Author: cprindia

FULL VIDEO OF THE WORKSHOP
POLITICS URBAN GOVERNANCE

Watch the full video (above) of the CPR- Centre for Science and Humanities (CSH) Workshop on ‘How Women Mobilise Women into Politics: Theory and Natural Experimental Evidence from Urban India’, featuring Tanushree Goyal.

How does women’s political entry affect citizen’s political involvement? Building on qualitative interviews and extending elite mobilisation theories to account for who conducts grass-roots mobilisation, Goyal argued that female politicians increase women’s numbers in party activist roles, and prospects of cheaply mobilising women provide a strategic incentive to do so. As a result, more women receive mobilising effort, such as door-to-door party contact, where women contest. Women’s entry in activist roles has downstream effects on the quality of mobilisation. When women enter into activist roles, where they were previously absent, they induce competition for these roles and in doing so raise the quality of activist pool. This affects the political involvement, that is, political knowledge and participation, of all citizens. Goyal provided evidence for this argument using original survey data from a natural experiment in Delhi’s Municipal Council, where randomly chosen electoral seats are reserved for women. By outlining how representation affects the calculus of mobilisation, this paper connects the literature on women’s political entry with mobilisation and political involvement.

This paper is part of an ongoing dissertation book project, provisionally titled, ‘The politics of representation: How female politicians make politics inclusive in India’, that examines the consequences of women’s entry through quotas in Delhi’s civic body. Drawing on a natural experiment, extensive fieldwork, interviews, and original survey, combined with insights from a new electoral polling-station level panel dataset, this book proposes to offer new theoretical insights and an empirical account of women’s agency in shaping urban politics and governance in India.

Tanushree Goyal is a third year PhD candidate at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, UK. She specialises in the political economy of development and comparative politics with a geographic focus on South Asia.

The presentation made by the speaker at the workshop can be accessed here. Find all the available videos of previous workshops, here.

FULL VIDEO OF THE WORKSHOP
POLITICS URBAN GOVERNANCE

Watch the full video (above) of the CPR- Centre for Science and Humanities (CSH) Workshop on ‘How Women Mobilise Women into Politics: Theory and Natural Experimental Evidence from Urban India’, featuring Tanushree Goyal.

How does women’s political entry affect citizen’s political involvement? Building on qualitative interviews and extending elite mobilisation theories to account for who conducts grass-roots mobilisation, Goyal argued that female politicians increase women’s numbers in party activist roles, and prospects of cheaply mobilising women provide a strategic incentive to do so. As a result, more women receive mobilising effort, such as door-to-door party contact, where women contest. Women’s entry in activist roles has downstream effects on the quality of mobilisation. When women enter into activist roles, where they were previously absent, they induce competition for these roles and in doing so raise the quality of activist pool. This affects the political involvement, that is, political knowledge and participation, of all citizens. Goyal provided evidence for this argument using original survey data from a natural experiment in Delhi’s Municipal Council, where randomly chosen electoral seats are reserved for women. By outlining how representation affects the calculus of mobilisation, this paper connects the literature on women’s political entry with mobilisation and political involvement.

This paper is part of an ongoing dissertation book project, provisionally titled, ‘The politics of representation: How female politicians make politics inclusive in India’, that examines the consequences of women’s entry through quotas in Delhi’s civic body. Drawing on a natural experiment, extensive fieldwork, interviews, and original survey, combined with insights from a new electoral polling-station level panel dataset, this book proposes to offer new theoretical insights and an empirical account of women’s agency in shaping urban politics and governance in India.

Tanushree Goyal is a third year PhD candidate at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, UK. She specialises in the political economy of development and comparative politics with a geographic focus on South Asia.

The presentation made by the speaker at the workshop can be accessed here. Find all the available videos of previous workshops, here.

FULL VIDEO OF PANEL DISCUSSION
URBAN ECONOMY

Watch the full video of the CPR – CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) panel discussion (above), featuring Amita Bhide, Kaveri Gill, Pankaj Kapoor, Anne Odic, Sanjeev Sanyal and Asim Waqif, which seeks to understand and explore the implications for the urban research agenda.

Even as India urbanises, there is relatively limited discussion on what this future urban will be. Will we follow well-trodden paths or will our dispersed settlement pattern, the advent of Industry 4.0 and new tools of governance lead us to a different destination? A panel of thought leaders from industry, civil society, academia and government brought their distinctive perspectives to answer such questions.

Amita Bhide is the Dean of the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Kaveri Gill is Associate Professor, Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, Shiv Nadar University.

Pankaj Kapoor is founder and Managing Director of Liases Foras.

