There was much to fret about, be disappointed about and outrage over during 2024 as India’s urbanisation marched on and took on features that do not inspire confidence – shiny new infrastructure for a small elite but declining quality of life for most people based on anecdotal evidence and news reports, increasing privatisation and diminishing public land or spaces, violence against women that just didn’t seem to pause, hill towns that saw more tourists than they could handle, a continuing assault on the green cover and forests across the country ostensibly for development and more.
There were extreme weather events too, triggered by climate change. “In 2024, India faced extreme weather events on 93 per cent of the days in the year’s first nine months — 255 out of 274 days — marked by heat and cold waves, cyclones, lightning, heavy rain, floods and landslides. These events claimed 3,238 lives, affected 3.2 million hectare (mha) of crops, destroyed 235,862 houses and buildings, and killed approximately 9,457 livestock,” stated the annual India Climate Report[1] by Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment-Down to Earth.
While we, at Question of Cities, tracked developments related to cities, people, nature and climate change, we quietly totted up a handful of achievements that delighted us, reaffirmed our path, and committed us to do more. QoC is, even if we say so, India’s only online journal dedicated to cities, ecology, and social equity. Our approach has been to do in-depth think pieces or ground reports on a theme in every edition that we publish fortnightly. It warms us that the effort is being recognised. Here’s a round-up:
A bright spot in 2024 for us was that QoC became a partner to venerated The Nature of Cities festival in Berlin and showcased an installation (that we conceptualised and created from scratch) on the Linear Parks Ecology taking Mumbai’s Irla Nallah in Juhu as an example. QoC Founder and architect PK Das had conceived and designed it in collaboration with the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute and the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay; it was a pilot opened in 2017 and would have given Mumbai at least 300 kilometres of inter-connected parks and open spaces along its water courses.
Photo: QoC file
“Linear parks are more than public spaces or mere manifestations of the now-popular blue green infrastructure. At the larger societal level, linear parks revive the ecology of cities across their length and breadth as well as nurture a democratic and participatory political atmosphere. When made along natural areas such as rivers and drains, or old ‘brown’ infrastructure like railway lines and roads, they contribute to the regeneration of nature, provide neighbourhoods with lush green zones, nurture biodiversity, and create open spaces for people. By their character of meandering along physical infrastructure, they connect neighbourhoods and, therefore, people across the neighbourhoods too promising community and democratic bonds.” Read more on linear parks and QoC’s presence at the Berlin exhibition here.
For the second successive in our two-and-half years of existence, QoC picked up two prestigious Laadli Media Awards 2024 by Population First and UNFPA. Our multimedia journalist and social media bosswoman Jashvitha Dhagey won it for her experiential essay Micro-mapping streets and footpaths in a neighbourhood, as a woman published in October 2023. Dhagey explored what it meant to walk the streets as a woman, the hurdles, the hazardous road design elements that are not women-friendly. Read it here.
Hrushikesh Patil and Sejal Patel, QoC-CANSA Fellows won the Jury Appreciation citation for their essay How the lack of rights worsens climate events for Delhi’s informal workers published in November 2023. Their in-depth ground report from the streets and bastis of Delhi show how informal workers and the city’s most vulnerable had only themselves to fall back during extreme weather events such as extreme heat and rain. Read it here.
QoC has made its presence felt in important seminars and talks. In February 2024, QoC was invited to the National Seminar on Gender and Climate Change organised by Asar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), where our Founder Editor Smruti Koppikar spoke about the dimensions of gendered vulnerability to climate change. The Centre for Urban Policy and Governance at TISS organised a series of events on ‘Shaping the Urban’ that QoC attended.
In March, we were invited to the Urban Water Forum held by Wipro Foundation in association with the Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay. In October, QoC was a delegate at the Rising Heat Convening organised by Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE) and WIPRO Foundation at the Azim Premji University. Here, QoC was part of many discussions on heat, vulnerability, heat mapping and planning for heat-related disasters in cities. Founder Editor Smruti Koppikar presented on the multi-disciplinary challenge in dealing with heat and called for accountability from governments to address it as a public health crisis.
