Managing COVID-19 in India’s Cities: Reshaping people’s everyday lives in poorer urban neighbourhoods

The State of Cities – #CityConversations with Dr Glyn Williams on Managing COVID-19 in India’s Cities: Reshaping people’s everyday lives in poorer urban neighbourhoods

#IMPRI Center for Habitat, Urban and Regional Studies (CHURS), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi invites you to a #WebPolicyTalk series –

The State of Cities – #CityConversations

Managing COVID-19 in India’s Cities:
Reshaping people’s everyday lives in poorer urban neighbourhoods

Details of the #WebPolicyTalk:

Date: January 20, 2022
Time: 6:00 p.m. IST
Platform: Zoom and Facebook Live

Speaker:

Dr Glyn Williams
Reader,
Department of Urban Studies and Planning,
University of Sheffield

Dr Glyn Williams is a Reader at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in the University of Sheffield and Honorary Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He held previous lecturing posts at Keele University and King’s College, London.

His research interests lie in the field of international development, and more specifically in the interaction between development programmes, governance practices, and citizenship in the Global South. He is the co-editor of International Development and Planning Review, and editorial board member of Contemporary South Asia.

Discussants:

Prof M Vijayabaskar
Professor,
Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai

Prof Debolina Kundu
Professor,
National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), New Delhi

Sameer Unhale
Joint Commissioner,
Department of Municipal Administration,
Government of Maharashtra

Moderator:

Dr Soumyadip Chattopadhyay
Associate Professor, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan;
Visiting Senior Fellow, IMPRI, New Delhi

About the #WebPolicyTalk: Managing COVID-19 in India’s Cities: Reshaping people’s everyday lives in poorer urban neighbourhoods

The Covid-19 pandemic is transforming lives globally: containing the disease and managing its risks requires a radical individual and collective rethinking and reordering of space. This poses governance challenges nationally, but also locally to implement and sustain change, and these are particularly acute within the world’s poorer urban neighbourhoods.

Taking three Indian cities with contrasting experiences of the crisis, this paper examines how local management of the crisis is reshaping people’s lives and re-adjusting their relationships with the urban environment. Comparing three Indian cities with contrasting experiences of the pandemic, Ahmedabad (Gujarat), Chennai (Tamil Nadu) and Trivandrum (Kerala), it provides vital insights into Covid-19’s impacts on poorer communities. It asks how is this changing lives and livelihoods that are intricately networked within dense (and often poorly serviced) neighbourhoods, and what do these cities’ contrasting experiences tell us about the motivations and capacity of the municipal state in implementing and reinterpreting national policy?

This work is funded by the British Academy, and has been conducted in partnership with Karen Coelho (Madras Institute of Development Studies), Binitha Thampi (Indian Institute of Technology Madras), and Darshini Mahadevia (Ahmedabad University)

Facebook Live Event Video: https://www.facebook.com/impriindia/videos/1604915543188937

YouTube: https://youtu.be/7Y0zhYgADrw

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