Brokered Resilience Climate-Resilient Spatial Reconfigurations as Strategic Governance in Informal Labor Geographies, Case of Surat.

Abstract

As emerging economies strive to build more climate-resilient cities, urban regions are constantly (re) articulating which relations need to be made resilient, how, and in response to which crises. Amid growing calls for global urban climate-economic restructuring, southern ‘resilient cities’ are stepping into a new era of climate-resilient urbanism. As these cities aspire to enhanced climate-resilient economies, the need to contextualize emergent climate-resilient relational practices, logic, and reconfigurations acquires greater urgency. Against this backdrop, this study traces institutional resilience practices in relation to migrant labor geographies in Surat, a port city located on India’s West coast. By examining the spatial intersections of climate-resilient reconfigurations and informal labor through a relational approach, this research foregrounds labor and labor geographies as constrained spatial agentic forces in emergent climate-resilient urbanism. This perspective builds on critical observations regarding the marginalization of labor and labor geographies in climate urbanism scholarship. The discursive-material reconfigurations in labor geographies highlight the intertwined spatial production of informal labor geographies, risk, and resilience in southern cities. This intertwined production motivates an inquiry into the differential encounters of resilience with urban heterogeneity in the city’s prime economic labor geographies. The study uncovers critical dimensions of Surat’s ongoing climate-resilient narratives, logic, and spatial reconfigurations within these heterogeneous labor geographies. Overall, these insights contribute to the broader argument of the thesis – that resilience functions as a spatial strategy to manage and govern labor amid climate-economic shifts in the region. Conceptually, this research builds on several subfields within the social sciences, including critical climate studies, urban infrastructure studies, urban science and technology studies, and labor geography. Methodologically, it employs institutional ethnographic and case narrative methods to pursue a relational inquiry at the intersections of climate infrastructural practices, spatial risk management and governance, and informal labor geographies. At its core, this study advances our understanding of climate-resilient urbanism and racialized labor geographies from the perspective of differential spatial management and governance.