Assessing Infrastructure Transformations for Sustainable and Healthy Cities
Speaker: Mansi Jain
About the talk
Cities and local governments are considered as seedbeds for sustainability transitions. One of the key mediators of such transitions are technical infrastructures, especially socio-technical systems in the provision of energy, water, waste, and mobility. Recently, Delhi has witnessed large-scale redevelopment of governmental housing colonies. Redevelopment policies create opportunities for experimenting and implementing novel decentralized infrastructural solutions that can potentially cause paradigm shifts in city-level infrastructural services. Such city-level transformations require strategic interventions that can trigger deeper changes in structures, practices and culture that potentially may or may not meet urban sustainability challenges.
Currently, we lack methods to systematically assess the progress of transformation i.e. whether the ensemble of the implemented transition activities is of pointing towards sustainable transformation. The presentation showcases research that uses assessment as a tool to explore the process of transformation while identifying specific set of process indicators, while being able to highlight supportive and restrictive conditions within the implementation process to establish pathways towards sustainable cities. Looking at cases in Delhi like East Kidwai Nagar, New Moti Bagh, Nauroji Nagar, and Sarojini Nagar, the workshop focuses on the redevelopment of urban areas as sub-systems to study such transitions, as they present opportunities for a paradigm shift (regime change) in the system as a whole.
About the speaker
Mansi Jain is an urban researcher based in Utrecht University, the Netherlands, where she is currently pursuing her postdoctoral study on Assessing Urban Transformations within the research hub on “Transforming Infrastructures for Sustainable Cities”. The hub explores pathways to urban sustainability in a global perspective and deliberately engages with various cities worldwide such as Los Angeles, Toronto, Sao Paulo, Utrecht, Berlin, Dar-Es-Salam, and New Delhi. Mansi has a PhD from the University of Twente, Netherlands. She also has rich consulting and policy advocacy experience for sustainable cities and buildings, energy efficiency and access, climate change and infrastructure, as well as smart cities in India.
Find all the available videos of our previous workshops, here
