Rehabilitation - Question of Cities

Wayanad rebuilds but discounts people’s needs and
nature-based development

Nearly nine months after devastating landslides flattened large areas in the northern part of Wayanad district, the process of building back – or rebuilding and rehabilitation – has started. But, as usual, it’s a top-down process without consultations held with…

M-East Mumbai: Votes don’t improve lives but they vote anyway

The cramped, polluted and neglected civic ward in the city, which houses migrant workers and project-affected persons displaced from other parts of Mumbai, shows the failure of politics to respond to people’s needs, in a sense. The triad of roti-naukri-makaan…

Vulnerabilities of informal settlers continue to exacerbate amid policy conundrum

Kathmandu’s squatter settlements have grown four-fold from 1985 to 2022, and they continue to expand. Mostly migrants, the squatters lack legal tenure to the place they occupy. Living under pathetic conditions in structures which are not houses, their lives are…

Climate justice eludes the displaced from Karachi’s Orangi Nala

After the heavy floods in 2020, the decision to remove illegal settlements along one of Karachi’s streams, Orangi Nala, to make way for water was a double blow to the residents. Three years later, they await justice. With climate-related catastrophes…

‘We are scared that the polluted Mithi might flood again’

As Mumbai’s most prominent river and natural drainage channel, the Mithi has mostly been struggling to flow despite the restoration work after the destructive 2005 floods. The pollution, concretisation and encroachment that led to Mithi’s pathetic state have also impacted…

Nivara Hakk then and now: The struggle for housing rights

As slums were demolished in massive operations and slum dwellers summarily evicted, often out of Bombay (as it was called till 1995), in the 1980s, a smorgasbord of organisations emerged to protest this. Nivara Hakk Suraksha Samiti, a collective of…

A tall order: Housing as part of the ‘Right to the City’ is long, hard work

The Delhi High Court’s judgment in the Shakur Basti petition in 2019 foregrounded the Right to the City for slum dwellers, bringing hope for those who were facing forceful eviction. The verdict, widely seen as progressive, spelled out the rights…

Wayanad rebuilds but discounts people’s needs and nature-based development

M-East Mumbai: Votes don’t improve lives but they vote anyway

Vulnerabilities of informal settlers continue to exacerbate amid policy conundrum

Climate justice eludes the displaced from Karachi’s Orangi Nala

‘We are scared that the polluted Mithi might flood again’

Nivara Hakk then and now: The struggle for housing rights

A tall order: Housing as part of the ‘Right to the City’ is long, hard work

Wayanad rebuilds but discounts people’s needs and
nature-based development