Discussion on Startups in the City

One common feature of the startups these days that is most interesting is that they are all about providing spatial connectivity. There are services that help people book restaurant tables and get reliable home deliveries from restaurants. Some that book orders for home chefs and delivers the orders to homes and offices. Some that connect autorickshaw and taxi drivers with commuters. Some are about recyclable waste pickup. These are all interesting and exciting. It would also be great to get a peek into their databases. They would reveal so much about the nature of our cities. But apart from that intellectual curiosity, it is also interesting to see the different kinds of projects being undertaken by startups and the strategies they employ.

Waste in the City

Patrick Geddes once said that the biggest drawback of modern civilization is that it lacks an understanding of waste. Our cities produce massive amounts of waste on a daily basis. All this waste has to go somewhere and we have only three sinks for waste, the earth, the water and the air. There is, however, also a fourth option: waste can be recycled. Indian cities are typically derided for being filthy, but Indian cities also have very high proportions of waste being recycled! This recycling is not taking place through large high-tech corporate industries. It occurs through the dispersed activity of a large workforce of rag-pickers who segregate the garbage that households and commercial establishments dispose. Starting from the rag-pickers, the circuit of waste is a sprawling network of individuals like kabadiwalas, small and medium sized recycling industries and buyers. This sprawling network of waste recycling is invisible to us because alot of it operates “informally”, some would say “illegally”. But all the bodies involved in this circuit of waste provide our cities with a massive economic and ecological subisdy. They firstly, absorb polluting waste into their own bodies and neighbourhoods, and they also breathe new life and value into waste so that it can re-enter economic circulation. This talk on waste will mostly focus on rag-pickers, but the discussion will also extend to the larger circuit of waste.

Roundtable of Community-based Experts

In the last 20 years, Hyderabad and most other “third-world” cities have witnessed phenomenal growth in population. With inadeqaute or no social housing to provide for the incoming populations, there has been a proliferation of slums which has garnered a great deal of attention from scholars. Everything from our newspapers, to prestigious scholarly journals present us with knowledge about slums, slum communities and informal urban settlements in general. The opinions voiced through these media are generally considered authoritative to various degrees. However, it is a major problem that opinions and voices from these communities themselves are underprivileged. Members of the “community” are usually presented as owners of experiences based on which the intellectuals produce knowledge. The idea of this roundtable is to try and break this structure. To bring together community-based experts on a panel to share their knowledge – not just experiences – about pressing issues in the city. The theme of this roundtable will be the legal and political strategies employed by communities to address a variety of problems such as housing, water & sanitation, upkeep of community spaces, etc.

Open Discussion on Youth and the Future of Urban Politics

With every major political upheaval in history we associate an idea. An idea that animated particular subjectivities, the free individual of the French revolution, the free citizen of the Indian independence struggle, the emancipated worker of the Russian revolution, the rights-bearing woman of the Suffragette movements, etc. These subjectivities were universal and tried to subsume all differences under them. In the last few years however, social and political movements have had the tendency to assert their particular identity and thus, their difference, they have tended to escape being subsumed under broad universal categories which do not accommodate their particular desires or demands.

Many people frown upon this fragmentation of political movements, and feel nostalgia for the golden days of universal categories, but perhaps there is a necessity to these tendencies. This provokes us to think that rather than a new universal category to re-unite differences, we need an idea that can create new alliances, whereby different groups can unite to further a common goal, along with their particular goals. Not a universal category, but an open concept, one that different groups can relate with.

Could this idea be freedom? What else could it be? What are the movements that the youth are allying with? What are their commonalities and differences? What new alliances are being built in these movements? Join this open discussion to think through some of these questions.

Urban Ecology

We are well aware of the fact that our cities are averse to the existence of bio-diversity, even geo-diversity. For many decades now, the destructive ecology of cities has troubled those concerned about the environment. The term ecology refers to a complex of checks and balances that govern the environment, the process of urbanization creates disturbances in this ecology with such momentum and randomness that it is difficult for new checks and balances to emerge. This is why we witness ecological degradation. This degradation of ecology results in a degradation of the quality of everyday life itself. All of us may not know the particular factors that result in this degradation, but all of us do have an intuitive understanding of the process. This roundtable will bring together actors who have been dedicated to addressing the problems of ecological degradation and will try to provoke a discussion on the action points that the current situation demands. What are the ways in which we can act? Research, documentation, sensitization are all essential tasks. But there must also be campaigns and conscious dedication to make a difference through new everyday practices.

Working Women in the City

Besides all the women who are full-time workers in the household, there are thousands of working women in the city; hired domestic workers, sanitation workers, vendors, cleaners, government employees, corporate employees, etc. What are the safeguards provided to these women, not just as workers, but as women workers? Who has access to these safeguards and who doesn’t? Besides, to what extent are these working women taken into consideration in planning cities? Take the public transit for instance, how easy is it for women to move in the city? Join the discussion at this roundtable on working women to acquire an understanding of how they experience the city? What are the factors of their security and insecurity?

News Media and the City

The news media plays a vital function in a democratic society like ours. They make the realities of our city visible and also provide the framework to read and interpret this reality. But the news media itself is a commercial industry. What are the pressures on this industry? What are the sources of these pressures? How do journalists navigate the structure of the media industry and the responsibilities of their profession?