Abstract:

Across the world’s great cities — Mumbai and Chennai, São Paulo and Rio, Johannesburg and Cape Town — a quiet but consequential pattern repeats itself. How citizens engage with the state, what they can claim, and whether they are heard at all turns out to depend less on formal rights than on social position. And it plays out in virtually every fast-growing city on earth, particularly in the cities of the Global South.

In this public lecture, Professor Patrick Heller will present findings from the Citizenship, Inequality, and Urban Governance (CIUG) project — a landmark study surveying over 30,000 households across Indian cities — and set them against two decades of comparative research in Brazil and South Africa. The picture that emerges is vivid and unsettling:

Social position shapes not just what you have in a city, but whether the city hears you at all.

Drawing on case studies from Mumbai, São Paulo, and Johannesburg, Heller will trace how cities that look radically different on the surface — in history, politics, and geography — reproduce the same hidden hierarchies of access and voice. He will ask what it takes to break this pattern, pointing to moments in Brazil’s participatory governance experiments and India’s rights-based welfare movements where things began to shift.

The talk will close with an open question for Shanghai: as one of the world’s most dynamic and rapidly transforming metropolises, what does its experience reveal about the relationship between urban growth, governance, and the quality of citizenship? The floor will be open for discussion.

Speaker’s Bio:
Patrick Heller is the Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences and Director of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs. His comparative research spans India, Brazil, and South Africa, and has shaped global debates on democracy, urban governance, and inequality.

Chair
Dr. Sangeeta BANERJI 
Assistant Professor, NYU Shanghai

Discussant Dr. Min TANG
Research Professor, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University

Prof. Shih, Chih-yu
Professor, School of Political Science & International Relations, Tongji University