100 – Navigating the City: Civic Life and Everyday Worlds in the Urban in South Asia

October 3, 2025

8:30 am

H10

Amidst precipitating socio-political contestations, acute inequalities, glaring gaps in availability of key civic services, increased strain on resources, rising hostilities and marked intolerance of the ‘other’, it becomes critical to pay heed to the myriad negotiations that shape everyday modes of inhabitation and existence for diverse classes and communities within expanding cities. Our sprawling urban centres serve as ready sites, where many of these negotiations play out. At one level, cities offer prospects of economic advancement, upward mobility and improved standards of living. At another, they also engender exclusion and strife. When particular resident groups feel threatened, besieged and cornered within a city, it is not just their lives that are reconfigured, their inhabited urbanscapes are also reoriented. This panel seeks proposals that uncover different experiences of disenfranchisement, exclusion and marginalisation within the urban—be it on the basis of class, caste, gender, ethnicity, religion, community, differential access to infrastructure and technology, or any other reason. Possible methodological approaches may vary to include—primary field survey, data collection, ethnographic work, personal interviews, community engagement, archival exploration, analysis of urban planning and land use patterns, and more. The list is only indicative and not restrictive by any means. We are interested in contributions which deliberate on changing urban landscapes, and the ways in which different resident groups make sense of, negotiate with and respond to these changes. The panel welcomes both contemporary and historical experiences. It invites paper proposals that unpack different modes of inhabiting, navigating, engaging with and laying claims to the urban in South Asia.

Convenors

Dr. Anshu Saluja

Presentations

Gendering Urban renewal: A loft resident and a tenant’s struggle for recognition for rehabilitation in Dharavi.

patil varun - Max Weber Kolleg, University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany

Urban Renewal and Caste Dynamics: Political Assertion and Subversion of Dalit Localities in Pondicherry

Muthu Lalitha - King's College London, Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy, London, United Kingdom

World-Class Aspirations and Everyday Realities:Understanding Survival, Politics and Resistance of Street Vendors in Kolkata, West Bengal

DHAR MADHUBARNA - INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

“Radical Interdependence” in the City: On the spatial conditions of navigating queer and trans embodiments in Hyderabad (India)

Binder Stefan - Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

While circling back to the city: patterns of demarcations through Bengali labour migrant’s lived experiences in Kerala

Bej Sourina - Department of South Asian Studies, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

Contested Imaginaries of Inhabitation: Navigating Insecurity in Contemporary Urban India

Armaan Alkazi - -
Samuel Moses - -