We received notes and posts of appreciation for the essays and stories we featured during the year and we got stalwarts like Claude Alvares, among India’s best-known environmentalists, to speak to us. Some made more impact than others like the reflections we published of the past decade of urbanisation during the general elections in April-May (read here) and how the disastrous COP29 can be interpreted at the local level (read here). Some resonated well with readers and others like our stand-out translation and compilation of poetry about the monsoon (read here) and Pune’s eco-warriors (read here).
It is difficult to make a pick of our favourites but here are some of the most-read essays and stories in Question of Cities through 2024.
1. Move the air pollution needle to smaller and neglected cities
Conversations and policies on air pollution are mostly centred on Delhi and Mumbai but other cities and towns have been facing toxic air too, reports QoC Associate Editor Shobha Surin. Authorities here go in for quick-fix measures such as dust management, paving roads, using water sprinklers even as less than one percent of the budget is spent to control toxic emissions from industry and construction. A staggering 295 million people live in only 131 such non-attainment cities. This threatens to turn into a pan-India urban crisis if attention is not directed to them.
2. ‘Goa has successful ecological movements but we should not have to keep doing this’
Renowned environmentalist-activist Claude Alvares has fought legendary battles, on the streets and in courts, to protect Goa’s village lands, khazan lands, lush forests, and a natural water network that have come under intense pressure from massive development. People’s movements have stood against the attempts to break apart villages, economies, and communities, he says in this interview pulling no punches about governments that act as land brokers and ‘outsiders’ who are part of Goa’s speculation economy.
3. Big bold ideas that can change public or affordable housing in our cities
India’s urban housing crisis is well-known. Millions live in slums and jhuggis. The housing paradox in Mumbai and Delhi, now increasingly seen in other cities too, means there is a high shortage of affordable homes and a glut of high-priced vacant houses. Influencing change in this framework calls for de-commodifying housing, audacity in land pricing, and ensuring that the state comes good on its statutory role rather than let private developers have a free run. Easier said than done but, as a few international cities show, it is possible, we said in this hard-hitting editorial.
4. Walk the talk on public transport, invest with sound mathematics
Transport analyst Ashok Datar writes that cities are all about space, and both private and public transport must be seen from this perspective. Private transport is uneconomical for cities, especially like Mumbai, because cars carry fewer people but occupy more space than other modes like buses. Parking is a dangerous byproduct of the car culture and claims space too. The solutions have to be two-fold: supply-centric and demand-centric. A shift in planning paradigm and sound mathematics, rather than showcase infrastructure for private cars, should inform transport policy, he argues.
5. From ground zero: Human decisions worsened climate tragedy in Wayanad
Even as the challenge of rehabilitating the landslide-affected looms large, the disaster raises other issues, wrote veteran journalist KA Shaji. Once a dense forest, Wayanad now has tea and coffee plantations, tourist resorts, road projects through the mountain ranges, and mono-culture crops. Over 40 percent of Wayanad is vulnerable to landslides and floods – 17 of 25 gram panchayats and two of three municipalities are environmentally fragile. As climate change exacerbates rainfall, clear land use policies and construction norms are needed. The government’s plans for the Rs 858-crore road that will drill into the mountains, which held the landslide-struck Chooralmala-Mundakkai villages, are on.
6. India darshan through festival foods and culinary traditions
People celebrate Diwali with a smorgasbord of foods unique to the traditions of a community or state, influenced by local climates and geographies, but within the boundaries of caste and gender. Besides Diwali, a number of other festivals across India have their own food traditions. While traditions such as offering niramish mutton curry during Kali Pujo or making sausages from animal blood might offend some, it is important to document them all so that we can read human history through food. Well-known filmmaker and food researcher Shubhra Chatterji, who has travelled extensively across India documenting food, shared her stories and insights.
7. We want safe cities, we want feminist cities
Against the backdrop of the heinous rape-murder of a Kolkata doctor and the nation-wide protests for safe cities, our Founder Editor and well-known journalist Smruti Koppikar wrote that the safety of women anywhere is non-negotiable, the bare minimum, and not entirely women’s responsibility. Women also need to be comfortable and at ease in cities, and belong to public spaces. Such cities have to be explicitly planned and built to include all women across caste, class, education, and income. Call them feminist cities or not but they are the future of city-making, she argued.
