Tanya Chandra

Across the different vernaculars of the world's urban majorities, there is renewed bewilderment as to what is going on in the cities in which they reside and frequently self-build. Prices are unaffordable and they are either pushed out or strongly lured away from central locations. Work is increasingly temporary, if available at all, and there is often just too much labour involved to keep lives viably in place. Not only do they look for affordability and new opportunities at increasingly distant suburbs and hinterlands, but for orientations, for ways of reading where things are heading, increasingly hedging their bets across multiple locations and affiliations. Coming together to write this piece from our own multiple orientations, we are eight researchers who, over the past year, joined to consider how variegated trajectories of expansion unsettle the current logics of city-making. We have used the notion of extensions as a way of thinking about operating in the middle of thin...

What is the solution, when solution is the problem? Delhi is going through massive urban upgradation in terms of infrastructure and development for its attainment of ‘world-city’ title. Promoting high technological solutions for public transport, encouraging suburban gated communities served by cars and resettlement of urban poor at the periphery of the city, which form 55 percent of the population and depends extensively on non-motorized modes of transport.
This urban re-configuration for ‘progress’ creates a socio-economic segregation and creates a bi-polar city. A city which gives priority to motorize based development and causes a peripheral push to those who cannot afford this type of urban development.
Mobility is a tool for urban development and land-use pattern, therefore, it is also primary symptom of urban decay. Therefore, the paper studies the causes and symptoms of Delhi’s socio-spatial deterioration due to segregation between different economic groups which has been examined through their options of mobility.

Patterns and networks indicate the trends of the city much like today's global networks of world cities and economies. These patterns come from the biggest asset of the city - its people. People make these patterns through their actives which comes from their design of work, live and play. When inequality or disparity rises in a city, these puzzles that completely fit together in this triangle becomes a scrambled Rubik’s cube of a polarized city. This urban phenomenon of polarization and inequality can be solved through an approach of urban equity, which translates into planning and looks into proportionate distribution of urban resources. Hence, the main object of this paper is how, as an urbanist, one can strive for urban equity.