 Welcome, everyone, to the six GESAP Lectures in Planning series. Today we have the pleasure of welcoming Nima Khurvar, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. Nima's research focuses on international organization, particularly issues related to small cities and their regions and on institutional structures for equitable planning and development at the local level. She has explored various aspects of the role of public agencies and non-governmental organizations in planning and development, primarily in South Asia but also in the US. She also has an interest in pedagogical experiments around citizenship and sustainability planning. Khurvar is the faculty leader of the Nilgeries Field Learning Center, a disciplinary collaboration between a group of faculty at Cornell and the Keystone Foundation in India since 2011. Today's lecture will focus on the Field Learning Center's Water and Waste Project based in villages and small towns in the Nilgeries to both describe their work being done at the NFLC and the ways in which it shapes theorizing in the realms of engaged research and learning and small city urbanization. After the lecture we'll open the floor for questions and with this please join me in welcoming our speaker. Thank you, guys. I'm wondering if you want to come forward. It's sort of strange to see all the empty seats and so we can just have a conversation. I have some prepared comments but we can open up and just do, yeah, just have a conversation. Might be more fun. And you can leave midway. You don't have to sit at the back. So thanks, Guy. Three thanks for the invitation and for the rest of the committee who I met very briefly. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to do three things. First I'll, you know, I'll just sort of walk you through and describe the Nilgeries Field Learning Center. We call it the NFLC. So you know a little bit about the place and the project that has been in the making for the past eight years. Second, I want to describe this pedagogical experiment. And within that, you know, there's something that we do called the Crossing Boundaries Exercise that the students have dubbed the CBE. And I'm going to walk you through one of those to show you how it links out to both the thematic and the methodological learning that takes place at the NFLC. The CBE also demonstrates how we, and I'm quoting here from an article we wrote, invite and structure cultural collisions that present opportunities for fundamental reflections on what constitutes valid knowledge, the fluidity of cultural norms, and the range of social and ecological interactions that structure opportunities and constraints to conservation, unquote. And I must add, they're also two livelihoods. The program is bilingual. It is conducted in Tamil and English, and it is multi-vocal, by which I mean we seek to integrate knowledge pluralism, interdisciplinarity, lived experience, and diversity into each interaction at the NFLC and into the ongoing research projects. The projects themselves have emerged from conversations with community members. So finally, I want to take what we learned from the Water and Waste Project, which is one of several at the NFLC. I co-lead it, and I want to take that project to make some observations on small city urbanization and sort of theorizing small cities and think about that problem space of this larger theoretical project that I've been engaged in for close to 15 years. I mean it's a bit of a tall order, and I might rush at times, but slow me down if you need to, and I thought it's worth a try. So these are sort of the seven binaries that we work against at the Neel Giri's Fiend Learning Center. So the NFLC, it's a deeply intentional collaborative experiment that brings together the expertise and the lived experience of four groups. This is the landing page of the website, and I'm just going to take pieces of it to walk you through what the project is. And so these four groups that I'm talking about are the Adivasi Communities of the Neel Giri's Biosphere Reserve. It's the first sort of UN-declared biosphere in the world. It includes the staff of an eco-development NGO, the Keystone Foundation. You see them on top over there. And a group of faculty researchers at a U.S. university, Cornell, and two groups of students, Cornell undergraduates from across disciplines, much like their faculty, and young people from the Adivasi communities that Keystone works with. So the NFLC is based in Kota Giri. It's a small town in the Neel Giri's district, which Gayatri has visited, I know, and some others here in the audience, including my daughter who's sitting right there. And so it's a small town in the Neel Giri's district in the biosphere. And the biosphere itself is part of this very large area, the green diagram there, called the Western Ghats. And it sort of goes all along the southwestern coast of India. And this is a very important region for India, not only because of its biodiversity, its mountainous and forested, but it also regulates all of India's monsoonal climate. So it's extremely important. Now in parts, the Western Ghats are highly urbanized. And you can see that if you place the two diagrams next to each other. And it has a thriving economy, again in several parts, I mean, it changes a lot. But the economy is typically based on commercial agriculture and on mining. And