A central guiding idea of our work at Metropolitics is to share the knowledge, concepts and practices that academic and activist scholars generate in contemporary cities. In addition to making scholarship public, the journal is interested in sharing the plurality of ways that people produce urban knowledge that is useful, and that can generate the political will to make cities better, healthier places to live. For the past two years, Dr. Naomi Adiv and Dr. Hari Sasikumar have been conducting research with Hyderabad Urban Labs (HUL) that reviewed public-space interventions in Hyderabad through the iLocal project. This style of urban intervention—neither strictly formal nor tactical—mobilizes local knowledge to think about the variety of publics that make claims on Hyderabad, which, like many cities in the Global South, has undergone rapid economic and landscape changes in the last three decades. Here, we interview Dr. Anant Maringanti, co‑founder and co‑director of HUL, about how research can be a vehicle for advocacy, current scholarship surrounding urban change in the Global South, and thinking about Indian nationhood from urban centers.
First, can you tell us about Hyderabad Urban Lab and how it began, and why ?
The founding story of Hyderabad Urban Lab, like all founding myths, has many different stories.
There was always a thread which was leading many of my colleagues towards saying that any meaningful research at this point of time needs to start by embedding the researcher and the research question in a particular locality. And that you have to negotiate what your relationships with these communities are. What we wanted to do was to see if there is a way in which this whole relationship can be turned into something much more dialogic. What kinds of new questions will become possible ? How do you even manage the entire research process when you begin to do this ?
This is one reason why the form of the Hyderabad Urban Lab actually emerged, which is that we were very keen to start producing knowledge which is locally relevant. But what we found can travel and translate into other localities in a way that doesn’t make claims that are universally applicable. You can call it Southern urbanism, you can call it participatory research—these have been thought about in multiple iterations by scholars everywhere. But Hyderabad Urban Lab was basically an attempt to figure out how to do this in the city of Hyderabad.
It started with a project in a scrap market, which had a very deep wound that they were dealing with : in 2009, a tremendous amount of drinking-water contamination happened, with E. coli bacteria from fecal matter that entered the drinking-water supply. Ten people died, and many more got hospitalized, and the community there was struggling to figure out what happened and what to do about it. It was connected to their livelihoods, it was connected to their housing conditions, and that’s where we stepped in, trying to figure out what kinds of tools make sense for us. We figured that it makes sense to generate a lot of spatial data, because we wanted to understand who goes from where to where. Where do materials come from ? How do things move around ?
So, the founding principle then was that cities are embodied. Cities are about circulatory systems, whether you’re thinking about water, or labor, or scrap, or anything, so that’s what we wanted to get at. And that’s how the center came together.
And we became a sort of a school, without intending to do that. And that’s where we—actually, Bhashwati, my partner, who was also a very important person in setting this up—became very deeply invested in the place. Because her entire work has been about what kinds of learning we should nurture. So, it was really about what’s the future of learning itself that we were trying to put together as an important question.
You talked about learning from particular places. Why is Hyderabad an important place to think from ?
The point that we’re making is not that Hyderabad is more important than other cities, but that Hyderabad’s importance is to be found in its specificity.
And that specific history of Hyderabad City is really that, alongside Bangalore, Hyderabad is one of the two metropolises in India which were not seats of colonial power. Hyderabad was a very wealthy city, and a very wealthy kingdom, but it was never a center for colonial extraction, and therefore there were no opportunities for Hyderabad to generate an industrial manufacturing capitalist class until the mid‑20th century. It’s only in the 1960s that you see substantial change happening because the government of India invests in public-sector undertakings in these cities. There is a particular urban form, there’s a particular kind of urban subject-citizen that emerged in the ’50s and ’60s, because that’s when we actually get out of a certain kind of subjecthood to the most faithful ally to the British : the Nizam.
There are lots of things that create a particular kind of urban form. And that’s what we wanted to really look at. Because telling the story of Indian nationhood, or Indian modernity from the point of view of a city, it’s a project that has actually not been undertaken in any serious way. But what happens if we start telling the story of Indian nationhood, or Indian modernity from a city like Hyderabad ?
Sometime in the early 21st century, the main message from the government and from the technology folks was that Hyderabad missed the Industrial Revolution, and we’re going to get there via the information superhighway. So they made very aggressive investments in real estate, to facilitate IT development, because that’s what was going to get us to catch up with the rest of the world.
