Question Of Cities

Question Of Cities We ask the difficult questions about cities and seek answers.

Read all our interviews through the link in bio or head to our website at www.questionofcities.org[World environment day...
05/06/2026

Read all our interviews through the link in bio or head to our website at www.questionofcities.org

[World environment day, environment, nature, climate, great nicobar, musi riverfront development, ecology, ngt, environmentalism, Ramchandra guha]

04/06/2026

In Mumbai's Slum Rehabilitation Authority buildings, building design intersects with heat and makes it unbearable. In Mumbai’s Shiv Shahi Punarvasan SRA complex in Goregaon East, the feels-like temperature, or the Heat Index, approximately 10 degrees higher than outside as the built form – tiny windows, lack of cross ventilation, no open spaces, materials used – simply ignores high temperatures and humidity. The SRA persists with such flawed designs despite better alternatives like Sangharsh Nagar being available, primarily to suit real estate developers.

Read the full story by from the link in bio.

www.questionofcities.org

[Mumbai, Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), heat, heat index, building environment, design, vertical slums, heat wave]

Rising night temperatures are playing havoc with people’s lives in cities. In Delhi’s Seemapuri, a colony of waste picke...
01/06/2026

Rising night temperatures are playing havoc with people’s lives in cities. In Delhi’s Seemapuri, a colony of waste pickers, unusually warm nights compound the day’s heat stress. Mumbai and Chennai have unusually warm nights too.
The burden of rising night heat, like other extreme climatic events, is falling on the marginalised. Informal workers in low-income settlements remain heat-stressed in cramped homes that remain hot through the night. Posh areas such as Delhi’s Safdarjung Development Area and Hauz Khas were 5-6 degrees Celsius cooler at night.

Unusually hot nights are India’s silent heat crisis; the response cannot only be individual, it has to be institutional about how cities are planned and built, whether natural areas are conserved, and how the marginalised live.

What’s been stolen from people is sleep and doctors are already seeing a rise in cases of patients with dehydration, headaches, cramps and rashes – even heat strokes – even as disrupted sleep worsen co-morbidities.

Experts advise recognising night heat in plans and policies including in Heat Action Plans, sending night heat alerts and providing night cooling infrastructure, and heat-sensitive urban planning.

Read the full story through the link in bio.

www.questionofcities.org

[Heatwave, heat, nightheat, heat action plan, heat mitigation, seemapuri, Sunder Nagri, SDA, Hauz Khas, weather, climate, IMD, heatstrokes]

Extreme heat is everywhere. You must have read that, on May 21, Banda in Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest temperature ...
01/06/2026

Extreme heat is everywhere. You must have read that, on May 21, Banda in Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest temperature anywhere in India – a staggering 48 degrees Celsius – and Sirpur in Telangana registered 46.5 degrees Celsius. Other cities and regions have hit 45 degrees Celsius. The feels-like temperature, of heat and humidity combined, has touched the higher 50s. The map of India is deep red and orange all over. It has been that since April; Akola in Maharashtra recorded a blistering 46.9 degrees Celsius on April 27.

The worst hit are the ones least equipped to deal with it – outdoor workers, gig and construction workers, millions living in cramped and poorly designed tenements, without access to cooling devices or forced to buy water.

The national emergency cannot be tackled by offering a glass of water to people like them; governments at every level must go beyond issuing meaningless advisories and step up to provide relief and a proper institutional response. This begins by recognising what’s below the radar: night heat which shows unprecedented levels, built form which traps heat in tiny homes, cooler regions like Kashmir turning hot, treating shade (and shade-giving trees) as heat mitigation – themes in this edition of Question of Cities.

Read all the stories through the link in bio or head to our website.

www.questionofcities.org

[Cities, heat, heatwave, heat action plans, night heat, akola, Kashmir, weather, climate, heat mitigation, tree cover]

30/05/2026

Extreme heat is everywhere. You must have read that, on May 21, Banda in Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest temperature anywhere in India – a staggering 48 degrees Celsius – and Sirpur in Telangana registered 46.5 degrees Celsius. Other cities and regions have hit 45 degrees Celsius. The feels-like temperature, of heat and humidity combined, has touched the higher 50s. The map of India is deep red and orange all over. It has been that since April; Akola in Maharashtra recorded a blistering 46.9 degrees Celsius on April 27. From the mountains to the coasts, heat is India's national emergency right now. But the brutal scorching heat does not touch everyone the same way.
 
The worst hit are the ones least equipped to deal with it – outdoor workers, gig and construction workers, millions living in cramped and poorly designed tenements, without access to cooling devices or forced to buy water. The nearly 380 recorded cases of heat stroke were people that cities mostly forget about. The national emergency cannot be tackled by offering a glass of water to people like them; governments at every level must go beyond issuing meaningless advisories and step up to provide relief and a proper institutional response. This begins by recognising what’s below the radar: night heat which shows unprecedented levels, built form which traps heat in tiny homes, cooler regions like Kashmir turning hot, treating shade (and shade-giving trees) as heat mitigation – themes in this edition of Question of Cities.

