On 6 April, I delivered a keynote in the SLOWLAB Conference in University of Oregon, Portland, OR. My keynote is titled ‘Gendered urban futures: Speed, Time and Violence in India’s digital urban age’. On 29 March 2019, I delivered a plenary lecture in the ‘Smart cities’ panel in European Public…Continue reading “News and events”
the city inside out
A blog on gender, citizenship and urban life
Dr. Ayona Datta
I am Reader and research domain chair in Urban Futures in King’s College London. My research interests are in the politics of urban transformations in the global south, with a particular focus on gender and citizenship. I am author of ‘The Illegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement’ (2012 Ashgate), co-editor of ‘Translocal Geographies: Spaces, places, connections’ (2011 Ashgate) and ‘Mega-urbanization in the global South: Fast cities and new urban utopias of the postcolonial state’ (2017 Routledge).
Intimate Infrastructures Storymap
Intimate infrastructures is a way of seeing and understanding how infrastructure, in their absence, disconnectedness and exclusions are woven into the…
#AanaJaana Storymap
Curating gendered digital lives in Delhi’s urban peripheries Combining approaches from urban geography, gender studies, software ethnography and Geographic Information…
Indian women from the outskirts of Delhi are taking selfies to claim their right to the city
Ayona Datta., Author provided Ayona Datta, King’s College London Taking selfies and posting them on social media is often derided…
Films, videos and podcasts
Is our understanding of urban infrastructure changing? Do we need to move beyond discussions about ‘smart cities’ and digital innovation? What pathways exist for the city of the future?
Please click here for British Academy film on ‘Habitat and Living in Plural Cities’. In conversation with Prof. Mathew Gandy and Prof. Simon Marvin.
Habitat and Living in Plural Cities
Malegaon, a small town near Nashik, Maharashtra, is driven solely by the power loom industry and is forgotten by the state and private sector since the bomb blasts of 2006. Through the eyes of its residents, local activists and civil society members, City Forgotten tells the story of Malegaon’s fall from the Manchester of India to a town in decline, where its women and minorities continue to aspire for and claim their constitutional rights to education despite the lack of any real prospects for its future generations.
Please click here to watch the film ‘City Forgotten’
City Forgotten
If you were to visit any Indian city today there is one thing that would strike out immediately. It is not poverty – the clichéd lens with which westerners approach the global south. To an eye fatigued by austerity images in the west, the continuous and frenzied construction activity across Indian cities would be a lasting memory of your visit. The claim is that India is rising. Each city, each district, each regional state is reinventing itself. From steel girder to fibre optic cable, from buses to BRT, from rail to monorail, from roads to expressways, from ethernet to wifi. One smartphone, one flyover, one superhighway, one mega-project, one smart city at a time.
Please click here to watch Open Day talk in Thoughtworks.
Hashtag Citizenships
Resilience decoded: Multiple dimensions of vulnerabilities in the smart city
UN ECOSOC, 2018 Integration Segment, 20th Plenary meeting. 1st May 2018, New York.
Please click here to listen to my talk.
United Nations ECOSOC Talk
What do people mean when they talk about the ‘smart city’, and can the smart city ever be inclusive? In our second episode recorded in collaboration with The Sociological Review, Chantelle, Tissot and Saskia talk to Dr Ayona Datta about her work on urban transformations in Indian cities. Ayona argues that we need to be skeptical about whether smart cities can really address deep-rooted inequalities – smart water meters are useless if there’s no infrastructure for clean running water. Tissot tells us about the creative uses of smart technology by homeless people living in London’s financial district, showing that, although digital divides run across class lines, smart technology can change our cities in unplanned and exciting ways.
Click here to listen to podcast
