URBAN PLANNING

As I drive past the roads of Bengaluru, all I see is huge hoardings of various developers and builders with beautiful pictures of residential and commercial complexes, wooing buyers of all types! Gone are the days when cinema ads dorned our roadsides. What hurts me most is the fancy names that these builders give to their projects, which come up on the grave of thousands of fruit-yielding trees or fertile fields-Green Orchards, Gardenia, Trees, Shrubs, Riverside, Lakeview and what not! Housing is important and it is but natural for every human being to look for a shelter. But this latest…

 As the flood waters started to recede, one of the main issues that the city of Chennai grappled with in the aftermath of the recent floods was the clearing of tonnes of garbage strewn all across the city. Chennai Corporation employees with the help of volunteers cleared 1.32 lakh tonnes of garbage from the streets of Chennai. This was a grimy reminder of the impending crisis of solid waste management (SWM) faced by the residents of Chennai. According to The Waste-to-Energy Research and Technology Council (WTERT), the city generates 6,404 tonnes of garbage every day with an average per capita of…

Kaikondrahalli and Kasavanahalli lakes have been in the news for disturbing reasons lately - the rampant real estate developments in the valley zone that may lead to drying up of the downstream lakes and massive flooding in the next rainy season. There is an ongoing petition to raise awareness on this issue. However, it is business as usual at the government offices. Authorities seem to have been quietly sanctioning one project after another. While there is Shriram Chirping Woods project that has been sanctioned in the valley zone, there is also Bren Imperia that has partly been built on the valley…

The idea of the 'Everyday city' is based on the concept of Everyday Urbanism that was proposed in 1999 by Margaret Crawford & others, wherein the city is seen above all as a social product and which focuses on informal urban spaces. They point out that it is not what the planning initiates for the city but what the people seem to generate as an outcome of their everyday needs. How relevant is this in the context of the Indian city? And, how does it work for Bangalore & other cities? What is the Everyday city here? Is it ...…

In a discussion on ‘The City in the World’ as part of the IIHS City Scripts festival in Bangalore, K.T.Ravindran, Professor & Head of the Urban design department for the last 20 years at the School of Planning & Architecture in Delhi talked of his three favourite cities – New York, Istanbul & Benares. He suggested that in places such as these, the intensity of the life in the city could change its people, it could make them special, different & quirky. On the one hand, these were cities that could draw people from outside, absorb them into their fold, give…

Civic group members who have pushed hard for RERA Bill, are a happy lot. With the passing of Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Bill, 2015 which intends to protect the interests of home buyers, in the Rajya Sabha on 10th March 2016, the bill crossed a major hurdle. All day, activists were trying to lobby for the Bill through Twitter with the handle @FightForRERAInd. Today (March 15th) the Bill was passed in Lok Sabha too. The citizen activism to push the RERA Bill started in Delhi, by Lt Gen Bahri (Retd). The Delhi group reached out to other major cities…

How do you begin to like Bangalore when you have moved here from elsewhere? I remember when we first came here 8 years ago, I yearned for anything that would remind me of Bombay, where I grew up - or of Chennai which was where we had lived for the 3 years before. But, nothing about Bangalore seemed like either Bombay or Chennai. I shared my woes with other friends from Bombay who had also moved here around then. One friend was living in Fraser town and another friend had moved into a quiet neighbourhood in Domlur. They missed Bombay…

Here is a news story about how a visitor's car wheel was clamped and she was fined Rs 500.   It's all very well for the Residents' Association to say that the rules warn that the car wheels may be clamped, but is such clamping, and levying a fine of Rs 500, legal?  Surely residents' associations cannot take the law into their own hands in this way?  

Residents Welfare Associations across Indira Nagar have been working towards getting rid of the commercial enterprises in the residential streets of their neighbourhood. Members of the RWAs in Indira Nagar 1st Stage and 2nd Stage had filed RTIs last year to figure out if the commercial establishments in their neighbourhood had a valid trade licence, as the Karnataka High Court order states that:  “The BBMP shall not permit or grant any change of land usage in the following areas: Malleswaram, Richmond Town, Vasanthnagar, Jayanagar, Vijayanagar, Vishweshwarapuram, Rajajinagar and RT Nagar. In addition thereto, residential areas mentioned and shown in CDP…

The story I’m about to tell here is about the discoveries at the Everyday City workshop at the School of Architecture & Planning, CEPT University. This workshop was held as part of CEPT’s Summer Winter School from 1st to 17th Dec 2015. The question we asked was: How can we bring about small changes in our perception and that of others through documenting how people negotiate streets on an everyday basis? The two key modes of inquiry were Photography and Map-making. The course participants worked in groups of three, approaching topics that they found riveting, ranging from cows in urban…