When the pandemic hit, many of us who planned qualitative research were preparing to travel to our field sites. What was initially a ‘wait and watch’ scenario, ended up being a situation where we had to consider a complete revamp of our methodologies; I know of colleagues who had to change their topics entirely because […]
Kerala was lauded for being both, the most responsive to the pandemic, as well as the most effective in its state response to the pandemic. Oftentimes, the state’s response was seen as more restrictive than the national response, especially in the early days of the pandemic. As we will see, subsequent state action was aligned […]
I am a doctoral student in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. My summer dissertation research is being supported by the CASI summer research grant. As a planner, I am interested in how urban space is constructed. In particular, how informal space is formed by the critical relationship that defines it – […]
Three activities were essential to the pre-tourist economy of Fort Kochi in Kerala – fishing, coir, and spices. Of these three, only fishing survived the transition. The coir factories closed down, and spices are now sourced from Munnar and Idduki. Like farming, traditional fishing is a seasonal activity, and most commercial fishing shuts down for […]
Urban informality is very personal to me; I grew up Bombay, where the informal is normal, and worked in Delhi, where informality was not exclusively a low-income activity. As a researcher, however, I began to encounter atypical informal settlements (read: not slums), which did not easily respond to existing solutions for formalisation of such activities and […]
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