Anne Odic is the head of Local government and urban development division of the French Development Agency.

Sanjeev Sanyal is the Principal Economic Advisor, Ministry of Finance, Government of India.

Asim Waqif is an artist.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all available videos of previous workshops here.

FULL VIDEO OF WORKSHOP BY ANIRUDH KRISHNA
URBAN ECONOMY

Watch the full video of the CPR – CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) workshop (above), which seeks to investigate the condition of slums in the cities of Bengaluru, Jaipur and Patna.

Projections suggest that most of the global growth in population in the next few decades will be in urban centres in Asia and Africa. Most of these additional urban residents will be concentrated in slums. However, government documentation of slums is incomplete and unreliable. Slums and slum dwellers are systematically under-counted in India. It is necessary to employ creative methods to locate and sample these understudied populations. By using satellite image analysis and fieldwork to build a sample of 279 diverse slums in the 3 cities, and neighborhood surveys as well as individual interviews with 8,257 households, the presentation shows that living conditions vary along a wide-ranging continuum of wellbeing. Most variation in conditions is due to differences across rather than within slum neighborhoods.

Anirudh Krishna is the Edgar T Thompson Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. His research investigates how poor communities and individuals in developing countries cope with the structural and personal constraints that result in poverty and powerlessness.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all available videos of previous workshops here.

FULL VIDEO OF THE WORKSHOP
URBAN ECONOMY

Watch the full video of the CPR-Centre for Science and Humanities (CSH) workshop (above) on ‘A Post-Post Apartheid Urban Praxis’ featuring Jhono Bennett.

South African cities are experiencing an unprecedented shift in the nature of growth and control as the country nears its fourth democratic election. The loss of majority political control held by the post-1994 ruling party to its opposition in three out of the five major metros, combined with the growing disillusion of the ‘rainbow nation’ articulated by student leaders in recent student protests, suggest a very different process of growth for a rapidly urbanising country.

Specifically, the manner in which those that practice and frame teaching and research within city-making spaces engage with each other will become increasingly fraught due to the growing contestation of the various urban identities; making it harder in the near future to meaningfully work across polarised sectors of the city to address emerging urban challenges.

The presentation shared a reflection on the speaker’s journey through this context and on their emerging modes of praxis.

Jhono Bennett is an architectural urbanist based in Johannesburg. He is a co-director and co-founder of 1to1 – Agency of Engagement, a design based social enterprise that has been developed to support the positive re-development of South African cities.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all the available videos of previous workshops, here.

FULL VIDEO OF WORKSHOP
URBANISATION

Watch the full video of the CPR – CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) workshop (above) on ‘Iron Cage meets Makeshift Shed – The ‘Jugaad’ State in Mumbai’, featuring Dr Shahana Chattaraj.

How does the state govern cities where much of the economy is informal, on the margins of state regulatory institutions? Chattaraj draws on field research in Mumbai between 2009-2016 to present an empirically-based conceptualisation of how the state works in cities like Mumbai, where ‘informality is a mode of urbanisation.’ She uses the popular Indian notion of ‘jugaad,’ which refers to makeshift adaptations, workarounds and improvisation under constraints, to describe the state in Mumbai. ‘Jugaad’ practices and strategies of governance – adaptive, flexible, negotiated and contingent – are routinely applied by state actors at different levels in Mumbai, in spaces ‘illegible’ to formal state institutions. ‘Jugaad’ governance practices are not arbitrary or merely corrupt, but rational, if ad hoc and extra-legal, adaptations around formal rules. These processes embed state actors in local power structures and crosscutting networks that span state, market and political organisations. While they enable the state to apprehend and partially incorporate the city’s informal spaces, they dissipate centralised state power and cohesiveness. The ‘jugaad’ state concept encapsulates how the formal and informal workings of the state interact and shape urban governance in largely informal cities. It draws attention to tensions and disjunctions within the state and in state-society relations in informal contexts.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here.

Find all available videos of previous workshops here.

FULL VIDEO OF THE WORKSHOP BY SHAMINDRA NATH ROY AND KANHU CHARAN PRADHAN
URBAN ECONOMY

Watch the full video of the CPR – CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) workshop (above), which seeks to estimate the number of census towns (CTs) that will be identified in 2019 for the 2021 census.

The presentation asks whether the large increase in the number of CTs from 2001 to 2011 census was a one-off phenomenon or part of a longer process of rural-urban transformation. Since such prognosis requires a detailed review of the census methodology of determining CTs, it also clarifies certain challenges that arise during such identification.

