Urban Transformations & Regional Resilience | Virtual Lecture Series
Urban Transformation: A Yearning, a Utopia?
Janki Andharia
Feb. 19, 2021 | 8:30 - 10:00 AM (EST) | Synchronous
Feb. 24, 2021 | 12:00 - 1:30 PM (EST) | Asynchronous
Registration Link | Flyer
While global capital and technology are heralded as the medium through which urban growth and prosperity are fuelled, it is important to recognize the importance of place as a site of oppression. The presentation will highlight intersectionalities and the persistence of inequalities based race, ethnicity, class, caste, gender and how power differentials operate. Can urban transformation be seen as a mere yearning, an aspiration and a utopia or can it become a reality? A technology driven, capital intensive imagination of what constitutes the urban, has gripped many countries, with investments in large infrastructure and real estate projects, highways, metro rail, GIS enabled bus systems, on line transport sharing platforms and application of technology in everyday lives - from production to consumption processes. The push towards smart cities has led to interrogation of what constitutes “smartness” when we observe that pollutions levels in a large number of cities has reached toxic proportions, waste management has gone awry, access to clean water and housing remains a distant dream for millions and a rising number of cities experience flooding as are ill prepared for climate change impacts. The discussion held in the shadow of the current pandemic, will raise some critical policy questions based on the analyses of a few case examples and also reflect on possible solutions to address issues of resilience and sustainability from the perspective of the marginalised, who are invisibilized in the contemporary imagination of cities.
Professor Janki Andharia is Dean of Jamsetji Tata School of Disaster Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She has over 37 years of experience in the field of social development and community organization. Her areas of work focus on gender issues, environmental concerns, social planning and participatory development, addressing diverse forms of marginalization and vulnerability. She has had a long association with grassroots organizations. Her current research work is on policy accountability to at-risk population. She has been teaching at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) for over three decades and was the Head, Department of Urban and Rural Community Development before moving on to establish the Jamsetji Tata Centre for Disaster Management, in 2006. Professor Andharia was awarded the Association of Commonwealth Universities Scholarship in the year 1990 to pursue her Ph.D. which she completed from School of Environment Sciences, University of East Anglia, U.K. in the area of Gender, Development and Environment.
She was accorded the “Best Professor in Disaster Management Award”, by National Education Leadership Awards, of Lokmat in 2014. This was in recognition of the critical leadership she provided to the establishment of a multidisciplinary Centre for Disaster Management which introduced a new Masters programme in the subject in 2007 focusing on concerns of social and environmental justice. She is also the recipient of an award for outstanding contribution to education at the World Education Congress Global Awards for Excellence in Education, Leadership and Teaching on 23rd July, 2015 at Mumbai. Professor Andharia has successfully led several international missions to forge collaborations between TISS and other Universities and offered special lectures. Prominent among these is a partnership with the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Geneva, which now offers an on-line Certificate course in disaster management with participants from over 90 countries enrolling for this course. She was the editor of a working paper series, has published extensively and is also involved in a number of international research collaborations. Her recent book on “Disaster Studies: Exploring Intersectionalities in Disaster Discourse” published in 2020 by Springer, is gaining wide readership.