Abstract
The ongoing COVID-19 outbreak has challenged and upended our perceptions of cities and urban spaces with far-reaching implications for the socioeconomic narrative of urbanisation. It has highlighted the fractures and fissures that exist in urban society and around labour, livelihoods, race, caste, and access to care and basic services. In the Indian context, it has starkly shown how much our cities depend on informal and migrant labour—often among the most vulnerable and disenfranchised groups in cities. As cities across the world went into lockdown, perhaps one of the few positive outcomes was the improvement in environmental conditions, demonstrating even more convincingly that going back to a business-as-usual scenario post-COVID-19 should not be an option.
Although this issue of urbanisation was planned before the outbreak, the articles here serve as reminders that COVID-19 has only exacerbated the already existing urban challenges, pushing vulnerable populations to the brink. The two articles in the General Articles section focus particularly on different aspects of the labour and informality question. The first, by Sharma et al., looks at weekly informal markets or hafta bazaars in Delhi. Spaces like these are rarely documented and have now been completely changed by the pandemic; some may be permanently gone. This article is the first such attempt to showcase and digitise these economic hubs on a single platform. The researchers attempt to comprehensively document Delhi’s weekly markets by mapping their locations, the products sold and the days and timings at which they are held. It is a valuable archive, which may pave the way for future research to understand the administrative and economic models that underpin the efficient and sustainable functioning of hafta bazaars.
In the second article, Pratik Mishra examines the question of labour in peri-urban Delhi. It follows the emergence and growth of a brick kiln cluster in Khanda village on the periphery of the Delhi–NCR agglomeration that has profoundly altered and shaped Khanda’s landscape and ecology. The article establishes a dialogue between the fields of agrarian urbanism and urban political ecology in developing a situated critique of the metabolism of brick kilns. Mishra also brings brick kilns into Marxist debates on the interrelationships of nature and labour within capitalist production.
Speaking directly to the challenges that the COVID-19 outbreak has posed to urban researchers, Anant Maringanti urges us to think critically about how we need to reimagine how we teach Southern urbanism. One of the early lessons of Southern urban practice was that the field had to be our primary site of pedagogy. It is important, too, to recognise and value what this experience teaches us about theory, knowledge and practice. He emphasises that as we witness uncertainty of an unprecedented degree, it is only through praxis and concept-building and informing each other that new theory will emerge.
Our classic reprint from the archives of Environment & Urbanization is an article from 2011 on the relationship between cities and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As cities have gone into lockdown, and commuting and travel came to a standstill, many urban regions saw a remarkable dip in emissions and air pollution and a significant improvement in air quality. This article presents a detailed analysis of per capita GHG emissions for several large cities and a review of per capita emissions for 100 cities for which peer-reviewed studies are available. The article discusses where GHG emissions arise and where mitigation efforts may be most effective. It illustrates the need to obtain comparable estimates at the city level and the importance of defining the scope of the analysis.
Our final article is a review of Milk Teeth, a novel by Amrita Mahale that celebrates the everydayness of a Mumbai neighbourhood—its people, their relationships, their nostalgia for what has passed and their aspirations that often contradict this past. Reflecting on her own home and neighbourhood in a different part of Mumbai, Divya Ravindranath writes that the success of the novel lies in Mahale’s attention to the rhythms of middle-class life, in all its ordinariness, tracing its aspirations and exposing its prejudices with equal ease.