Blogs

Look anywhere in a city and you will see more people on foot than in cars. Yet city roads and urban public spaces are rarely designed keeping pedestrians in mind, making it particularly challenging for children and the elderly. Integrating street infrastructure and raising user awareness is key to improving accessibility and enabling safer and smoother pedestrian and vehicular movement.

The Reimagining Fort Kochi project, developed under the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative is working to improve accessibility at the RoRo jetty node in the...

Disclaimer: All pictures are of participants in the Healthy Cities for Adolescents (HCA) project and have been taken with their consent.

This is the first in a series of blogs on Adolescents and Public Spaces. In this, we talk about how adolescents can partake in the public space development process and lead public space initiatives contributing to their well-being.

India’s potential for growth rests on the investments in and development of its youth, with...

India is projected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country in 2023. As the population practically doubles, cities are under extreme stress to ensure the provision of education, employment, and basic services.

A critical aspect of meeting these requirements is ensuring equitable access to existing opportunities and services that are often scattered across a city. An affordable,...

This is the first blog in our three-part series on the importance of implementing low-emission zones (LEZs) across Indian cities.

As the national capital grapples with the annual phenomenon of deteriorating air quality at the onset of winter, the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) has announced the imposition of Stage-II measures under the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) to address the issue. The implementation of Green Zones, with...

A version of this blog was originally published on July 13, 2022 on Scroll.in

Streets are the largest contiguous public spaces in cities across the world. However, they should not be considered as mere conduits for traffic but must be looked at as spaces where people meet, and businesses thrive.

In India, the lack of pedestrian infrastructure makes the basic act of walking fraught...

“Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day.”
- Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood in the 1900s (1932)

In our digitally connected world, navigating an unfamiliar city is no longer an unsurmountable challenge. However, incorporating wayfinding practices like making basic information easily available in the form of...

This is a second in a series of blogs on community-led tree-based intervention to build climate resilience. Please read the first blog here.

The name Kawaki, is formed from two Malayalam words, kawu (grove) and aki (make) which translates to "make a grove". It is also a community-led urban greening movement implemented in Kochi by the city municipal corporation with the technical support of WRI India under the Cities4Forests program....

This is the first in a series of blogs exploring pathways to accelerate the e-mobility transition of India’s freight sector.

At COP26, India pledged to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 45% by 2030. The sector of transportation logistics, one of the fastest growing in India and critical to economic growth, will need to transform considerably to achieve this goal. At present, the Indian freight...

This three-part blog series examines one of the many systems Mumbai relies on during the monsoons. The second photo essay, in the series, focuses on the urban settlements along the Mithi river. The "symptoms” observed call for a systemic approach in improving the health and flood resilience of the river. You can read the first blog in the series here.

On his 17 km walk along the Mithi, Abhijit Waghre observed the river’s water level, its flood protection...

This is a first in a series of blogs on community-led tree-based intervention to build climate resilience. Please read the second blog here.

The ever-increasing concrete surfaces in our cities absorb heat from solar irradiance, making the overall atmosphere unbearably hot and escalating energy demands by the residents. This phenomenon is better known as the ‘heat island effect’. Our cities also grapple with steadily rising levels of air...