On 20 June, I was invited to deliver the opening keynote in the ‘Undisciplining: Conversations from the edges’ conference organised by the Sociological Review journal in Newcastle. My keynote was titled ‘Undisciplining urban futures: Imagining and governing India’s smart urban age’. On 1 May 2018, I was invited as speaker in…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).
Learning from small cities
I am very pleased to announce that our ESRC Urban Transformations research bid for Newton funds to conduct research on…
India’s experiments with smart urban futures
This is a longer version of article published in The Conversation on 27th January 2016. If you were to visit…
What is smart about smart cities? A response from the global south
Imagine that you get off your flight and go straight into an electric car that takes you zipping over traffic…
Films and videos of talks
Mumbai’s road to global city status has been marked by the construction of flyovers and roads. Apart from increasing the speed with which the city’s new arrivals travel from its domestic/international airport straight to the business district, these infrastructure projects also enable Mumbai as an aspiring global city to make its marginal spaces and citizens invisible to these new arrivals in the city. City bypassed presents the story of Mumbai’s urban renewal as seen from Byculla, a multicultural inner-city neighbourhood symbolically and physically bypassed by road infrastructure projects along Mumbai’s journey to global city status.
Please click here to watch the film ‘City Bypassed‘
City Bypassed
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
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
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.