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About the talk:

Across India’s coasts, many urban residents inhabit what may be described as “uncertain grounds.” Intensifying cyclones, erratic flooding, rising seas, and eroding shorelines intersect with precarious livelihoods, out-migration, changing family structures, and large-scale infrastructure projects—making it increasingly difficult to anchor futures in stable conditions. Drawing on student fieldwork conducted at the School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai across four emerging urban contexts (2023–26) : Chellanam (Kerala), Divar Island (Goa), Behrampur (Odisha), and Uppada (Andhra Pradesh), this talk examines how residents respond to such uncertainty. And to do so, it focuses on the architectural compositions through which life is made and remade. Here, architecture is understood not merely as built form, but as spatial practices of constructing rhythms, connections, movements, and inhabitable spaces. By tracing shifts in environment, livelihoods, homemaking, networks, and kinship, the talk frames architecture as an ongoing act of composing relations to live within uncertainty as well as draws attention to the emerging forms of urbanism across the four contexts.

Speaker:

Prasad Khanolkar is an urbanist based in Mumbai and currently teaches at the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA, Mumbai). He is primarily interested in the incongruous and collaborative operations through which marginalised urban residents assemble urban lives and habitats across cities of the Global South. He has worked as a planner and researcher in Mumbai, Gurugram, Portland, Nairobi, and Addis Ababa. Across these contexts, his individual and collaborative work has engaged questions of housing, infrastructures, governance, informality, and urban redevelopment. His work has been published in the form of book chapters and journal articles. He is the author of Passages of Play in Urban India: People, Media, Objects and Spaces in Mumbai’s Slum Localities (Routledge, 2022).

This is the one hundred and ninty four (194) in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi, and Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on the city’s development issues and address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society, and politics. For further information, please contact: Rama Devi at ramadevi2487@gmail.com, Champaka Rajagopal at champaka@cprindia.org or Partha Mukhopadhyay at partha@cprindia.org.