Urban Planning | Development and design of urban landscapes

Reading Jane Jacobs today: Why her urban renewal agenda is still relevant

The doyenne of urban activism, Jane Jacobs, urged professional urban planners to understand that a city is more than its economy and its structures, that it is made by the everyday lives and interactions of people. Through her writings and…

Jane Jacobs’ focus on people and everyday lives in cities resonates in India

Jane Jacobs, the American journalist and barefoot urban planner of the 1960s, was often dismissed as a ‘housewife’ and her creatively built…

Jane Walks: A global movement to connect with cities and communities

How well do you know your city and its neighbourhood? Have you explored its layers of history and observed the nooks and…

Jane Jacobs for generations: Protester, urban thinker, people’s planner

Streets and sidewalks – often regarded as mundane — have immense significance in Jane Jacobs’ urban design vocabulary. Living and working in…

The life and times of Jane Jacobs, the urban activist who revitalised city planning

Jane Jacobs and her community-based ideas of urban planning snowballed into a movement as her influence spread. The urbanist and activist single-handedly…

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 were halted but it may have been a bit too late. It was mere damage control. Numerous committees,…

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…

For sustainable cities, begin by ‘seeing’ the unseen people in them

When people migrate to cities to make a living, they join the deprived urban classes in living a life of bare existence…