This talk will think through what COVID-19 and the lockdowns – understood as joint events within a health and livelihood crisis – tell us about our enduring debates within urban practice on southern urbanisms, informality and social protection. It will think through what “relief” during and post COVID tell us about both the imagination and delivery of social protection in southern cities, using India as a place to think from. It will draw from three archives: the Government of Delhi’s emergency hunger relief in Delhi, impact surveys undertaken with a domestic workers union, as well as a national assessment on state and non-state forms of relief during the lockdowns in India.

Gautam Bhan is Senior Lead, Academics and Research, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, where he works on housing, urban theory, urban social protection. He is most recently the author of In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi, as well as co-editor of the Routledge Handbook for Planning in the Global South. Gautam is also a researcher on the international global project PEAK-Urban, which brings together five renowned academic institutions around the world and is managed by COMPAS at the University of Oxford. PEAK Urban seeks to produce and explore ground-breaking research on the greatest issues facing the contemporary city.