Anant Maringanti, Nausheen Anwar, and Aalok Khandekar
Funding period: 1 October 2025 – 1 December 2026
Type of funding:
Seminar Series
Partner organisations: Interdisciplinary Centre for Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota (United States), International Institute for Environment and Development (United Kingdom and worldwide), Karachi Urban Lab (Pakistan), Indian Institute of Technology (India), Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Bangladesh)
Events: five online master classes (Oct 2025 to March 2026), city round tables and field visits in Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Karachi and Dhaka (February 2026 to April 2026), online writing workshop (June 2026), and online release of knowledge products (November 2026)
Lead organisers: Anant Maringanti ( Interdisciplinary Centre for Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota, United States), Nausheen Anwar (International Institute for Environment and Development, United Kingdom and worldwide), and Aalok Khandekar (Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India)
Team members: Nityanand Jayaraman; Vanshika Singh; Rohit Negi; Kazi Fattah; and Mukta Naik
Contact: Anant Maringanti
Abstract:
This seminar series explores how young people in South Asian cities engage with environmental change, moving beyond top-down climate adaptation frameworks to centre site-specific, embedded, and lived experiences. Through a network of five urban sites—three in India, and one each in Pakistan and Bangladesh—we investigate how youth act as repairers, mediators, and knowledge producers, shaping urban ecologies through improvisation, care, and survival strategies. The seminar series will comprise five master classes, five local convenings, and two online workshops for graduate students and activists.
The seminar series will generate three types of interlinked outputs:
- Place-based academic publications grounded in research across five cities, facilitating cross-city comparisons and advancing theoretical perspectives on youth-led environmental action and repair urbanism.
- An open-access teaching framework designed for educators and scholars, promoting comparative, grounded approaches to urban environmental change.
- A practitioner-oriented repository of case-based strategies for climate resilience, repair economies, and participatory governance, serving both academic and policy communities.