In this guest post, Dr Sushmita Pati describes the results of Emerging forms of southern urbanism(s): theorising from the South, a workshop funded by the Urban Studies Foundation.
Southern urbanists have, in the past two decades, challenged the ‘universality’ claimed by Northern, Eurocentric urban models by producing theories built from place-based evidence and actionable knowledge emerging from cities in the Global South and East. This staggering and rich literature has established southern urbanism as a decisive subfield, an emergent paradigm, and an epistemic problem.
However, for southern urbanism to inform a new generation of scholars and practitioners responsible for responding to emergent challenges like climate crises, economic downturns, and geopolitical conflicts, it must take stock of the theoretical inflections within. Following this impulse, a one-day workshop in Delhi sought to bring together early career and senior scholars, and practitioners, to critically reflect on how our understanding of the “south” has shifted, how ideas have endured and evolved, and how new arenas of thinking are pushing the subfield of southern urbanism itself.
The workshop unveiled an anxiety among urban studies scholars about what ‘southern urbanism’ means, who it speaks for, and whether it risks replicating the very universalisms it seeks to contest. Participants highlighted the “souths within the South”, communities rendered marginal not merely by location but by caste, gender, displacement, and the informality within. The room registered a wariness against the idea of a single dominant paradigm; rather, the idea of counter-universalism through provincialising Southern Urbanism had significant purchase. The innovative format of the workshop, which invited all participants, regardless of seniority, to offer sharp five-minute-long conceptual provocations helped establish common ground and tease out big picture ideas.
The first panel, Articulations of informality and labour amidst the climate emergency (Gautam Bhan, Anwesha Ghosh, Gayatri Nair, and Hafsa Sayeed) juxtaposed concerns around caste, labour, and precarious employment against the climate crisis, pointing out how precarity is deepened by the continuous erosion of public infrastructure in Indian cities. Raising concerns about the intensified nature of social reproduction of urban labor, they reiterated the relevance of studying the unconventional and the ordinary.
The second panel, Urban actors’ influence on urban governance and politics (Mukta Naik, Sridhar Pabbisetty, Suruchi Kumari, and Ratoola Kundu) addressed the nature of associations and communities in our cities, drawing attention to how lived experience must reshape categories and meanings. The idea of belonging, for example, may be expanded through how the homeless create both a sense of privacy as well as community while living on the streets, and how resident welfare associations can simultaneously produce effective and exclusionary mechanisms of self-governance.
The third panel, Other than human influences on the city (Awadhendra Sharan, Shweta Rani, and Shruti Ragavan) explored the city beyond the confines of anthropomorphism, weaving in cows, germs, and parasites that have forever lived and shared space with us. Positing the intermeshing of the non-human as a recovery and not necessarily something new, the panel reconceptualises the urban as a moving theatre, from human to non, from land to air, and so on.
The fourth panel, Reframing policy and planning, (Chandrima Mukhopadhyay, Malini Krishnakutty, Rahisha Thottolil, and Devansh Srivastava) highlighted the everyday struggles of “planning from below”. Discussions highlighted how the field is wrestling, not merely with informality, but with the ways both law and policy mimic illegality. Can emergent technologies like big data and network analysis forge new insights and strengthen the Southern impulse in urban planning?
The fifth panel on Big Tech (Rinky Halder, Ashima Sood, and Sushmita Pati) investigated how the evolution of technology is impinging urban spaces in interesting ways. Illustrated by the real life case of a fifteen-year-old girl designing open spaces and the ethics of letting her work be used by the big tech for scalability, the panel raised questions about how we must respond to the systemic capture of scholarly knowledge by AI.
The workshop’s biggest takeaway was the refusal to resolve its own central tension. Is “informality” still doing useful analytical work, or has it become a catch-all that flattens more than it reveals? Is there still a meaningful North/South divide in urban theory, or has that framing become a limit on thinking? Participants did not converge on answers. The workshop’s novel format facilitated an environment where a doctoral student and a scholar they have extensively cited could disagree with each other on equal terms without either party needing to concede. We offer this as a ‘southern’ template to reinforce the tenets of curiosity, camaraderie, reflection, and hope in urban studies.