Urban Design - Question of Cities

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

Cities become beautiful not only because of the quality of architecture but how it intermingles with nature, other life forms, and visual expressions of different communities. Advanced engineering and technology seen in flyovers, underpasses, and skyscrapers do not regard the…

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 Heritage Conservation Committee treats only the past as sacrosanct, the Delhi Urban Arts Commission intervenes in all…

Influencing change in cities through urban design interventions

Design holds incredible power to influence change in cities, address climate crises, break the prevailing order of exclusion, and renew nature-people relationship. In the re-envisioning of our cities, urban design must dismantle many walls in which it now exists, including…

‘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 sold for what kind of profits. Urban design necessarily responds to landform; without landform, there is no urban…

‘Cities that care’: A blueprint for feminist cities

A city is the ultimate act of an inclusive democratic society, a political act. It is also an important vehicle for the aspirations of equality of historically marginalised like the poor, women, caste and gender minorities, and people with different…

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 and has attempted to implement them. To that extent, it could be a template for urban developments across…

Rooftop cooling as design intervention to beat the heat
in Delhi’s Sultanpuri

The cramped homes, shared walls, asbestos or tin roofs, and narrow lanes make the indoors hotter than the outdoors in the Labour Colony here, leaving residents unable to cook, work or sleep. Unable to afford air conditioners and coolers, residents…

Play spaces for adolescents: The missing link in our cities

Urban spaces are currently spaces of adult hegemony designed for their work and mobility. Even when play spaces are built, they are for children but adolescents – at the threshold of childhood and adulthood – are usually left out. India…

The ‘build more’ way has failed. How to build better cities?

The construction industry, India’s second-largest contributor to the national GDP, rules the roost in cities, determining housing and other basic amenities, turning natural areas and common property resources into buildings or highways, and yet failing to address the shortfall in…

‘A happy city is where joy is not a commodity’

Rapid and unplanned urbanisation has hardly left open spaces for children. The carefree running, the cycling without the fear of speeding vehicles, the freedom that open spaces offered are now stories told by the older generations. The way cities are…