Can the migrant be heard by our cities? Migration, Exclusionary Urbanisation and the Precarious State of Affairs
The State of Cities- #CityConversations with Dr Ashima Sood on Can the migrant be heard by our cities? Migration, Exclusionary Urbanisation and the Precarious State of Affairs
Greetings from Impact and Policy Research Institute (IMPRI), New Delhi!
On behalf of Center for Habitat, Urban and Regional Studies (CHURS), IMPRI, New Delhi and Indrastra Global invite you to
The State of Cities – #CityConversations
Details of the #WebPolicyTalk:
Date: December 22, 2020; Tuesday
Time: 17:00 IST (GMT+5:30)
Platform: Zoom and Facebook Live
Speaker:
Dr Ashima Sood, Associate Professor, Anant National University, Gujarat
Ashima Sood is Associate Professor at Anant National University, where she teaches urban policy, research methods and academic writing. She is International Corresponding Editor at Urban Studies and has been associated as editor and editorial advisory group member with the Economic and Political Weekly’s Review of Urban Affairs since its founding. She coordinated the Urban Transformations curriculum for EPG-Pathshala, an initiative of the Indian Ministry of Education to create postgraduate curricula across the disciplines. She also contributed the section on Indian Urbanization to the Oxford Bibliographies on Urban Studies.
Her research lies at the intersection of institutional economics and urban and development studies. It combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine privatized forms of urban governance and informal public spaces in India. A co-edited volume titled India’s Greenfield Urban Future: The Politics of Land, Planning and Infrastructure is forthcoming at Orient Blackswan. She is working on a monograph titled Capital Citizens, analysing models of private local government in Indian growth hubs.
Her work has received funding and/or fellowships from the Urban Studies Foundation, the India Foundation of the Arts, the Azim Premji University Foundation, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study and the Centre de Sciences Humaines. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in avenues such as Urban Studies; Cities; Territory, Politics, Governance; Information, Communication and Society; Journal of Institutional Economics; the Economic and Political Weekly; tthe Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Urban and Regional Research and the World Social Science Report 2013, among others. She earned her PhD in Economics from Cornell University.
Moderator:
Dr Soumyadip Chattopadhyay, Associate Professor, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan; Senior Fellow, IMPRI
Registration and Facebook Live Link for Can the migrant be heard by our cities? Migration, Exclusionary Urbanisation and the Precarious State of Affairs
About the Talk–
Can the migrant be heard by our cities? Migration, Exclusionary Urbanisation and the Precarious State of Affairs
Ashima Sood
The COVID lockdown of 2020 brought distressing images of migrant workers fleeing Indian cities to return to their rural origins. While commentators sought to explain the reverse migration in terms of the precarious urban living and working conditions of these migrants, or in terms of an atavistic attachment to rural life, few analysts focused on the role played by governance institutions. Drawing on recent research, this presentation makes the connection between the peri-urban and peri metropolitan location of new construction and economic activity and the often-unrepresentative nature of local government in these sites. Fragmented and specialized forms of government in settings like Greater Hyderabad or Noida make it difficult for migrant workers to assert their right to the city. The recent scenes of reverse migration thus represent the outcome of long-standing processes of exclusionary urbanisation. Not only have the urban poor been pushed out of the core of our megacities, the political economy of peri-urban settings in many cases may have rendered inoperative modes of vote-bank politics that made possible occupancy politics.
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IMPRI, a startup research think tank, is a platform for pro-active, independent, non-partisan and policy-based research. It contributes to debates and deliberations for action-based solutions to a host of strategic issues. IMPRI is committed to democracy, mobilization and community building.