Land Use | Agricultural, industrial, residential and recreational land in urban areas

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 determine its design and success but it needs active government involvement to frame policies and principles. New York’s…

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…

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…

‘Private interests accumulate land through force or power. That’s a big problem’

If governments want equitable, sustainable and inclusive cities, they should understand how policies and planning can influence land use and the creation…

Wayanad’s lessons on how not to manufacture ecological disasters

The 572-millimetres rain in two days triggering massive landslides in Wayanad shook the nation. Beyond the rising death toll and large-scale devastation…

From ground zero: Human decisions worsened climate tragedy in Wayanad

Even as the challenge of rehabilitating the landslide-affected looms large, the disaster raises other issues. Once a dense forest, Wayanad now has tea and coffee plantations, tourist resorts, road projects through the mountain ranges, and mono-culture crops like rubber whose…

Dehradun model of development is unsustainable, ecologically hazardous

Once a quaint hill station nestled in the Himalayas, cradling many public institutions of learning and research, Dehradun has seen rapid growth…

‘Maharashtra had 1,500 landslides in 2021, so 1,500 lessons but nothing learnt’

The Wayanad landslides bring back memories of last year’s landslide in Maharashtra’s Raigad district, on the Sahyadri range of the Western Ghats…