Resilience to achieve Urban Transformation: Evidence from Delhi, India

Situating Indian urbanism, this paper attempts to delineate resilience as a central paradigm in the discourse on sustainable urban transformation. This paper highlights how the notion of resilience gets misconstrued to represent only urban transformation while ignoring an equally important aspect of urban adaptation. In India, the pressure to create world-class cities is so high, that there are frequent demolition of urban slums and informal settlements for urban gentrification. This exclusionary process often ignores that resilience is also about the protection of existing adaptive structures and not only about transforming urban areas by creating world-class cities. Microstoria antenarrative analysis is used as a methodology to capture the lived experiences of people affected by slum demolition in Delhi from 1990 through 2020. This analysis provides critical evidence against the grand narratives concerning urban transformation which form an integral part of grand narratives of macro- history of Indian urbanization. Resilience in under-researched in urban development and increased attention to resilience in urbanization can foster sustainable outcomes. Such a systematic inquiry can bolster the efforts towards achieving resilience which can then be instrumental in achieving inclusive participatory urbanization.