The rapid pace of urban transformation in cities over the last decade or so, in cities of South Asia, and elsewhere, has also often been accompanied by a discourse of environmentalism, of making city spaces safer, greener and less polluting. This new environmentalism finds place in the media and in law, in policy and civic mobilizations, drawing upon older discourses of hygiene but also radically departing from them. The grammar of new urban environmentalism, the strategies of mobilization, the (dis)continuities in the articulation of an urban environmentalist agenda and their social and political implications are some of the issues that we explore in this body of research.

Environmental risk is only one of the many risks that organizes life in the contemporary city.  Together with this, we face risks relating to social and political (in)security, those relating to speed and scale of transformations, technological risks, bodily risks etc. that reconfigure how we inhabit the city.   Over the coming years we expect to develop some of these themes to ask questions such as:

How are risks framed?  At what sites?
How does the discourse of risk proliferate?
How do risk discourses relate to other categories of knowledge through which we understand and act upon urban contexts?
What is the nature and function of expert and lay knowledges in the contexts that we research?
How do these translate into an engagement with democracy, equity and justice?
Does risk in South Asian cities need to be theorized differently than it has been for post-industrial cities in the West?