Built Environment - Question of Cities

Rooftop cooling as design intervention to beat the heat
in Delhi’s Sultanpuri

The cramped homes, shared walls, asbestos or tin roofs, and narrow lanes make the indoors hotter than the outdoors in the Labour Colony here, leaving residents unable to cook, work or sleep. Unable to afford air conditioners and coolers, residents…

Who owns the city’s ecology? Lessons from Amita Baviskar’s Uncivil City

As Delhi’s air turns foul, reading or revisiting Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi is timely. It not only…

Why are we pushed into unsustainable high-density living?

While not negating the benefits of density such as higher productivity, shorter commutes, and lower carbon footprint, the downsides of the high…

The anatomy of density in our cities: A storyboard, a way of seeing

Density, in urban planning, is often reduced to a simple metric: the number of people within a given land area.[1] But it…

A kilometre in South Delhi, two starkly different densities

The building and people densities across the upscale Sainik Farms and the poorer Sangam Vihar are too stark to ignore – languid…

‘Infrastructure and design of buildings matter, not only density’

Density is not the only factor in people in Mumbai’s slum rehabilitation colonies getting tuberculosis; a multi-disciplinary study showed that the built…

Density as urban good: A critical compendium

Density in India’s cities was not accidental. It was a part of an urban development approach and policy greatly influenced by the…

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…