Urban Planning | Development and design of urban landscapes

City looks: Not facades and boulevards, but people’s lives and creative expressions

Urban aesthetics has been either historically inspired or drawn from the post-industrial city’s grand geometry of imperial worlds, mercantile splendour, and cruising pathways. But the way a city looks is shaped by people in the everyday rituals of living, cultural…

‘Aesthetics not an after-thought or beautification, it’s harmony of city spaces and environment’

Cities become beautiful not only because of the quality of architecture but how it intermingles with nature, other life forms, and visual…

The numb-erred aesthetic of India’s financial capital

Without an aesthetic vision, the visual quality of the built environment deteriorates. Mumbai and Delhi present two approaches to aesthetics. While the…

Mumbai’s old textile market is on the edge of a new aesthetic

The Moolji Jaitha Market is a maze of lanes and gullies that culminates in small chowks; a grid of entrances and intersecting…

Let there be light, but aesthetically

Heritage buildings bathed in thoughtful lighting are a visual delight and also lend character to a city’s night-time aesthetic. Lighting, done correctly,…

‘Ecology and landform give rise to urban form. Town planning flattens it to 2-dimension’

Cities have been turned into a mechanical mode of counting numbers with excel sheets, looking at which plot of land can be…

How ecologically-sound is Kolkata’s New Town?

Designated a Platinum Rated Green City in 2020, New Town chalked out sustainable measures within the constraints of an already planned city…

The final straw: The plan that endangers Mumbai’s
National Park

The draft zonal master plan for the eco-sensitive zone of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park seeks not to protect the forest but to open parts of it for construction. In doing so, the plan ignores the web of life between…

A farce, a road map legitimising environmental destruction

It took the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation nine long years to prepare and release the draft zonal master plan for the eco-sensitive zone…

Walking the faultlines of a forest in the city

Amidst the chaos and cacophony of urban life in Mumbai and Thane, the lush green and quiet paths of the outer areas…