Question Of Cities

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

Goa adopted the language of comprehensive planning but not the practice. Regional Plans and Comprehensive Development Pl...
09/10/2026

Goa adopted the language of comprehensive planning but not the practice. Regional Plans and Comprehensive Development Plans were to guide urbanisation but Outline Development Plans (ODPs), a temporary measure, are now holding sway.
The ODPs are repeatedly extended and revised because there were no statutory consequences for not preparing the comprehensive plan and the temporary plan was politically useful to developers and politicians.
In Sancoale, thanks to the ODP, a construction company obtained permissions for a gated township on its northern slopes; these statutory no-development slopes will have 1,000 apartments, 70 villas, and private swimming pools.
In Poder-Dando, Panjim, land was re-zoned to commercial, facilitated by easy revisions in the ODP, and an eight-storey tower by a politically-connected developer sits amidst the fishing village.
The challenge is to institute a planning process capable of combining ecological knowledge, local participation, clear enumerated projects, and a spatial vision rather than have iterations of the ODP which allow developers and politicians to wield far too much influence in shaping our cities.

Read the full essay by Tahir Fernando De Noronha through the link in bio.

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The planned layout modes of urban expansion have (re)produced new forms of spatial inequality, ecological stress, infras...
07/10/2026

The planned layout modes of urban expansion have (re)produced new forms of spatial inequality, ecological stress, infrastructural fragmentation, and socio-economic uncertainty.

As Ramagondanahalli shows, peri-urban land is not merely a productive asset but an inheritance of memory, labour, and identity, its richness rooted in ecological sufficiency, abundance, and social cohesion.

Water and trees were central axes of the lived environment and people’s points of reference. Urbanisation has meant disappearing ponds, lakes transformed into fenced and regulated urban water bodies with walking tracks, and a shift from wells to borewells.

Soil that held moisture now reflects heat, cooler under-tree afternoons replaced by radiating tar roads, the smell of wet earth replaced by dust and cement – all this compounded by prolonged uncertainty in land acquisition.

Ramagondanahalli raises critical questions: In what ways can urban planning acknowledge rural landscapes as not subordinate to the urban and go beyond monetary compensation? How might built environments be designed to sustain, rather than sever, relationships between people, land, and water?

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[Built environment, ramagondanahalli, bengaluru, urbanisation, urban planning, periphery]

06/10/2026

On 2nd October 2026, women across Indian cities walked their streets at night in solidarity with survivors of sexual assault. The WhyLoiter called upon women to lead walks in their cities as a sign of occupying the streets and reclaiming their space. The walk in Thane began at 9 pm with a group of women and q***r persons of diverse age groups.

The 1.5 kilometer walk was marked by women holding placards, singing songs and chanting slogans while the people looked on. Led by Riri the group spoke of coming out on the streets in large numbers as a way of making the streets safer and taking back what is rightly theirs.

[women, gender, safety, walks, solidarity, gender based violence, safe cities]

The cold desert faces a dilemma – whether to build coherent with climate and geography or conform to a standardised vert...
05/10/2026

The cold desert faces a dilemma – whether to build coherent with climate and geography or conform to a standardised vertical development model imported from the plains.
Leh developed a precisely calibrated, uniquely vernacular architecture with walls made of rammed earth, houses oriented to maximise the winter sun, flat mud roofs, dry composting toilets, and ground floors shared with livestock.
The tourism boom since 2009 meant hundreds of hotels and a thousand home-stays, each a concrete block seen as a unit of investment, a bankable asset, a commodity indifferent to climate and culture.
Thousands of crores come from the Centre every year but allocations are time-bound. The fund cycle selects its own architecture with Reinforced Cement Concrete whose impact is thermal failure, worsening water math.
Leh’s climate action plan, drafted within national frameworks, never once mentions rammed earth, vernacular construction, local materials, local mason and engineering which already have the correction it recommends.

Read the full essay by Sabiha Baig and Adina Ara through the link in bio.

www.questionofcities.org

[Built environment, urban planning, leh architecture, vernacular architecture, urban design]

As cities expand, their peripheries and peri-urban areas are pursued as the next destination of urban development. The u...
03/10/2026

As cities expand, their peripheries and peri-urban areas are pursued as the next destination of urban development. The urbanisation process redefines the very nature and landscape of these places, leaving far-reaching unmapped impacts on people, their land and water, the ecology, social relationships and cultural contexts. More often than not, this city-making is limited to land acquisition, spatial planning, and construction in which the original inhabitants are pushed to the margins and sustainable ecosystems overlooked. But the peripheries of cities are not merely lands waiting to be urbanised nor is the prevailing model the best way. This edition of Question of Cities, seventh in our series on the Built Environment, examines how the top-down urbanisation of peripheries reshapes them and changes lived realities. Read the essays from Bengaluru, Goa, Delhi, and interviews from the planned Third Mumbai area.

