Thu Jan 01 10:09:12 UTC 2026: Summary:
An article discussing the interplay between nature and urban planning in Delhi, India, reviews several books that explore Delhi’s environmental history and its relationship with governance. It highlights how Delhi’s landscape reflects historical power structures, ideas of order, and the ongoing negotiations between the state and its environment. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding Delhi’s complex history and resisting nostalgia while restoring ecological balance and addressing climatic injustice. It also mentions Neha Sinha’s upcoming book “Wild Capital: Discovering Nature in Delhi” and emphasizes the need to decolonize our thinking towards restoration.
News Article:
Delhi’s Urban Landscape: A Reflection of Power and Environmental Negotiation
Delhi, January 1, 2026 – A new exploration of Delhi’s environmental history examines the complex relationship between the city’s natural landscapes and its political and social structures.
Recent books, including Jyoti Pande Lavakare’s Breathing Here is Injurious to Your Health and Siddharth Singh’s The Great Smog of India, have highlighted Delhi’s pollution issues as outcomes of governance and societal disparities. Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli’s Cities and Canopies examines how trees in Delhi preserve civic memory, while Krupa Ge’s Rivers Remember focuses on the 2015 Chennai floods to showcase how encroachment can cause disasters.
Neha Sinha’s upcoming book, Wild Capital: Discovering Nature in Delhi, will offer new insights. Delhi, unlike other metropolises, has a close entanglement between wilderness and public image.
The Aravalli Ridge, Yamuna floodplain, and planned gardens represent overlapping logics of governance. Control is always an illusion, according to the article.
The article delves into how the state has historically shaped Delhi’s environment to project authority, impose order, and promote a specific vision of modernity. The author draws attention to how Delhi’s plant and animal life reflects the city’s political economy and climatic injustice. Elite areas are marked by greenery and better public services.
The analysis urges for resistance to nostalgia and romanticism of the past. Delhi has always been built on many layers. The report emphasizes the importance of recovering better baselines by decolonizing ecological restoration.
First Piper 