New Delhi: ‘Development’ is a double-edged sword. Cities are choking on their own success, with rising carbon emissions and vanishing biodiversity, but the proposed ‘solutions’ are far from fair either. With no clear roadmap for a just energy transition, developing economies face a tough question: how to build prosperity without destroying the planet?
India and Africa, both working toward industrialisation, illustrate the dilemma. While India is gradually shifting towards renewable energy, the transition remains fraught with trade-offs due to the unequal power dynamics shaping global climate policies.
“Those with geopolitical power will allow certain climate actions for the good of humanity to work as legal punishments for one part or another,” said urban researcher Gautam Bhan, speaking at the launch of Cities Rethought: A New Urban Disposition at the India International Center (ICC) last week. “African cities have no paradigm for development because in 30 years people will be punished for using carbon.”
The book, co-authored by Bhan and scholars Michael Keith, Edgar Pieterse, and Susan Parnell, Bhan’s book, tackles these issues head-on. It examines how cities in India, China, Africa, and Colombia can deal with local crises while navigating global pressures. At its core is a pressing question: the study of cities today is “fragmented among different silos of expertise, diverse genres of scholarship, and widening chasms between theory and practice. How can we do better?”
Speaking to a room full of academicians and research scholars, Bhan described the challenges facing cities—climate change, inequality, and environmental degradation—as “analytical puzzles” that demand fresh approaches. Joining him on the panel were Amita Baviskar, an environmental sociologist from Ashoka University, and Amaljyoti Goswami, head of the legal and regulations team at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS). Over a discussion spanning nearly an hour and a half, they explored the future of cities and strategies for tackling urban problems like air pollution through community participation.
Bhan said that the book is about developing what he calls a “disposition about complexity” at a moment of interconnected crises, including climate change and inequality. An “urban disposition” has three key elements: normative (what motivates people), analytical (how systems work), and operational (how to achieve change). He proposed that this is a mindset everyone in a city must have—scholars, citizens, and activists alike—if real solutions are to emerge.
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The future of many cities hangs in the balance, especially in lower-income regions such as Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, according to the book. These places urgently need industrialisation to generate employment and facilitate social mobility, but the push for development often comes at a steep environmental cost.
However, without financial assistance from wealthier nations, a switch from carbon-intensive infrastructure to green energy seems out of reach, even when political will exists.
“Asymmetries in relative wealth, power, and control of regulatory institutions” like the World Trade Organisation and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “which lay down regimes for all” make the situation worse, Bhan said.
Cities in these regions face a paradox. While they symbolise movement and opportunity, they also bear the weight of pollution, inequality, and social fragmentation.
“Cities are spaces of movement, dynamism, and civitas. Yet this idea of cities as emancipatory spaces of boundless possibilities has been tarnished by the toxicity of communalism and the toxic air,” said Baviskar.
Bhan, nodding in agreement, then expressed his disillusionment with the global systems meant to uphold justice, citing ongoing “genocide in the Middle East” as an example.
“I feel I am in a moment where many of the categories of the 21st century that we used to hold as the big things—society, polity, economy, humanity, culture—are slipping out of our hands. They don’t make sense anymore,” he said.
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Analytical puzzles
For Bhan, cities represent not a litany of problems but bewildering analytical puzzles that offer a chance to “expand knowledge systems”.
Bridging the gap between thinking, feeling and doing, he argued, is essential to addressing urban challenges meaningfully.
To illustrate the complexity of cities, he likened them to a pyjama knot: “Their complexity can’t be easily resolved, much like the entangled threads.”
Tackling Delhi’s air pollution, for example, requires redescribing it not just as particulates, emissions, or farm fires, but as a “governance knot” that demands systemic structural intervention.
Baviskar then shot a direct question to Bhan: “When cities have become dystopic, what counter-strategies can be mobilised to build a different community and combat wicked problems?”
Bhan responded with cautious optimism, nothing that “communities of practice” develop organically with time.
Recalling his own experience as a queer 15-year-old in Delhi, he said the future once seemed “unimaginable”. Yet in his lifetime, he has seen “elite attitudes change” and the emergence of new spaces for queer politics.
“To me, the question is, what is the way language creates those conditions of possibility? And how do I create conditions so that a problem can be different in the future?” he asked, suggesting that the way urban tangles are interpreted—both in language and action—directly shapes the possibilities for solutions.
A student followed up with a question: “If the meaning of words is changing, what kinds of conversations or articulations do we need to create real change?”
To this, Bhan suggested that it starts with people recognising their own role in shaping conversations.
“The articulation of your normative disposition, is you… and as scholars we need to ask what role does this knowledge play when it goes out into the world,” he said.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)