October 19, 2020

India Needs Dynamic Ecosystems for Making Smart Cities Work

The article looks at the current trend of deep apathy towards sound reasoning as well as principled approach to making public policy processes work. It highlights the need to give City-Level Advisory Forums more space to make interventions in smart […]
December 23, 2019

The Planned Chaos of Erode City

B Chandrasekaran Unsound Cities Out of 100 big cities in India, 10 cities are in the State of Tamil Nadu (Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore, Salem, Tiruchirappalli, Tirupur, Erode, Thirunalveli, Vellore and Thoothukkudi) in terms of population size with four lakhs and […]
September 26, 2019

“Need to make Smart City Mission Citizen-centric” Dr. M. Ramachandran

Keynote address delivered by former secretary to the Ministry of Urban Development Dr M Ramachandran at the ‘Smart City Workshop: Sustainable Urban Development’ on September 20, 2019. The workshop was a joint initiative of Heidelberg University, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), […]
July 17, 2017

The Right to Walk

With the exponential growth in the number of personal vehicles in Kerala in the last two decades, the pedestrian sidewalks started disappearing from our cities at an alarming rate. Most of the discussions on urban mobility have focussed on motorised […]
September 30, 2015

‘Thattukadas’ need space in Kochi, Deccan Chronicle, September 30, 2015

‘Thattukadas’ need space in Kochi Even as the city corporation is in the process of preparing the Smart City project proposal, a section of civic experts has stressed  the need for a proper policy  to regularise street food vendors, an […]
September 18, 2015

Urban local bodies need more teeth, Times of India, September 14th, 2015

Urban local bodies need more teeth Times of India, 14th September 2015 KOCHI: The Centre had asked state governments to strengthen urban schemes before they launched smart cities, Amrut and housing for all by 2022 projects. Union urban development minister […]