SASNET Seminar with Glyn Williams: "Renegotiating Lockdown: collective life and the control of Covid-19 in India’s low-income urban neighbourhoods"

Chair: Ted Svensson

Abstract:

COVID lockdowns aimed to stop movement and dilute social proximity, and as such were a disruptive moment globally. This was particularly so for low-income neighbourhoods of the Global South, where intense interaction is an essential part of everyday social reproduction. While the resulting tension between disease control and the 'collective life' of these communities is widely recognised, this paper focuses on how it was resolved in practice. How did governments imagine and seek to exercise spatial control in low-income neighbourhoods, and how did these communities respond? It examines the state’s lockdown strategies in three cities (Ahmedabad, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram) focusing on their impact on the cities' working-class communities. The different experiences across our cities and between the neighbourhoods of our study show that lockdowns were both partial and uneven in their effects, and subject to continual change. These differences in turn highlight potential pathways through which forms of emergency intervention more attuned to these communities’ needs could be renegotiated in future.

Glyn Williams - Lund University

Research

My research is at the interface of human geography and development studies, and is concerned with making development sensitive to, and inclusive of, the agency and practices of socially, economically and politically marginalised groups. My work has been conducted in collaboration with partner academics, particularly in India and South Africa, and supported by a range of research funders (including the ESRC, British Academy, South Africa’s National Research Foundation and the Norwegian Research Council). Its focus is on the ‘everyday governance’ of development: the ideas and motives behind development projects, the practices of government and other actors engaged in implementing them, and the ways these are reworked and contested on the ground. Throughout, I have explored theoretical debates using detailed, primarily qualitative fieldwork to address three core themes:

Marginalisation, participation and empowerment: This work has looked at the relationship between participatory development and democratisation, examining participatory governance experiments in West Bengal and Kerala, and the links between poverty alleviation and social marginalisation

Democracy and political authority: This work is concerned with how formal structures of governance interact with how grassroots political authority is expressed. It has shown the importance of gender, caste, and party-political identity in reshaping the outcomes of programmes intended to decentralise government and empower marginalised groups.

Socially just urban transitions: This work has examined agendas for delivering ‘slum free’ cities, highlighting their effects on poorer citizens: disrupting links between their mobility and livelihoods, displacing them to the urban periphery, and falling short of promises to deliver gender-sensitive and participatory rehousing.

Most recently, my work has looked at the impact of Covid on urban governance, with fieldwork exploring its effects on low-income communities in Ahmedabad, Chennai,  and Thiruvananthapuram, India, work undertaken through British Academy funding and a Global Exchange Fellowship at Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

I am the joint editor of International Development Planning Review, and an editorial board member of Contemporary South Asia and Town Planning Review.

I am also an Honorary Associate Professor at School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.