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[cities, urbanisation, urban villages, transformation, peripheries, Delhi, Goa, Mumbai, Bengaluru]

Local building materials such as mud, brick, bamboo, local tiles, clay, stone are losing out to steel, concrete, glass a...
02/10/2026

Local building materials such as mud, brick, bamboo, local tiles, clay, stone are losing out to steel, concrete, glass and other materials. Romanticising the old does not help; thoughtful application to the current context does. Question of Cities speaks to a few architects about this. Mumbai-based architect Areen Attari says that “the bridge between then and now is to accept a bit of technology while trying to evolve vernacular technologies in a balanced, nuanced way. It’s not easy but it can be done.” Architect and designer Shilpa Ranade avers that “how we integrate elements and materials of climate-responsive architecture with traditional systems is important.” Read the full interview through the link in bio.

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[Built environment, vernacular architecture, local architecture, mumbai, urban planning, urban design]

Local building materials such as mud, brick, bamboo, local tiles, clay, stone are losing out to steel, concrete, glass a...
01/10/2026

Local building materials such as mud, brick, bamboo, local tiles, clay, stone are losing out to steel, concrete, glass and other materials. Romanticising the old does not help; thoughtful application to the current context does. Question of Cities speaks to a few architects about this.
Environmental architect Malak Singh Gill explains that “the biggest challenge of contemporary designs is that they are culturally out of place” and explains how traditional frameworks and materials were contextual and climate-responsive.
Prof Dr PSN Rao, Dean of the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, rues that we have forgotten our own designs while aping modern Western styles. “Houses with high ceilings and small window openings, courtyards, ventilators, thicker walls…local motifs and symbols can be brought back,” he says.

Read the full interview through the link in bio.

www.questionofcities.org

[Built environment, vernacular architecture, local architecture, urban planning, urban design]

What is celebrated today as Goa’s architecture hardly tells its pre-colonial and colonial history, or is rooted in the l...
30/09/2026

What is celebrated today as Goa’s architecture hardly tells its pre-colonial and colonial history, or is rooted in the local culture, folklore and dynasties which gave it a unique coastal vernacular blend.

Like the balcaos – large entrance staircases with curved walls and round pillars – the built-in seats, wide sloping roofs, Mangalore tiles, local wood, lime plaster, red oxide floors, and the art form of kaavi to adorn walls are fading.

Rarely seen now are the blue tiles or azulejos, which carry a distinct Portuguese legacy, and nacre or the mother-of-pearl used in wooden window panes that allowed gentle daylight in.
The recent boom in tourism and second-home culture has meant a rush of hotels and villas, which appropriate convenient or tokenistic elements of Goan architecture but do no justice to their functions.

Goa’s architecture and materials were tuned to handle extreme heat and rain, but today’s constructions and most architects show little care to fuse these elements and features, older materials and techniques, with contemporary demands.

Read the full essay by Tallulah D'Silva through the link in bio.

[Balcaos, Sopos, Goa architecture, vernacular architecture, local architecture, built environment]

Dehradun’s architectural character was a unique blend of native Garhwali traditions, British colonial interventions, Tib...
28/09/2026

Dehradun’s architectural character was a unique blend of native Garhwali traditions, British colonial interventions, Tibetan Buddhist influences, institutional footprints and post-independence developments.

Its canals once shaped its urban life, serving as infrastructure, ecological corridors, public spaces and climate regulators. Their disappearance beneath roads has severed the city’s historic relationship with water.

Rajpur Road shows how Dehradun’s urban character has changed, from a tree-lined, low-rise corridor with bungalows, gardens and orchards to a commercial and residential road dominated by traffic and construction.

As developers moved in, the built form became increasingly generic. Towers, gated complexes, and metro-style architecture have replaced much of the city’s relationship with its landscape, turning mountains, trees and canals into real-estate commodities.

The challenge now is to build without losing Dehradun’s sense of place which means context-sensitive design, protecting trees and canals, involving local communities, and changing rules to consider buildings as part of neighbourhoods rather than isolated structures.

Read the full story by Ravjyot Kaur through the link in bio.

www.questionofcities.org

[Built environment, dehradun, Rajpur road, canals, uttarakhand, local architecture, garhwali architecturem]

Older homes tend to be 6-8 degrees Celsius cooler than the outdoors which can be traced to their thick lime-plastered wa...
24/09/2026

Older homes tend to be 6-8 degrees Celsius cooler than the outdoors which can be traced to their thick lime-plastered walls, masonry roofs, louvred teak shutters, courtyards, ventilators, and shaded openings.

Climate-responsiveness was not a property of the building alone but a synergy between the structure and practices of inhabitation, or thermal memory.

The thermal comfort of the vernacular houses has given way to new buildings, constructed by the hundreds, that are thin-roofed, glass-fronted, concrete-framed, and entirely dependent on mechanical cooling.

Against the trend, the vernacular principles are being revived by a few who have studied them and taken knowledge forward. The Vipparti House in Yapral and Kondapalli House in Jubilee Hills are examples.

The principles and materials are there; the policy and regulatory environment need to change to enforce mandatory passive design criteria and climate-aware revision of development control regulations.

Read the full story by Krithika Sridharan and Dr. Aalok Khandekar through the link in bio.

www.questionofcities.org

[Built environment, hyderabad, local architecture, vernacular architecture, planning, urban design]

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