in terms of agriculture, it's tea, coffee, spices, rubble, the further south you go. And it has a thriving tourist economy up and down the Ghats. So our classroom is on Keystone's campus. And these are some of the cities in the Western Ghats. And our classroom is really on the Keystone campus. And so, which is in Kota Giri, as I mentioned before. And we roam Keystone's production centers. They have four across the biosphere, the towns and the villages in the biosphere itself, and the varying ecologies of the biosphere. You can see that in the images there. The NFLC is anchored around a year-long commitment that students make, where they spend one semester in Ithaca or in Kota Giri, depending on which group they belong to, preparing to be a part of the NFLC. And then they spend 15 weeks together in Kota Giri, engaged in an integrated curriculum on sustainability that requires them, again, to spend seven weeks in the classroom and seven weeks in the field doing research in teams. And these research projects, as I mentioned before, are really, as you see them here, in the various parts of the NFLC. And here's the program. And like I mentioned before, the projects have emerged in conversations with community members. So it took us three years to actually put the projects together. And then we launched the part which included our students. So Keystone's Tribal Advisory Council, community members from the places where we work. Keystone staff, they are about 70 now. Government officials and others who we engage with all come together through these various projects. And they all attend the presentations that the students make in summer at the end of the semester. So our research focuses on, and there are these learning rhythms that take place over the semester and stuff that we have learned to structure it over the years that we've been doing this. So I'm going to go back to that. So our research focuses on four main areas. The first is ecological conservation. And it follows projects that Keystone runs in their Satyamangalam Center, which is now in the middle of a tiger reserve, a newly declared tiger reserve in India. We have a whole set of projects around environmental governance or planning, environmental planning, where we study the impacts of things like the Forest Strikes Act. We try and understand how non-timber forest produce collection works and its impact on livelihoods and why lands are left fallow and so on and so forth. There is a health and nutrition stream and it follows maternal and child nutrition. It follows traditional health systems, as well as community wellness more broadly. And finally, there is the urbanization stream, which is the piece that I'm connected to. Ironically, the Nilgiris is Tamil Nadu's most urbanized district after Madhya Chennai, which is the main center and Coimbatore, which are the two largest cities in the state. Now our focus in terms of the urbanization stream, there's a long-term project where we've been studying water and waste. And it's the backbone infrastructure that undergirds the urban. So we look at that. But like all other projects at the NFLC, we are stretched and pulled and influenced and shaped by our interactions with the other work that happens. So we've done a series of projects that look at human wildlife interaction, particularly the presence of wild bison that are leaving the forest to come into the towns, the gore. We also look a lot at health questions, health of people and environments and how that ties in with questions of waste in particular. So now you have a sense of the NFLC and I am, how many slides behind? Not that bad. And I'm going to sort of move, shift gears and talk about what I said would be the second part of the talk, which is really this idea of a crossing, this pedagogical experiment called the crossing boundaries exercise, right? Now these exercises take place most mornings during the first seven weeks of the classroom phase of the Kottagiri semester. At its core, the CBE, as the students call it, is designed as situated language learning. You're learning two languages at the same time and it's grounded in experiential knowledge of the weekly theme. So the entire semester is structured around weekly themes that tie back to our research projects. It intentionally focuses on our bodies and ourselves and the places we inhabit in the process creating what we think of as cross-cultural collisions on many fronts. The teaching teams, we always work in a team. It's a Cornell faculty member or we have faculty from Hawaii and Syracuse who are part of our group. So but it's a US-based faculty member along with an NGO staffer. And so the teaching teams have honed in on a common structure and that's what you see laid out on that slide. And we sort of, we share a certain rhythm to the structure of the CBE. We populate it with the content that sort of emerges from our themes. And then, you know, we link it back to both thematic and methodological issues in our week, the week that we teach. We have also learned that the conversations that are sparked during these exercises and the debriefs that follow with each group of students present some of the most important learning frontiers at the NFLC. I've already talked about the teaching team. I'll tell you very briefly that the US-based faculty come from the fields of medical anthropology, natural