Staying Poor in a Rich City

Trained as an urban planner, Lalitha is an urbanist whose research interests focus on urbanization, local governance and planning, urban infrastructure, informality and public participation. She is particularly interested in learning from and theorizing everyday urbanisms and contributing to academic and practitioner networks within India and the Global South. Lalitha is with the Centre for Urban Policy and Governance, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Anirudh Krishna (PhD in Government, Cornell University, 2000; Masters in Economics, Delhi University, 1980) is the Edgar T. Thompson Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. His research investigates how poor communities and individuals in developing countries cope with the structural and personal constraints that result in poverty and powerlessness. His most recent book, The Broken Staircase: The Paradox and the Potential of India’s One-Billion (Cambridge University Press and Penguin Random House India), won the A. K. Coomaraswamy Award of the Association for Asian Studies. Krishna has authored or co-authored five other books, including the noticed, One Illness Away: Why People Become Poor and How they Escape Poverty (Oxford University Press, 2010), and more than seventy other journal articles and book chapters. He received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, Sweden in 2011 and several academic awards. Before returning to academia, Krishna spent 14 years with the Indian Administrative Service, managing diverse rural and urban development initiatives.

Alessandra Mezzadri is a feminist political economist based at SOAS, London, where she is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies. Her research interests focus on global commodity chains and labour regimes; the global garment industry; labour standards, CSR, Modern Slavery and ethical consumerism; feminisms in development and social reproduction approaches; India’s political economy; and Marxian methods for field-based research. She is the author of The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments ‘Made in India’ (Cambridge University Press, 2017, 2020). She is the editor of Marx in the Field.