Built Environment - Question of Cities

Wake-up call: India’s air pollution-related deaths among highest in the world

As winter sets in, the air quality in most cities in India turns critically poor. Triggered by climate change, the situation worsens every year, impacting people’s physical and mental health. More than 2.3 million Indians died prematurely due to pollution…

Urban spaces and mental health: The important correlation we miss

In the race to construct cities with mega projects, the relationship between the built environment and people’s mental health is rarely acknowledged.…

The silent epidemic: Air pollution infiltrates our lungs, our lives, say people

No one has been spared by the effects of air pollution. A nagging cough, throat infection, lung ailments, breathing problems, and tiredness…

Let’s breathe better air, said cities and fought air pollution

As people in cities across India struggle to breathe through the smog and haze that now characterise winter months, a number of…

Streets are sutradhars of people’s lives, first units of neighbourhoods

Streets, as living and meeting spaces for people, are more than roads. Street-based neighbourhoods reflect social cohesion and inclusiveness in cities but…

On streets of India, life unfolds through food, flowers, traditions and people

Urban India lives on its streets, it is said. This is not far from the truth of everyday life for millions in…

Micro-mapping streets and footpaths in a neighbourhood, as a woman

We walk by on badly-designed streets and footpaths or race across at ill-planned traffic intersections made to facilitate vehicles rather than pedestrians,…

How women perceive, navigate and occupy public spaces and streets

Are streets gendered? If not, then are streets used differently by women and men which makes them apparently gendered? Does the dynamic of women shopping on streets change when women are in a shopping mall? These and other questions are…

When you open a street up to people, they create magic

Children cycling and skating, a bunch of people practising yoga, an enthusiastic group dancing to Zumba beats, and the elderly strolling without…

How redevelopment ruined Mumbai’s housing and marred the landscape

Three decades after redevelopment of slums and old buildings took off in Mumbai, in the first flush of liberalisation, the percentage of…