resources, ecology, musicology, and planning. Okay, so there are many examples of CBEs. There's one, you know, and like I said, we've designed, I didn't say that, but we've designed maybe over two dozen. There are multiple CBEs every week. Now, what I'm going to do, and they typically, you know, they have this structure of five questions with a certain rhythm with certain things that we always do. And remember, it's about learning language. So the English speakers are learning Tamil and Tamil speakers are learning English. What I want to do here is actually walk you through maybe this one, counting and taking measure using the body. So it's like the third exercise we do. And the idea here is to start thinking about measurement and to start thinking about what it means to take measure. You know, so for an American student, you're just going to say, oh, yeah, we use the inch and the whatever or, you know, use a metric system. But our Adivasi students, for them, this is a culturally grounded method. And so the carpenter uses the RD, which is this measure, right? The wild honey hunter groups that we work with, the corumbas and the irula measure creepers to weave ladders using the mar. And you'll see that on the on the drawing up there. We buy Jasmine in local markets by the mullum, which is this measure, right? And it goes on like that. It allows us to think about, you know, how deep do you dig to measure a grave? It allows us to talk about those questions later in the so it opens up several ideas about what we use measure for and how it's grounded in daily lived life and experience. And of course, the Americans are at a real disadvantage because all they can say is in feet mile, you end there, right? And it's really quite an interesting exercise. It allows us to do several other things. Later in the week, we talk about sort of other ways of representation and we think about how indigenous communities across the world in Australia. This is from an aborigine map or the Marshall Islands. You've seen the stick maps for ocean currents or various communities in the US, how they map and represent their worlds. We learn about sort of the abstraction of a culturally grounded method. So we go around and we learn a method, right? We learn the survey. We go around the entire classroom or the campus saying how much is each person's mullum? No two people are going to have exactly the same mullum, but then it allows us to teach the concept of survey, right? And an average and therefore abstraction and what that means. So we're able to both methodologically talk about mapping, representation, distance, and the idea of the survey. So we have another exercise where we map the campus in parts and that's the image that you see at the bottom. And you're only allowed to use your body to map the entire campus. So and you learn, you know, the importance of collaboration to produce knowledge about place. Because the Adivasi students, of course, they know each tree, they know each leaf, they know the various kinds of soils and our students all having to learn that across this language barrier. And then we also learn because everybody has to collaborate to create the entire map about sort of representational scale, right? So through this very simple CBE that opens up the question of measure as grounded culturally, we're able to get to so many other questions. The mapping and representation exercises extend out so that people can learn, you know, so we're doing other field trips and they learn to sort of create sort of other kinds of maps. We hear they're making maps about the biosphere reserve and then they learn how to actually use maps to elicit information. You sort of doing participatory action research methods, right? So I'm sure you're all familiar with transit, walk, social mapping, things like community timelines. So all of these are very fundamental methods that are used when you do participatory action research. So all of that work in this one week is feeding into these various kinds of methods that our students do when they go out into the field. So when our students do go out into the field, which would be seven weeks from when these exercises happen, all they're learning, all the learning that they're doing in the classroom and more sits behind whatever they're doing out in the field. And the observations that they're making that translate back into maps and things like QGIS because they also learn stuff all the way to doing that. The CBEs, therefore, in this example that I gave you, are a critical, pedagogical tool that together operationalize the tensions and the complementarities evident in these seven binary relations that I laid out that I just sort of showed you in the beginning. And that are fundamental and central to how we, to what we work against and through at the NFLC. Okay, I'm going to shift gears again and talk about the project on water and waste. It's one of the four streams, the urban, it's one of the sort of two sets of projects within the urban stream and one of four research streams at the NFLC. So I co-lead this, as I said before. Now, if you go to the Neil Guineas or if any of you have been to India, you know that there's trash everywhere. There isn't a single place, you know, even deep in the forest, there's trash. And the most common sort of trash are these tiny plastic single-use sachets and packets. And you see them all