‘Dehat in Flux: Facing climate anxiety in peri-urban Delhi’ is the second in the five-city masterclass series for Ordinary Ecologies of Repair: Youth, Urbanity, and Environmental Change in South Asia, a seminar series funded by the Urban Studies Foundation, spanning Hyderabad, Karachi, Delhi, Chennai, and Dhaka. The series proposes that young people are not a "future generation", but are already deeply engaged in sustaining urban life through quiet, ordinary and often unrecognised acts of “repair”. 

 

From rural villages like Ghummanhera that exist in Delhi’s metropolitan shadow to urban villages like Naraina hemmed in by the burgeoning city, youth are grappling with uncertainties around identity, land and ecological resources. Their efforts to document their lived experiences, contest policy and make claims, are making visible what the city prefers to forget. 

 

This masterclass, anchored by Dr Rohit Negi (Associate Professor, Public Policy and Management, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta), builds on the case of Ghummanhera’s persistent hydro-anxiety to shed light on how local responses are shaped by the layering of historical relations with water onto uncertain hydrologies and incremental state interventions. By highlighting particular climate anxieties in metropolitan peripheries, the session invites scholars, practitioners, researchers and students to re-examine agrarian entanglements in the urbanisation trajectories of cities in the Global South.