And by 2002, people were taking note of Hyderabad City and saying that Hyderabad actually proves that you can be part of a poor region, or a poorer country, but you can lift yourself up in relief against that backdrop. That was the claim. Everywhere in large conferences on cities, this was what was being said.
So, going from there, you’re in the US now, and you’ve studied and worked extensively in the US, thinking about international development. How do you think the North–South conversation has changed in the past 30 years, particularly in regard to urbanism ?
There is definitely a material shift that has happened, and that has to do with broader changes in geopolitics. In the early ’90s, there was a very clear sense that it’s no longer making sense to think about the world as something divided between East and West as powerful nation blocks. We need to think about the world map as a map of inequality. We still think about nation-states, so inequality is mapped in terms of the wealth of nations, but we draw a map of the world in terms of poorer nations and the richer nations, and that divided the world into North and South.
But that has changed now. You have a lot of the Global South in the North now, and you have a lot of Global North in the South. Both ways, you’re seeing that there are things that have materially changed. And I think that the discontents of that are very, very powerfully hitting us in our face. We’re dealing with that all the time, whether it is in the form of anti-immigrant politics, or rising resentments against unemployment rates.
But at the other end, I think one of the shifts that has happened is in terms of what kind of knowledge can be produced, by whom, who gets to speak. Thirty years ago, it was still possible for a certain kind of naïveté whereby you could say that we provide the theory and we get the data from the Global South. I don’t think it holds anymore. It’s really happening so much that the Global South is throwing theoretical challenges at the world, and I think this is a big shift that has happened.
Now, whether this is being supported in the form of funding, whether it is possible to actually organize research, knowledge production, how AI is changing, all of that : these are empirical questions that need to be investigated. But I do think that there’s definitely a conceptual shift that has happened at the level of institutions ; we’re all sensing it in terms of where the power is.
We’ve gone from the founding of HUL and the specificity of Hyderabad out into these big questions of Global North and South. So, if we can bring it back : what, in this landscape that you’ve laid out for us, does HUL contribute in the next five years, in the next 20 years ? What is the role of civil-society organizations like this that academics can’t accomplish, that planning organizations can’t accomplish ? That even private capital can’t accomplish ?
I think one of the most important things about a center like HUL is enabling different groups of people and different individuals to find their voice. What did Hyderabad Urban Lab achieve in the last 12, 13 years ? I would say about 100 young people who are across the world doing very different kinds of urban work.
When we began, I would always say that HUL is about crafting a new urban sensibility. That’s what the work of a new pedagogy should always be : it crafts a new sensibility. And that sensibility then translates into moral orientations, it translates into skill sets, it translates into repertoires of work. It translates into archives, and so on.
Hyderabad Urban Lab’s role is to create new orientations in the city, to ask new questions, and teach people how to ask those new questions. To make it possible for people to imagine new kinds of research agendas. The larger ambition is to make it happen everywhere.
In Hyderabad : making it possible for people to find resources to ask more important questions in very concrete terms. When we started our work, one of the first things that we realized is that so much of research data, so much of the published material, is hidden away in places where it becomes very, very difficult for people to access. Now, when it is difficult for you to access basic data, you end up producing that data as the primary work that you’re doing in your research. So, the first thing we realized is that for interesting and new questions about the urban to emerge, there have to be enabling conditions, and those are about publications, archives, data of various kinds, that should be made easily accessible to everyone.
So, we started opening up data. Put together all the data on bus transit in the city, make it openly accessible to everyone. Once you have that in hand, you can begin to ask questions about gender parity in transportation. Otherwise, what you’re going to do is to spend all your time and money and resources mapping where bus stops are, and you keep doing it repeatedly, and that’s all you’re doing.
That’s what we broke. I think the thing that we really broke was precisely that which makes it impossible to ask new and challenging and interesting questions which are worth asking. So HUL’s contribution would be, in some sense, to say that it helps us articulate an answer to the question : what is worth asking about our cities ?
Further reading
- Data Analytics and Reflections from a Research Project on Heat in Informal Settlements (a joint project of HUL with some other urban research organizations) : https://heatingcities.in.
- Map examples from This is Not an Atlas : https://notanatlas.org/maps/a-civic-mapping-project-in-an-indian-megacity.