over, bright, shiny little things. And so there's pan masala packages, there's shampoo sachets that, you know, promise to turn your hair into that like dreamy white girl who's on TV. It's just very strange and deeply sad thing. But anyway, so towns have garbage dumps like this one. This is in Kothagiri, beautiful hill town. And then if you can see, you know, just next to the tea plantations, right? We still call them plantations. It's you have these big garbage dumps everywhere. Now, this is a big community concern. So when we started to have conversations in the Neil Guineas about the kinds of projects that we wanted to focus on, garbage and trash would come up all the time. So so this project, much like all the projects in the Neil Guineas, like I said, emerges from these community conversations. And it seeks to build on the expertise and sort of practical expertise that Keystone already possesses. So Keystone has done a lot of work for about 15 years when we started working with them on water, on water resources. They've mapped them, they host something called the India Water Portal, which is a water portal that NGOs use. They host the Neil Guineas Water Portal and they've done enormous amounts of work doing resource inventories, right? So they had all this prior work and practical expertise on water. The community's concern was with garbage and trash. And I have worked, I mean, my prior work is on waste as well. And so we brought these pieces together in the water and waste project. So Keystone's sort of, you know, understanding of water, the hydraulic territories within the Neil Guineas, the hydrology of the Neil Guineas, understanding water as a cultural resource, different Adivasi communities have different relationships with water. So, you know, and the linkage of water to both health and human rights. I mean, all of this was central to the project. The other thing that they had done, which I just want to show you briefly is, you know, so these are some of the kind of mapping things that they have. They've also done restoration projects because the ecology of the Neil Guineas is such that the, you know, the Neil Guineas, there's a lot of spring, seasonal springs that emerge in certain parts of the year. And these seasonal springs are tied very closely to certain sorts of native species and solar montane forests. And so they've been involved in smaller kind of experimental projects to do reforestation with native plants, to work the, you know, sort of the whole sort of toilet rebuilding infrastructure with government funding, bring that together to think about both wetland and spring restoration projects. So they have that sort of experimental knowledge as well. So keeping all this in mind, Bala, who's my co-lead at Keystone, and I mapped a five-year project, right? And what our interest really was was to take a rural urban transect. And this, of course, goes back to what I know of how small city urbanization sort of work occurs. And so the rural urban transect is a super important piece for us. And so what we really did was we drew this transect and we took Adivasi and non-Adivasi communities, you know, along one particular river, the Kulur River, which is a fairly important river in the Nibiris, in this part of the Nibiris, and we sought to actually describe and understand the water and waste problem. I mean, the real nice linkage is that all waste flows along the water streams, right? And so we sought to do that. So our projects focus started at the level of the household and the person. We collected information on what was working, what was not working. I can tell you all kinds of things about the way gender works, the way age works, in terms of how people use facilities, how they put together facilities. We looked at how bacterial contamination takes place, the role of sort of livestock, wild animals like monkeys, and so on and so forth. We tracked, we continue to track health outcomes and our students help quite a bit. You know, they help the community health workers doing advocacy work. So this was all sort of happening and continues to happen, you know, every year as we work our way through the projects. Now, along with looking at household and community level infrastructure, we also sought to understand and I'm showing you drawings that were made for community presentations, right? So you'll see everything is in English and Tamil and it's drawn by folks in the villages and by our students. And so we also study waste collection mechanisms, management systems. We understand, we try and understand the role of civic and municipal bodies and we follow the waste stream as it takes over springs and rivers, right? And it contaminates water that is used by people, by wildlife, by the forests, in the guards. There is a piece to this which sort of is about how we would work if we continued to go downstream to Coimbatore or the cities of the Congunadu, which are the cities in the plains or the larger cities like Chennai. But for now, we're really quite focused within the Nilgiris. Now, the other thing that we've also done is we've tracked recycling networks and this is quite important, right? And so this is work that I've done in other parts of the country as well. But in the Nilgiris, what's really important is that it operates in some ways much like the rest of India where there is a thriving informal economy