Author: cprindia

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.

CPR ranked highest in India in the 2014 ICCG climate think tank rankings
RANKED 14TH GLOBALLY
CLIMATE RESEARCH

We are pleased to let you know that the Centre for Policy Research has been ranked highest in India, highest among developing country think tanks, and 14th globally by the International Centre for Climate Governance (ICCG) in its standardized global climate think tank ranking for 2014.

The ICCG produces a ‘standardized’ ranking of climate think tanks every year, adjusted for the number of researchers. They also produce an ‘absolute’ ranking, which ranks think tanks independent of size. In both rankings, ICCG uses 15 indicators organized around three categories: Activities, Publications and Dissemination. For the full rankings click ICCG ranking.

CPR’s ranking of 14th globally, and highest among developing country think tanks in the standardized ranking, is based on the output of the 11 researchers at CPR working only on environment and climate related areas among our total staff of about 100. In the absolute ranking, which is not adjusted for size of the environment/climate-related team, we are the second highest rated Indian think tank and in the top 100 (74th) globally.

We are pleased to receive this high ranking, which recognizes the quality of the work done by our relatively small team. At the same time, we recognize any such ranking effort necessarily has to simplify a complex research and policy landscape to arrive at quantitative scores. This involves methodological issues, such as how to draw boundaries around environment/climate work, and substantive issues, such as providing equal emphasis to both national and international work, and mitigation and adaptation. The challenges of developing a ranking system that accounts for all these complexities should be kept in mind when reading ranking results.

We wish to acknowledge and thank our funders, partners at think tanks and academic institutions, and interlocutors in government, private sector and civil society who have enriched our work.

Navroz K Dubash
Coordinator, CPR Climate Initiative

CPR RANKED 11TH GLOBALLY, AND HIGHEST AMONG DEVELOPING COUNTRIES IN 2015
CLIMATE RESEARCH

We are pleased to let you know that the Centre for Policy Research has been ranked as the leading climate think tank in India, highest among developing country think tanks, and 11th globally by the International Centre for Climate Governance (ICCG) in its standardised global climate think tank ranking for 2015.

The ICCG produces a ‘standardised’ ranking of climate think tanks every year, adjusted for the number of researchers. They also produce an ‘absolute’ ranking, which ranks think tanks independent of size. In both rankings, ICCG uses 15 indicators organised around three categories: Activities, Publications and Dissemination. For details on the rankings for 2015 and methodology used, click here.

CPR’s ranking of 11th globally, and highest among developing country think tanks in the standardised ranking, is based on the output of the 11 researchers at CPR working only on environment and climate related areas among a total staff of about 100. In the absolute ranking, which is not adjusted for size of the environment/climate-related team, CPR is the second highest rated Indian think tank and in the top 100 (34th) globally.

We are pleased to receive this high ranking, which recognises the quality of the work done by our relatively small team. We wish to acknowledge and thank our funders, partners at think tanks and academic institutions, and interlocutors in government, private sector and civil society who have enriched our work.

Navroz K. Dubash
Senior Fellow and Coordinator, Climate Initiative