Khan Market in boulevard Delhi is said to be the most expensive real estate in India, maybe even in the world. But in this richest shopping destination, buyers do not want to pay for parking their vehicles. The shopkeepers’ association has taken the local city council to court, saying it has the right to free parking. In court, it ridiculed the connection between parking and car restraint—how can pricing of parking spaces bring down car usage in cities? The very idea was farfetched, said its lawyer to the judge. Standing in the court, I could see the judge was also bemused.

Hidden behind city branding exercises through large projects are acts of land capture and slum demolitions by a predatory local state and crony capitalism. In the policy arena, meanwhile, the urban, and particularly the metropolitan story has been one of deliberate confusion, and fragmentation of policy and implementation. The promise of rapid city transformation has not been met through the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, which does something for infrastructure and something for housing but all in an uncoordinated project-by-project manner.

Arguing that the initial years of the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board were dominated by the priorities of the then ruling party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, whose government created it in 1971, this paper points out that shelter policies in the state had a formal orientation away from eviction and resettlement and towards in situ tenement construction, alongside an informal tendency to protect and reward those groups of the urban poor that the party was trying to court for votes.

India’s “bypass” approach to urbanisation seeks to decongest its post-colonial metropolises by building new towns for a new economy of knowledge-based activities and businesses driven by global capital on their fringes. The globalised economy, hegemonised by immaterial labour, creates conditions for these new towns to culturally secede from their national or regional location and align themselves with the global cities.

Human actions rather than natural forces are the source of most contemporary changes in the state and flows of the biosphere. Understanding these actions and the social forces that drive them is crucial to understanding, modelling and predicting local, regional as well as global environmental change and also for managing and responding to such change. The present study investigates the patterns of urban land transformation in Srinagar City, which lies in fragile hill eco-system of Kashmir valley. The results points towards unplanned and haphazard urban expansion and transformation.

This paper questions the accuracy and validity of the criticisms made by Ananya Roy regarding the approach to community development of a Mumbai-based NGO, SPARC, and its partner grassroots federations in Mumbai. This includes the suggestion that the focus on sanitation rather than on land tenure is an appeal to middle-class values about cleanliness and that their support for relocating those who lived right next to the railway tracks made them agents of the state.

Well-planned urban green landscapes, including wildscapes and green spaces, have the potential to contribute to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Yet for cities in low-income countries, the value of these urban landscapes in climate change response strategies is often disregarded and remains largely unexploited and unaccounted for. This paper discusses the potential role of urban green landscapes as a “soft engineering” climate change response strategy, and calls for the pursuance of management practices that preserve and promote the use of these urban spaces.