around recycling and trash as a source of livelihood. But it's important in that it links the Nilgiris to the plains in completely different ways than one would expect or what even folks who live in the Nilgiris expect, right? Now, this is what leads me to the final part of this talk and then we'll open up and have a conversation. And what I want to do here is really theorize for a couple of minutes, small city urbanization. So why do small cities matter to us? And I'm going to skip over this slide. Why do small cities matter? There's a simple demographic fact. Most people live there. And when I say small cities, I'm talking about cities less than 100,000 in population. The majority, the bulk of the world's urban residents live in these places. In India alone, about 70% of India's urban residents live in small places. Yet, and these are places that are poorer and I've written a lot about it and there's a lot of writing coming out about it. They are poorer, they are less well resourced and lower capacities for planning or for any other kind of economic development work than their metropolitan counterparts. And yet, all our theorizing is rooted in big places. And it makes me so uneasy. So we've managed to shift away from all our theorizing being rooted in London, Frankfurt, Munich, New York, and LA. We've moved away from that. But we haven't, and then we've moved away from that and now we talk Mumbai, Shanghai and, you know, I don't know, Lagos. You can name many other very large cities. We're about 20% of urban residents in the global south live. We don't talk about the Kota Giris and the Mangalors and I can name you many, many, many other places where, like I said, everybody lives. So this is sort of my, the problem space and I'm using David Scott's term here. You know, this is the problem space that I inhabit and I've been inhabiting now for over a decade. So, and here's a map of, yeah. So look at how many smaller places there are just in southern India. Southern India is more urbanized than northern India. But look at this, this is Kaila, right? This is a typical sort of desiccota pattern. And look at the number of cities we're talking about, right? This is Mangalore, at the tip over there, and this is where the new uses. So I'm in the western cuts in terms of all my work either in the hills or in the coast. So my, you know, the largest small cities project has many facets and I'll just mention a few here. I don't want to go into them in any detail. So I explore at some length, I have explored how identity markers, such as caste, indigeneity, gender or class, remain salient, right? And they are durable. So there are durable inequalities that keep getting reproduced regardless of the kinds of interventions one makes. And these durable inequalities shape political and economic outcomes. It shapes planning, whether you're looking at planning as city maintenance or a city design or a city building. I have explored how informality in land and labor markets and waste disposal in other selected economic activities. There's a whole range of them, including floriculture, right? How it's deeper and more widespread in the smallest places that I look at. What I want to do here though in closing is to really focus on just one issue. How small cities allow us to theorize scale, right? And for those of you following urban theory, you know it's a big deal. Because when we think about scale, that's when we're able to think about intervention. So for planners, assuming many of you are, and for geographers, theorizing scale becomes quite central to how we think about action. So in Mangalore, I studied mobility. And I followed, like I said, various commodities, the jasmine flower production, sort of including being one of them. I looked at trash, much like I do in the Nilgirdies. Now in a neighborhood focused ethnography where people had come together to establish a waste collection and disposal system, I showed how a different notion of the middle class prevailed. It was not the middle class of the big cities in urban theory. These were people closer to the idea of, if you follow Kwame Anthony Apaya's work or Vinay Gidwani and Shivi's work on Rooted Cosmopolitans. You know, it is much closer to that idea of cosmopolitanism. It's bound strongly by strictures of religion, caste and gender. And it's more rooted in the rural sense. Even though these rooted cosmopolitans seek a kind of modernity that allows for garbage-free streets, parks to take children to, clean water from taps. So there's a very particular kind of modernity that is being sought out, imagined, fought for. Now these are not the cosmopolitans of urban theory that we all read so much about. Neither are they the subalterns that sort of southern urbanism, southern urbanist writers now extoll, right? Or that the southern turn would like to see. This is not a subaltern urbanism of that sort. Now putting aside the people for the moment and focusing just on the trash, what fascinates me is the ways in which the materiality of trash, like that of water, separately and written a lot about, produces scale, or it produced scale in the work that I was doing. Now unlike production and disposal, which occurs within or close to city boundaries, recycling follows a completely different logic. So in Mangalor, and I do want you to look at this diagram. So this is Mangalor city. And these