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Reframing Cities for Resilience
Embracing Complex and Uncertain Futures
Speakers
Cities today face an unprecedented convergence of pressures — climate risks, infrastructure stress, institutional fragmentation, and rapid urban growth. As these challenges intensify, the question is not simply how cities expand, but whether our planning and governance frameworks are equipped to understand and respond to increasingly complex urban systems.
This conversation, hosted by Jana Urban Space Foundation and Janaagraha, is anchored in Arun Jain’s book, Reframing Cities for Resilience: Embracing Complex & Uncertain Futures. Drawing on global experience and insights from disciplines ranging from systems thinking and behavioural sciences to economics and technology, the book argues that cities must be understood as complex, interconnected systems. Building resilient futures, Jain suggests, requires making this complexity more comprehensible and embracing uncertainty rather than attempting to control it through conventional planning approaches.
In this talk, Arun Jain will begin with reflections on Bengaluru’s evolving urban challenges and assets, using the city as a point of entry into the book’s central ideas and their broader relevance for cities today. The lecture will be followed by brief responses from Dr. Champaka Rajagopal and Jaya Dhindaw, and then the discussion will open to the audience. Together, the conversation will explore what it takes to build cities that are not only resilient to shocks, but capable of navigating uncertainty and change.
Presented by:
Speakers
Arun Jain
Arun Jain is a multidisciplinary urban designer and strategist with over four decades of experience across professional practice and academia. This includes institutions, city executive positions, and the UN. His professional contributions span 165 cities across 46 countries, impacting over 90 public and private sector urban development projects.
A Fulbright Specialist and a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners, Arun has taught at six universities with contributions in both print and digital media. His new book Reframing Cities for Resilience: Embracing Complex & Uncertain Futures is published by Routledge.
Champaka Rajagopal
Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and Professor Affilié at the Urban School, Sciences Po Dr. Champaka Rajagopal is a senior researcher, educator, and practitioner, focused on urban policy, governance, planning, and infrastructure governance. She is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, India, Professor Affiliée at the Urban School, SciencesPo, Paris, France, and Founder and Director of The Entrepreneurship and Partnerships Lab. She also serves as a Trustee of the IJURR Foundation, UK. Her research interests lie in investigating state-business relationships, firms, entrepreneurship, and innovation, with a focus on commercial and contract laws, policies, governance, and mechanisms directed at privatisation. She draws on experiential learning from her more than two decades of engagement with multi-national corporations and international finance institutions, in India and abroad. Previously, as part of international consultancy firms, she co-led large statutory plans, including the Draft Development Plan for Greater Mumbai 2034 and Revised Master Plan 2015, Bengaluru, where the focus was to remove regulatory rigidity and regulatory capture.
In her two decades of practice across cities in the global South and the North, with international donors, national-state governments, businesses, markets, and communities, she has advanced the design of policies, regulatory processes, instruments, and mechanisms that deepen democratic processes and respond to place.
Jaya Dhindaw
Jaya Dhindaw brings over two decades of international experience in urban development, planning, and sustainability. She currently leads the Sustainable Cities program at WRI India, where she guides initiatives at the intersection of urban development, mobility, climate resilience, and planning. Her work focuses on advancing national and state-level reforms, building knowledge partnerships, and implementing place-based solutions that connect global expertise with local urban needs.
Before joining WRI India, Jaya led the Urban Planning and Infrastructure Development team at CISTUP at the Indian Institute of Science. She previously spent nearly a decade with the City of Charlotte, USA, working across the transit system and the planning department on strategic planning, compact growth strategies, and development regulations.
Jaya is a widely published author, speaker, and podcaster, and currently serves as Managing Associate Editor of the Journal of Sustainable Urbanization, Planning and Progress.
Srikanth Viswanathan
Srikanth Viswanathan is the Chief Executive Officer of Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, a Bengaluru, India based non-profits working towards the mission of transforming quality of life in India’s cities and towns. He also serves as the Executive Director of Jana Urban Space Foundation, a sister organisation of Janaagraha that works on the spatial planning and design of cities. Srikanth practises ‘city systems’ reforms and champions the application of systems thinking to urban reform agendas. He works closely with the senior leadership in union and state governments and constitutional bodies, such as the Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the Finance Commission of India, to shape and implement long-term reforms to city-systems in India. An Associate member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India for over twenty years, Srikanth worked in banking and audit before joining Janaagraha in 2011.
