Urbanisation - Question of Cities

How Kerala is coping with one of its harshest summers

Many cities across Kerala experienced a high heat summer in early March. Experts say there is no doubt that this summer will see temperatures up by one to 1.5 degrees Celsius, even 2 degrees Celsius in some parts. The high…

Ahmedabad’s Heat Action Plan has more hot air, less gas to propel it forward

The idea of Heat Action Plan for cities has come a long way from 2013 when the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation rolled out its plan for the city that was scorched by a heat wave resulting in at least 1,344 deaths.…

Lessons from independent India’s urbanisation: Plan cities based on sustainability and social equity

The first three planned cities in India were to be reflections of a modern and secular new nation, built form of the new democratic republic. Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, and Gandhinagar could have become the template of India’s urbanisation, strengthening their role…

How Gandhinagar transformed from ‘Gandhian’ city to GIFT City

More than a decade after Chandigarh was built, the planners of Gandhinagar had the opportunity to re-envision a city with different or local influences. Instead, Gandhinagar was an opportunity lost. It furthered the experiment in independent India’s urbanisation trajectory which…

How Bhubaneswar’s master plan was overtaken by unsustainable development

German-Jewish architect Otto Koenigsberger adopted a linear approach in building Odisha’s capital Bhubaneswar in which the neighbourhood unit would be “an attempt to transplant into the city one of the healthiest features of country and small-town life.” This, he argued,…

Bhubaneswar’s urbanisation caught between old temple town and new city

The new city of Bhubaneswar was built from scratch but in the frenzy of building Odisha’s capital, the existing Old Town was pushed into the background. Inclusion and integration were crucial while the new city was being built but there…

Transformation of the planned city: Some hits, some misses

The temple town of Bhubaneswar is no longer a town of people employed in the government, building a life with their families in bungalows built on allotted plots in the planned units. The city has grown multi-fold beyond its master…

A compendium on Odisha’s planned city and its transformation

The interesting story on how Odisha’s capital, Bhubaneswar, was planned and built has found its way into many research papers and reports. German architect Otto Koenigsberger’s master plan emphasised on organising the town “in such a manner that it forms…

Delhi’s real town planner, the Yamuna, still gasps for life

Over the decades, even as multi-crore programmes to clean the river are expanded, the Yamuna and its floodplain continue to be polluted. Delhi takes from the Yamuna but treats it as a receptacle for its waste. As long as this…

‘We need to ask where our data is being used and who is encashing it’

What does digitalisation look like in the urban periphery, the smaller towns? Urban studies scholars and researchers set out to Bhiwandi, on Mumbai’s periphery and part of the larger Mumbai Metropolitan Region, to try to answer the question. In the…