India’s cities are on a breakneck path to growth. Cities are engines of prosperity and promise, but also concentrations of pollution, stress, and disease. Episodes of flood, drought, heat waves, and smog tell us why we must begin to think ecologically about the urban future of Indian cities. Many Indian cities were built on a firm basis of local ecology, drawing on the rivers, lakes, forests, grasslands, and coastal areas around them for food, water and building material. Yet over centuries the human population has grown and transformed the ecology of our cities beyond recognition. This talk will discuss how we need to learn from our past urban history, to re-design our cities to accommodate ecology. This is essential to ensure human wellbeing and resilience to climate change.
Harini Nagendra is Director of the Azim Premji University Research Center and leads the University’s Center for Climate Change and Sustainability. Over the past 25 years, she has been at the leading edge of research examining conservation in forests and cities of South Asia from the perspective of both landscape ecology and social justice. For her interdisciplinary research and practice, she has received a number of awards including the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize from the US National Academy of Sciences, the 2013 Elinor Ostrom Senior Scholar award, and the 2017 Clarivate Web of Science award. Her publications include the books “Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future” (Oxford University Press, 2016) and “Cities and Canopies: The Tree Book of Indian Cities” (Penguin, 2019) as well as recent papers in Nature, Nature Sustainability, and Science. She writes a monthly column ‘The Green Goblin’ in the Deccan Herald newspaper and is a well-known public speaker and writer on issues of urban sustainability in India.
The Guest lecture is part of the IUSD Lecture series and will be held in English via Cisco Webex on Thursday, January 14, 2021 / 12:00-13:00 CET.
Join us using the event-related information below:
Meeting link: https://unistuttgart.webex.com/unistuttgart-en/j.php?MTID=mbec84d525d2abe0b54a509ffb4c85903
Meeting number: 121 867 9837
Password: urYN2i7fRy3