8. To record and remember changing cities is to resist their erasure
Cities change, and resisting their transforming physical form is impractical and untenable. Resistance then takes other forms such as documenting, recording, collecting stories, organising walks, logging everyday life so that the old is not totally erased. Multimedia journalist Jashvitha Dhagey found that while organised public archiving may still be far off, individuals in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and other cities, independent of one another, are giving a new collective and creative dimension to resistance.
9. The spectacular failure of planning cities, as we know it. What next?
Architect-illustrator and QoC writer Nikeita Saraf argued that the widely-prevalent conventional urban planning framework in India – focused on land use, zoning and building regulations – is out of step with the demands of the time we live in, especially climate change events. Development Plans or Master Plans still approach natural areas in cities merely as resources to be exploited. The old mould has to be broken. Planning has to be more sensitive to nature in cities and to the needs of the largest number of people if cities have to be liveable, inclusive, and sustainable, she wrote.
10. Dehradun model of development is unsustainable, ecologically hazardous
Ranjona Banerji, once a Mumbai editor now based in Dehradun, wrote about the ‘development’ in her hometown. A quaint hill station nestled in the Himalayas, Dehradun has seen rapid growth and construction. Studies show that the town’s built-up area increased, almost doubled, in the past 20-odd years while its vegetation and forest cover declined considerably. The hill town had heat waves this summer and landslides earlier. The ‘development’ is to attract tourists, both for leisure and pilgrimage, but offers little to locals who, along with environmentalists and groups, are fighting to save the picturesque green they can, she explains.
Who are cities for?
Among the biggest disappointments for us, working at the intersection of urbanisation-architecture-people-justice, are two that must be mentioned.
First is the unravelling and failure of the UN annual climate summit Conference of Parties or COP29 at Baku, Azerbaijan, this November. We said “COP is broken”. Why so? Read our take here. The commitment, sincerity of purpose, vision, and action to leat put money on the table to mitigate the impact of climate change in the developing nations were entirely missing. The annual summit has turned into a farce.
Second, vast swathes of natural areas in India came under attack, environmental laws were either bypassed or diluted, all to suit big businesses and protect corporate profits. It is still not fully comprehended in governments, from the centre to states and local level, that the old system of assessing economy against ecology is a grossly outdated one. Disrupting and destructing nature for economic growth and gain will only exacerbate the climate crisis. “Research has found that the climate crisis could cost the country[2] from 6.4 percent to more than 10 percent of its national income by 2100, taking 50 million more people back into poverty,[3]” stated a report of the World Economic Forum, among the most ardent campaigners of free market economy.
Continuous temperature fluctuations and extreme weather conditions in various parts of the country have been the default for this year. Monsoon lingered longer than usual, the summer felt like it had been the most scorching and with winter the fluctuations in temperatures even across one day are something one cannot get accustomed to.
Similarly, the stripping down of the old in cities in the name of redevelopment – a questionable Mumbai model fast spreading its mantra across India’s cities – has created chaos everywhere, making cities look like a massive chunk of dug-up homogeneous masses of debris. And QoC is as dismayed as ever to see that, in the name of urban infrastructure, the emphasis has been on the handful of projects that serve a few but can be showcased to the world while the infrastructure for the masses – good road quality, walkable pavements, clean air and water, parks and open spaces in every neighbourhood, affordable transport – were given the short shrift.
We will end with this example: Mumbai’s famed BEST bus service has been under strain for many years, slowly bled from within, we believe; officials recently totalled up its losses to Rs 11,000 crore in ten years terming BEST a liability. More than three million people depend on it every day for their work or leisure or other transport needs, and it’s still the most affordable and connected transport mode in the city. The coastal road, opened early 2024, cost Rs 13,000 crore over six years for one stretch and carries about 22,000 people a day. Why the first is a liability and the second an asset reveals all we need to know about the priorities of those who plan and construct cities. QoC is forced to ask: Who are the cities for?
Illustrations: Nikeita Saraf
