In this guest post, Anant Maringanti (Interdisciplinary Centre for Study of Global Change), Nausheen Anwar (Karachi Urban Lab/IBA and International Institute for Environment and Development), and Aalok Khandekar (Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad) introduce their Seminar Series Awards project, Ordinary Ecologies of Repair. The project brings together youth practitioners across five South Asian cities to rethink climate adaptation from the ground up: not as a crisis response, but as everyday urban politics.
Beyond the “Future Generation”
Across South Asia, the climate crisis is not a future condition. It structures the present. Young people are already negotiating heat, polluted air, saline intrusion, and recurring floods. Yet policy discourse continues to frame them only as vulnerable dependents or as a symbolic “future generation” who will someday fix the world.
Ordinary Ecologies of Repair begins by rejecting this framing. Young people are already sustaining urban life. Across informal settlements and contested peripheries, youth are keeping infrastructures operational, caring for communities, and inventing provisional solutions.
We call these practices ordinary repair: forms of work that remain largely invisible, yet prevent everyday breakdown.
Funded by the Urban Studies Foundation, this seminar series (2025–2026) connects five cities—Karachi, Dhaka, Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad. Each of them offers a specific lens on repair, from memory and conflict to justice, vocabulary, and trust.
A five-city framework
Rather than impose a single framework, the project treats the five cities as an emergent network whose relationships must be interpreted rather than standardised. Each team focuses on one dimension of repair grounded in the political and environmental histories of its site.
Karachi: Memory as infrastructure
Anchored by Soha Makhtoom (Karachi Urban Lab).
Recent monsoon floods made the long-submerged Lyari River visible again. This is a common experience across many South Asian cities where rivers have gradually turned into drains filled with municipal solid waste and sewage. We begin by asking how a crisis opens up windows through which young people try to reconstruct the past with an eye on the future. Among other things, workshops and field visits on themes such as “thermal wisdom” and indigenous architectures (wind-catchers, courtyard houses) revisit dormant knowledge for coping with extreme heat and with floods. Repair here involves recovering environmental memory that modern planning has attempted to overwrite.
Dhaka: Conflict as an environmental condition
Anchored by Musleh Uddin Hasan (BUET) and Kazi Fattah (University of Melbourne).
Dhaka’s Pantha Kunja park is squeezed between an expressway ramp and neighbourhood claims to public space. Protests against this top-down approach, which wipes out a vital resource, take diverse forms: participatory mapping and street performance. We will attempt to show how street dwellers, tea sellers, and youth activists negotiate environmental precarity as political struggle rather than ecological management.
Delhi: Vocabulary and translation
Anchored by Mukta Naik (SFC) and Rohit Negi (IIM Kolkata).
Environmental politics in Delhi is fractured by language. Global climate discourse coexists uneasily with livelihood and migration-based environmentalism rooted in caste and precarious work. Convening a series of conversations with young people from small towns at the Dhirpur wetlands, we will attempt to develop a comparative vocabulary of repair to make these multiple environmental worlds legible to each other.
Chennai: Justice and the politics of enclosure
Anchored by Nityanand Jayaraman (Chennai).
Chennai’s hydrology, through its complex system of tanks, ponds, and creeks running into the sea, exposes the inequalities of caste and industry. We will organise a masterclass featuring youth leaders engaged in everyday and ordinary repair of the city, and curated walks that we call the ‘toxic tours’ that expose the casteist logic underpinning technocratic models of development that treat oceans, wetlands and commons as extractable and disposable.
Hyderabad: Trust under abandonment
Anchored by Vanshika Singh and S. Q. Masood (Hyderabad Urban Lab).
In Hyderabad, we work through the idea of “Slow Trust” – a relational framework that addresses the question of how communities maintain social life when basic infrastructure fails. Repair Cafés and “Everyday Alchemy” workshops explore the affective infrastructure—the friendships, obligations, and solidarities—that allow communities to improvise life in a fragmented city.
The intellectual stakes
These lenses do not simply describe ingenuity; they reveal the uneven politics of survival. Young people repair things not out of empowerment, but because formal systems have withdrawn. If repair becomes necessary, abandonment has already taken place.
Yet repair also becomes the first terrain in which political capacities are learned. These are not heroic acts, but the slow accumulation of practical knowledge, accountability, and collective decision-making. As young people improvise, they learn who shares water, who protects wetlands, and who can be relied upon.
Agency here is emergent, contingent, and often unrecognised.
We neither romanticise nor despair. We examine how ordinary repair becomes the apprenticeship through which political capacities and solidarities take shape. Cities, in this sense, operate as incubators of emergent agency, where governance, solidarity-building, and collective care are learned under conditions of abandonment.
Solidarity is not simply a value. It is a political capacity built through the shared experience of repair. Yet it is never automatic. It must be made visible, articulated, and recognised as political work in its own right. At the same time, ordinary repair risks being appropriated as evidence that communities can cope without structural investment, allowing abandonment to deepen even as agency emerges.
A transnational rhythm
Rather than a short workshop model, the series builds cumulative engagements:
Masterclasses (Online, late 2025–early 2026): where “thermal wisdom,” “hydro-forensics,” and everyday repair are placed in dialogue.
Field Schools (Early 2026): collective documentation of ordinary ecologies through observation, mapping, and shared analysis.
Public Archive (Late 2026): zines, teaching templates, and comparative glossaries designed for scholars and practitioners across the Global South.
Why this approach matters
Ordinary Ecologies of Repair is a wager that climate adaptation in South Asia cannot be understood through policy frameworks alone. It must be read through the precarious, often invisible practices that sustain urban life under systemic failure.
These practices are not merely signs of resilience. They are the early political traces from which new forms of governance, solidarity, and civic engagement may emerge. Yet precisely because repair sustains life in the absence of the state, it can also become a justification for further withdrawal, normalising the very abandonment that necessitates it.
By centring youth not as victims but as agents of ongoing repair, the project highlights the everyday labour that keeps South Asian cities alive—and makes visible the political possibilities that grow inside conditions of abandonment.