slums…

Planning does not make space for women, children, and
the informal

The way cities are planned and built reveals a disconnect and inequity in how they treat the marginalised, the informal workers, women…

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…

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 and hazardous heat. A longitudinal action-research study in Delhi found that vendors suffered monetary losses due to heat,…

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…