Urbanisation - Question of Cities

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…

By leaves we live: Finding Patrick Geddes in Mumbai’s Aarey

As trees are cut and trimmed in the lush green expanse of the Aarey forest for the Metro car shed paving the way for more construction, it marks yet another rupture in the relationship between people and nature which informed…

Indore 2.0 bears no stamp of its first master planner, Sir Patrick Geddes

One of the first cities in India to be planned expansively by the Scottish biologist, geographer and town planner, Sir Patrick Geddes, Indore in Madhya Pradesh is fast losing its natural beauty and charm. The city’s development is not people-oriented…

Central Vista redevelopment could rob Delhi of its iconic public space – and shrink democracy

The once sprawling lawns, wide pathways and iconic buildings at Rajpath in New Delhi are being erased by the Rs 13,450-crore Central Vista redevelopment project which began in 2019. The India Gate and the Rajpath area, the largest public space…