Urban planning - Question of Cities

Dehradun: Infrastructure development or the
ghost of greed?

The aggressive push for infrastructure projects – specifically the Char Dham Yatra road, Dehradun’s airport expansion, and an elevated corridor to Mussoorie – threaten the fragile ecology of the Himalayan region. Despite studies advising caution, the government pushes ahead with…

The anatomy of density in our cities: A storyboard, a way of seeing

Density, in urban planning, is often reduced to a simple metric: the number of people within a given land area.[1] But it is more than just bodies per square kilometre. It is also the concentration of housing units, the total…

A kilometre in South Delhi, two starkly different densities

The building and people densities across the upscale Sainik Farms and the poorer Sangam Vihar are too stark to ignore – languid life in a low density neighbourhood in one, constant struggle amidst high density in the other. Both are…

Private space and public interest in the Indian city

How we choose to imagine the city fundamentally affects whether democratic urban governance serves public interest or gets compromised by increasing privatisation. We tend to imagine it as a conceptual model translatable into technical frameworks such as a master plan.…

Gurgaon and its private
city-making model crumble. What next?

Promoted as a haven of urbanisation and India’s showcase of private entities building a city, Gurgaon turned out to be a case study of the limitations and shortcomings of this model. Barely two-three decades later, the cracks are showing. Perennial…

Mumbai’s healthcare system shows the public, not the private, matters

With its tertiary and secondary hospitals hardly functioning, the pressure falls on the large public hospitals, most of which are located in south and central Mumbai. These also see a large influx of patients from outside Mumbai. As the presence…

Reforms in Hyderabad: From World Bank to land bank

The erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh was the World Bank’s first sub-national loan experiment. The eventual privatisation of the public sector and projects also meant de-collectivisation of land as the state acquired it for ‘development’. Financial markets used land as…

Tag: Urban planning

Dehradun: Infrastructure development or the
ghost of greed?

The anatomy of density in our cities: A storyboard, a way of seeing

A kilometre in South Delhi, two starkly different densities

Private space and public interest in the Indian city

Gurgaon and its private
city-making model crumble. What next?

Mumbai’s healthcare system shows the public, not the private, matters

Reforms in Hyderabad: From World Bank to land bank

Mumbai’s contested land use and the jostle for space

Public housing calls for governments to regulate land prices

‘Give the river back its space. Give it a new spatial
role in a city’