are all the other cities that are around it in this region, right? So all the pet bottles from the entire region all go to this one town, Karkar, where someone who's very high caste and this is highly unusual, right, has set up a very mechanized, swank new facility to recycle these pet bottles and to create plastic pellets. These reprocessed plastic pellets that are being produced in Karkar go all the way to Delhi. That's how good quality they are. Mangalor is a rich town. The buses, the public buses that run in Mangalor, because it's a very well-established region. So between Mangalor and Budapest alone, for example, there'll be up to about 50 buses a day. And there's swank new Volvo buses, right? We're not talking about the old buses that clatter around in northern India. So these swank buses are sold seven years to the dot, to Bihar, Jharkhand, the poorer regions in India. And there is an entire economy of recycling and repurposing that works across the country. And that's the networks that Mangalor is and Dakshan Canada, this region, and Udpi, are all sort of hooked into. Similar systems operate in the new cities as well. So these are the little towns that we're talking about. There's Kothigiri, Kunur, and there's Utti over here. So your home will be somewhere here, right? Here. Okay. So in the Nilgiris, you'll see, okay, that little diagram isn't there. Oh, it's not there. I'm ending, I'm ending soon. Okay. So in the Nilgiris, and you might have seen sort of images elsewhere in the talk, a first order recycler is often a chap on a bicycle or a moped or a little motorbike. And he's got loads of things tied all over to his vehicle and he's going from village to village, hamlet to hamlet, collecting things, buying things. These first order recyclers make their way once in two months, once in three months into the forest, into the villages that are in the forest as well, right? So there's a very active economy of recycling. There are cell phone arranged truck pickups and routes all along the Nilgiris where these first order recyclers bundle and leave things at appointed places that the trucks then pick up. There are second order recyclers or bundlers in the various towns as well. And all the stuff that is bundled goes down to a place called Metropolium, which is in the foothills of the Nilgiris. And from there, depending on what kind of plastic or paper or metal we're talking about, it will go to various other towns which are, here's Metropolium, it should go to various other towns which are in the coconut belt, so Eero, Salem, and so on. Now what's really interesting is that these territories of recycling operate at different scales and these are regional scales, right? Very different from how we think about the city and how we think about how you plan for a city. They're not bounded in the same kinds of ways. In large cities like Mumbai and Delhi, people like again, Gidwani who studies waste in detail, notes that most of these networks are located within city boundaries. So it allows cities to think about waste and recycling in completely different ways. So scale and related to it, action, planning, right? Is that shaped by the analytical unit one is looking at? Are we talking water? Are we talking floriculture? Are we talking cardboard recycling and so on, trash? It is shaped and this seems kind of self-evident but something we don't think about enough. It is shaped by the size of the place where a particular process takes place. But I think what's not self-evident and I've given you some stories, some hints, not very much, we can talk about it more. But what is much less self-evident is the ways in which scale is shaped. All our actions are shaped by networks of relations amongst all the people who actually operate within that particular economic activity, right? And that there are temporalities that are particular to place in region. That again, structure and shape these relationships. So I'm going to end here and what I wanted to sort of go back to was I started to talk about, to describe a collaborative project, right? The NFLC, it works across several binaries and boundaries as I pointed out. I produced particular pedagogical instruments and I used one, the Crossing Boundaries exercises to really talk about the kinds of work we do within the classroom, sort of writ large, right? And it allowed me to also sort of present to you particular ways in which the research strategies began to emerge. What it has sort of allowed me to do, which was the last part of the talk, was it's allowed me to sort of feel my way through this profound unease I have with urban theory and urban theory informs all planning. And so I remain deeply uneasy and uncomfortable about the way we do urban theorizing. And it's allowed me to find a language through engagement. So the NFLC project, the project that I do on small city urbanization will always remain unfinished much like the cities and environments that it seeks to understand. I also know that it will always involve invention. We're constantly talking about how we create new mechanisms, modes, tools. We borrow, we invent, we reinvent, we change. And there are multiple small experiments ongoing in data collection and storytelling and in exploration. So with that thought, I'm gonna end and just open up. Hopefully we can have a conversation about your concerns and mine. So thank you.