Event 1: Between the Ballot and the Blockade

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Monday 28 September | 5:30-7:00 PM | Room E403, NYU Shanghai New Bund Campus

Two recent books on democracy, crowds and representation in urban India meet in conversation. Lisa Björkman’s Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (Minnesota, 2025) follows the everyday theatre of political work in the city; Lisa Mitchell’s Hailing the State: Indian Democracy between Elections (Duke, 2023) reconceives collective assembly – sit-ins, strikes, blockades – as fundamental to how Indian democracy actually functions between elections. Together they ask how people hold officials to account and claim inclusion when the ballot is not in play.

Event 2: How to Study a City: Methods for Urban Research

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Tuesday 29 September | 3:45-5:15 PM | Room W516, NYU Shanghai New Bund Campus

Three urban ethnographers on how one actually studies a city: gaining access, following people and infrastructures, working across languages, and knowing when a method has stopped serving the question. Aimed at students thinking about fieldwork of their own, in Shanghai or elsewhere.

Event 3: WHO KEEPS THE CITY GOING? A round table on urban life in the global South

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Tuesday 29 September | 5:30-7:00 PM | Room E403, NYU Shanghai New Bund Campus

Cities are usually judged by their plans — and usually found wanting. But the plan is not what keeps a city running. That work is done by brokers and encroachers, drivers and hawkers, water intermediaries and street-level bureaucrats, whose improvisations are less a failure of planning than the way planning actually works. Four leading urbanists, working across Mumbai, Gurgaon, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Brazil and South Africa, sit down to compare notes: which of these practices travel between their cities, which stubbornly don’t, and what that tells us about who really governs the city. Open to the whole NYU Shanghai community.