Read all the essays through the link in bio.

www.questionofcities.org

[Heatwave, heat, urban heat island, night heat, night time temperatures, ventilation, built environment, thermal heat, feels like temperature, humidity, summer, Indian summer, El nino]

Our calculations (based on news reports) show that in the last 5-6 years, close to 28 lakh trees have either been cut or...
28/05/2026

Our calculations (based on news reports) show that in the last 5-6 years, close to 28 lakh trees have either been cut or proposed to be cut. We find this, and many other facets of what the state of India's trees and forest cover is in our latest fact sheet.

Check out the full factsheet through the link in bio.

www.questionoficities.org

[Trees, Tree cover, climate, nature, forest cover, deforestation, hasdeo arand, dehradun, the great nicobar islands]

How many hundreds or thousands of trees have been chopped down across India, where has the tree-felling been, and what w...
27/05/2026

How many hundreds or thousands of trees have been chopped down across India, where has the tree-felling been, and what would the destruction look like on a map? Researching, collating and analysing the answers to these and related questions led to the creation of this Fact Sheet. An essential data-led dossier-style Fact Sheet, it covers a large ground about tree-cutting that has happened in cities and states across India in the past few years and points to a staggering number that will be cut in the near future.

Read the full factsheet through the link in bio.

www.questionofcities.org

[Heat, trees, forest cover, forests, india, climate, tree felling, factsheet, green cover, heat wave]

26/05/2026

Between the Dwarka forest and the road outside, there was a staggering difference of 17 to 21 degrees Celsius on the thermal camera, underscoring the need for trees.

But Dwarka was not legally tagged a forest and did not appear as such in Delhi’s Master Plan which, the Supreme Court decided in March, meant it was not a “deemed forest” paving the way for construction.

Already, 1,200 trees have been felled here adding to the nearly 15,000 trees chopped down in the past few years across Delhi; 77,000 were cut between 2008 and 2018 in the city. The Ridge is seeing similar battles.

The tree felling on the grounds that a forest is not legally defined matters as heat rises. Studies show Delhi lost at least 29.6 acres of tree cover since 2001, intensifying heatwaves.

The SC order also rested on the invasive species’ argument but, as researcher explains, when these are categorised as ecologically undesirable, governments may bypass accountability mechanisms for large-scale tree removal.

Read the full story through the link in bio.

www.questionofcities.org

[Dwarka forest, forest, india, delhi ridge, trees, heatwave, delhi ncr, tree felling, bijwasan railway terminal]

The gendered impact of heat is beginning to be acknowledged but the need is for a feminist approach to address the issue...
25/05/2026

The gendered impact of heat is beginning to be acknowledged but the need is for a feminist approach to address the issues of livelihood and health that arise from heat waves. This means centering well-being and care at the heart of heat mitigation rather than only infrastructure or other measures. Well-being is beyond these. It involves awareness, resources and collective care, and practices of care. It means access to cooling for all women, it calls upon state and non-state organisations to use the gender lens in heat policies.

Read the full essay by and through the link in bio.

All illustrations are by

[Heat, heatwave, heat stress, heat deaths, heat action policy, women, gender, gender and heat, feminist, climate]

The southernmost island in the Nicobar Islands archipelago is the Great Nicobar. Of its 910 square kilometres, a stagger...
24/05/2026

The southernmost island in the Nicobar Islands archipelago is the Great Nicobar. Of its 910 square kilometres, a staggering 130 square kilometres is slated for diversion and will be adversely impacted by the Rs 92,000 crore mega project. Its rich biodiversity, according to UNESCO, includes around 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms and bryophytes, many of them rare and endemic species. Recently, the National Green Tribunal held that it is not CRZ-IA (most ecologically sensitive coastal area) paving the way for the construction of a transshipment terminal, an airport, and other infrastructure.

“That forest is an asset at various tangible and intangible levels. But we are signing off a forest much richer, more diverse, a much older and larger forest than the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai,” says Pankaj Sekhsaria, researcher and editor of The Great Nicobar Betrayal and Island on Edge – The Great Nicobar Crisis. Working in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for over 30 years, Sekhsaria is among the few to have focused on the project. Author and editor of six books on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, he hopes that the unprecedented ecological loss can still be averted; there’s nothing yet “to be reclaimed” but it should not be wiped out. Sekhsaria speaks to Question of Cities about various aspects of the controversial Great Nicobar Project. ()

Read the full interview through the link in bio.

www.questionofcities.org

[shompen, nicobarese, great nicobar island, nicobar, trees of india, india, tree felling, ecology, climate, environment, pankaj sekhsaria, the great nicobar betrayal]

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