Sustainability - Question of Cities

Climate-induced inflation wrecks women’s food practices in Shaheen Bagh

Shaheen Bagh, a middle-class and predominantly Muslim area in south east Delhi, emerged as the city’s culinary hub after the persistent protest against the draconian Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens in 2019-2020. Though the chaalis futa road…

Making new cities in climate emergency calls for respecting nature

A city does not exist outside of its natural conditions, no matter how much air conditioning or bottled water we use. As…

How Navi Mumbai developed into an urban jungle edging out nature

The planned satellite city on the outskirts of the oversaturated Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, was built from scratch. Its landscape was once an…

‘Why Joshimath, Mussoorie and Nainital are also threatened towns’

When Joshimath, a hill town in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, suffered the destruction caused by subsidence in January, the large infrastructure projects…

Battered and forgotten, Joshimath holds a lesson in urbanising at the cost of environment

It’s been more than three months since the subsidence in the hill town of Joshimath, Uttarakhand, made headlines. Deep cracks appeared in…

Lessons from independent India’s urbanisation: Plan cities based on sustainability and social equity

The first three planned cities in India were to be reflections of a modern and secular new nation, built form of the…

How Gandhinagar transformed from ‘Gandhian’ city to GIFT City

More than a decade after Chandigarh was built, the planners of Gandhinagar had the opportunity to re-envision a city with different or…

How Bhubaneswar’s master plan was overtaken by unsustainable development

German-Jewish architect Otto Koenigsberger adopted a linear approach in building Odisha’s capital Bhubaneswar in which the neighbourhood unit would be “an attempt to transplant into the city one of the healthiest features of country and small-town life.” This, he argued,…

Chandigarh: Seductive and orderly icon yet prophetic for democracy

In the newly-independent and modernising India, planning and building capital cities was the symbol of the nation. Chandigarh, planned by Le Corbusier,…

The city and its discontents: Chandigarh’s alternative story

Despite its proclaimed democratic and egalitarian foundation, Chandigarh has emerged as a city designed for neo-liberal India with its grid hierarchy, segregation…