Along with this methodological review, the talk presents the regional distribution of CTs on the basis of the last two censuses and the upcoming predictions; and offers insight on their spatial characteristics in relation to larger cities, attempting to shed light on their economic characteristics in the broader context of rural-urban transformation. A better appreciation of this transformation is necessary to contextualise how well the policy framework is placed to manage and govern these areas, not only in the present but also in the future.

Shamindra Nath Roy and Kanhu Charan Pradhan are Senior Researchers at the Centre for Policy Research. Their current research includes patterns of rural-urban transformation, migration, labour force participation, and issues related to spatial segregation, urban informality and governance.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all available videos of previous workshops here.

FULL VIDEO OF WORKSHOP
URBAN ECONOMY

Watch the full video of the CPR-CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) workshop (above), featuring Eric Verdeil on ‘Reforming Failed Infrastructure, Struggling for the State: Lessons from Lebanon’.

The talk considers infrastructure as a site for the examination of urban governance in Lebanon, in a context of failure of the state to provide basic public services such as electricity and waste. The argument is threefold. First, public infrastructure is a site of political struggle. Political actors seek to make infrastructure serve certain political and social interests, demonstrating their belief that these state institutions and instruments produce a range of effects worth competing for. Second, the talk challenges the view that neoliberalism and sectarianism are radically narrowing and marginalising the state and its institutions. Third, despite failing to deliver the expected service outcomes, the complex assemblage of more-or-less reformed infrastructural policy instruments produces strong social effects in terms of wealth distribution. These instruments accentuate Lebanese society’s gaps and inequalities. This outcome is largely unintended, as is often the case with public policy instruments. It is a product of the work of state institutions, however, and not proof of their absence. To make this argument, this talk explores urban services in Beirut through the main types of instruments that successive governments and their advisers—commonly from the World Bank and other international organisations—have adopted for their reform: the geographic boundaries of the zones where urban services are organised; the services’ financing instruments, such as subsidies and pricing; and public-private partnerships.

Eric Verdeil is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Sciences Po, Paris and researcher at the Centre for International Research (CERI).

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here.

Find all available videos of previous workshops here.

Watch the full video of the CPR – CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) workshop (above), which seeks to explore how Bhisti experience the state, its policies and politics of employment and challenge them, through the experiences of a Bhisti community leader.

This talk reflects on contested sanitary workers recruitment in the Jaipur Municipal Corporation, to explore a Muslim biraderi of Bhisti’s (water carriers) struggle to gain legal right to municipal job and the state’s attempt to ignore it. Despite reservation in municipal sanitary worker job, Bhisti recruitment has stopped since 1982. The community’s claims and attempts to assert and defend their rights have fallen on deaf ears, contested not only by different levels of bureaucracy and politicians but also by their Hindu counterparts, the Dalit sanitary workers.

The talk demonstrates how city politics and political infightings between councillors and party members variously impact the process of recruitment through the institutional and regulatory system, particularly contesting the applicants’ rights as citizens, and symbolically and materially marking their socio-economic deprivation.

Gayatri Jai Singh Rathore is an urban ethnographer. She holds a PhD in Political Science from SciencesPo/CERI. Her ethnographic work is concerned with examining the workings of waste disposal, materials recovery and recycling. Her current work focuses on circulation of ‘discarded’ objects and the specific notions of value attached to it.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all available videos of previous workshops here.

FULL VIDEO OF WORKSHOP
URBANISATION

Watch the full video of the CPR – CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) workshop (above) on ‘Urban Mobility and Dengue in Delhi and Bangkok: What Can We Learn from Online Data?’ featuring Alexandre Cebeillac.

Emerging vector-borne diseases such as dengue intensify public health crises in the Asian mega cities of Bangkok (Thailand) and Delhi (India). The links between mosquitoes and the urban environment are well documented, but our understanding of human movement, as a key element of virus spreading, has yet to be fully explored as a research subject.

Given the paucity in adequate or available institutional data, our research first focused on field surveys, and then on the collection, comparison and critique of data collected from major Internet platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft). Their potential varies from one geographical area to another, still they shed light on the organisation and structure of the studied cities. Moreover, they highlight intra-urban interactions and time frames.

However, such studies cannot be carried out without knowledge acquired from the field. Using the concept of activity space, we propose a method that uses Twitter data and field surveys to model the daily schedules of individuals, thus offering insights into mobility patterns. This is a first step in the development of an agent-based model of individual mobility.

Alexandre Cebeillac recently defended a PhD in Geography from the University of Rouen (France) and CSH in New Delhi. His work focuses on urban mobilities in Delhi and Bangkok.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all available videos of previous workshops here.