Civic Learning and Urban Problem Solving in Risky Times: A Youth Perspective

Youth have been seen as vital to delivering India’s demographic dividend, but today, face a compounding crisis of rising unemployment, climate risk and democratic decline. India’s cities, far from being spaces of emancipation for caste- and gender-marginalized youth, exacerbate this sense of crisis by failing to deliver quality employment and infrastructure. Through testimonies of youth from disadvantaged social and spatial locations, Mukta Naik narrates cities as laboratories where youth learn to articulate, cope with, and repair problems through everyday encounters with people, spaces, institutions and networks. Youth do not merely read the city to fit into precast roles like the beneficiary, entrepreneur, or future leader. In practice, everyday acts of risk-taking, negotiation, and repair allow youth to generate important civic knowledge that is missing from prevalent urban planning and governance debates. In this seminar, she explores how these youth-generated knowledges and practices of civic learning could inform our ideas of urban resilience.

Mukta Naik is an architect and urban planner with longstanding research interests in urban informality, housing and internal migration in India. As Fellow, Sustainable Futures Collaborative, New Delhi, she works at the intersections of labor, urban planning, and climate adaption. She is currently based at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis as an Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow, working on a manuscript on the role of cities in shaping youth resilience, aspirations, and transformational pathways. Naik has previously worked at reputed Indian policy think tanks like the Centre for Policy Research and the National Institute of Urban Affairs lectured at SPA Delhi, TISS Hyderabad, and Ambedkar University Delhi. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban Development and Governance from the Institute of Housing and Urban Development Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam.