Rate your city, Reimagine your future
Our cities are in crisis. It has become almost routine to see streets flood within minutes of rain and to endure scorching summers with temperatures regularly crossing heatwave levels. Over time, we have normalized this crisis, accepting it as just another part of urban life. A sense of hopelessness seems to hang over many living in Indian cities.
By 2030, more than 40% of India’s population is expected to live in urban areas. This makes it critical for us to pause, reflect, and ask: Are our cities growing in the right direction? Is our current model of development truly economical, sustainable, inclusive, and environmentally sound?
While we continue to build flyovers, expressways, riverfronts, and other massive infrastructure projects meant to make life easier and more comfortable, we must also ask, are these developments really helping our cities thrive or making our life easier and more comfortable? Or are they turning our cities into spaces of deepening inequality, environmental damage, shrinking commons, choking air, and increasing vulnerability to extreme weather events and making our lives more difficult.
It’s time to pause, introspect, and take action!
Are our cities truly livable? Are they moving in the right direction of development? Have they made our lives easier, better, and more comfortable?
Are community and neighbourhood spaces like parks, community halls, or resting and mobility areas disappearing from our cities? Or is there still hope to reimagine urban life as livable, walkable, just, accessible, inclusive, and sustainable? Do we aspire of a city driven by rapid car-centric infrastructure and unchecked commercial development which has not only eroded public spaces in our cities but also led to unsustainable and unchecked urban development, or do we want a people’s city focused on walkability, inclusivity, justice, equity, affordability, safety, and cultural vibrancy?