Join us for an intellectual weekend.

Date: 15 March 2026

Time: 1 - 4 PM

Venue: The Big Small Cafe + Bar, Dadar West

The price of the ticket includes food & drinks.

About the lecture

Metropolitan urbanisation in India is largely a patchwork — with gated communities and pockets of luxury infrastructure and consumption coexisting alongside informal settlements, broken public transport, and eroding commons. As a result, we have arrived at a situation where even elites residing in these cities are not truly enthused by their metropolitan experience. Clearly, the masses fare far worse.

Often, the response to suboptimal living conditions is to blame the authorities and migrant workers. While it is convenient to target the usual scapegoats — politicians, builders, and bureaucrats — for the broken condition of our cities, the deeper reasons lie elsewhere. Indian cities are, in many ways, a reflection of the country’s social structure.

They reveal a lack of consensus on civic values and social compact, poor citizenship education, and the absence of a shared socio-cultural and economic vision. In this talk, I will examine these issues in detail and explore pathways toward achieving an aspirational quality of life in our metropolitan spaces.

About the speaker

Dr Anup Tripathi is working as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at FLAME University, Pune, India. He obtained his PhD and Master’s degrees from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

His areas of interest include Urban Studies and Housing. He has published articles in several publications on themes such as homelessness, walkability in Indian cities, housing as care infrastructures, and the portrayal of labour in media.

He currently teaches Urban Sociology, Sociological Theory, Indian Society and Culture, and Urban Studies. He enjoys reading and travelling, and is an avid follower of Indian politics, cricket, and cinema.