The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) invite you to a workshop on:
Planned Cities, Unplanned Work: Rethinking Inclusion Through Informal Labour
Speaker:
Dr. Padmini Ram, Founding Director, Urban Ethnographers
Tuesday, 24th June 2025, 3:45 PM IST onwards.
The event will be held online via Zoom. Please register to attend.
About the talk
Indian cities depend on informal workers but rarely plan with them in mind. Migrant women in vocational trades, workers in informal manufacturing, and self-employed service providers often navigate cities that recognise their labour only as surplus, never central.
Drawing on field research across urban labour markets, from training centres and factory floors to slum settlements and skill portals, this talk questions how “inclusion” is currently defined in urban policy. It examines why informal workers remain invisible in planning processes despite their structural role in city-making.
What does it mean to centre informal work in the imagination of the city, not as a problem to fix, but as a starting point for how we design for belonging, mobility, and dignity?
About the speaker
Dr. Padmini Ram is the Founding Director of Urban Ethnographers, a leading academic research and consultancy firm based in Bangalore. Trained as an anthropologist, she is particularly interested in qualitative research methods.
Her diverse experience includes roles with grassroots NGOs in India and international organizations such as DANIDA, CARE-India, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York, and the American Red Cross (Greater New York Chapter). With a PhD from the University of Cambridge, she has taught students and professionals at universities in India and the UK. Serving as a senior faculty member at Christ University, Bengaluru, she spearheaded the CLARE project, a unique industry-academia collaboration with LabourNet, focusing on the informal economy. Her research is widely published in international SCOPUS-indexed journals, and she is the author of The Affordable Housing Market in India, published by Routledge.
Find all the available videos of our previous workshops, here.
