Abstract

Since the RC 21 meetings in Delhi in 2019, urban worlds have experienced radically disjunctive conditions–ones that deepen existent disjunctures, as well as rearrange livelihood practices, social reproduction, tacit social compacts, and the compositions and operations of urban territories. The panel considers the sensibilities and experiences of re-arranging during the so-called Covid-19 period with a group of eminent Indian urbanists, whose work and thinking during the past year have made significant contributions to global knowledge about changing urban landscapes. The panel attempts to exemplify a process of collective thinking, deployed to consider the enduring and changing terrains of urban life in India. From the configuration of new provisioning systems, the extension of the home to encompass the street, the provisionality and circulation of migrant bodies, and the mobilization of improvised arrangements and infrastructures of care, this freewheeling discussion will look closely at the intersections of registers, cities and ways of life.