The Hidden Infrastructure of Urban Resilience

Cities aren’t just structures. They’re people. In the rapidly urbanising cities of the global majority, many of those people are migrant workers.  They often work informally, with limited protection when shocks hit. At the same time, they are vital to propping up and rebuilding cities after climate disasters. In this week’s Cities 1.5 podcast episode, host David Miller speaks to Ritwika Basu, an environmental social scientist and urbanist who researches this invisible labour in small and medium-sized cities in India.

Featured guests:

Ritwika Basu, Environmental Social Scientist and Urbanist, and one of the guest editors of the Journal City Climate Policy and Economy’s soon to be released Special Issue on Adaptation and Resilience in Cities of the Majority World: Advancing Equity and Justice in Practice, and Author of “Hidden Infrastructure of Urban Resilience: Labor, Precarity, and Economic Adaptation in India” which will be released to open access on April 15, 2026.

Links:

Resilient Cities (and how to build them) - Cities 1.5

Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy

Resources on Urban Climate Resilience - C40 Knowledge Hub

Good Green Jobs and Labour Migration: Opportunities for Urban Leaders - C40 Knowledge Hub

If you want to learn more about the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, please visit our website at https://jccpe.utpjournals.press/

Listen to the Cities 1.5 five-part miniseries “Going Steady with Herman Daly: How to Unbreak the Economy (and the Planet)" here: https://lnk.to/HDMiniSeries

Cities 1.5 is produced by the University of Toronto Press and the C40 Centre, and is supported by C40 Cities. Sign up to the Centre newsletter: https://thecentre.substack.com/

Writing and executive production by Peggy Whitfield.

Narrative and communications support by Chiara Morfeo.

Produced by Jess Schmidt: https://jessdoespodcasting.com/

Edited by Morgane Chambrin: https://www.morganechambrin.com/

Music by Lorna Gilfedder: https://origamipodcastservices.com/

Transcript

[theme music]

David 00:01

I’m David Miller and you’re listening to Cities 1.5, a podcast exploring how cities are leading global change through local climate action. [music ends]

[fast rhythmic music] Climate policy has come a long way. The science is stronger than ever, the frameworks are multiplying, and city leaders around the world are increasingly stepping up where national governments have fallen short. But there’s a piece that’s still catching up, evidence on the equitable impacts of climate policies on city residents. Evidence grounded in real places, real economies, and real people translated into something a mayor can act on. That’s exactly why the C40 Center launched the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy; to build that bridge between academic research and the people making decisions on the ground. [music ends]

[rousing music] Right now, those decision makers need this evidence more than ever. Climate risks are accelerating: extreme heat, flooding, disrupted agriculture, shifting seasons. Cities are absorbing shocks that are arriving far faster than adaptation strategies can keep up with. At the same time, we’re living through a period of profound economic instability. Decisions made in Washington DC ripple outward, hitting global trade flows, disrupting supply chains, and landing hardest on the workers at the end of those chains. A tariff announcement in one capital can mean a textile worker in a city on literally the other side of the planet suddenly has no orders, no income, and no safety net. These two pressures, climate and economic, compound each other. No city in the world is fully insulated from that dynamic whether you’re in the Global Majority , or in Europe, or even Canada.

Urban resilience frameworks have historically focused on infrastructure, on systems, on buildings, and drainage, and sea walls. But cities aren’t just structures. At the heart, they’re people. In the rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global Majority, many of those people are migrant workers. Often, new city comers are internal migrants following rural to urban flows that the climate crisis itself is accelerating. They also work informally, with limited protection when shocks hit. A new paper in the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy looks hard at that reality through the lens of small and medium-sized Indian cities. What it finds has lessons that reach far beyond India. [music ends]

[slow rhythmic music] Ritwika Basu is an environmental social scientist and urbanist working at the intersections of critical and applied urban studies, climate societal transitions, and the science policy interface. She’s also a guest editor for the journal’s special issue on adaptation and resilience in cities of the majority world, ‘Advancing Equity and Justice in Practice’, which will be released to open access April 15, 2026, and the author of the paper ‘Hidden Infrastructure of Urban Resilience: Labor, Precarity, and Economic Adaptation in India’, released in that special issue. [music ends]

Ritwika Basu 04:03

[phone rings] [whooshing] Ritwika Basu, I’m an environmental social scientist and critical geographer, and I’m joining the podcast from Philadelphia today. [handset clicks]

David 04:14

Ritwika, thank you so much for joining us on Cities 1.5 today.

Ritwika Basu 04:19

Of course, thanks for having me.

David 04:22

So, I also have to thank you. You are the guest editor of our journal, so thank you so much for all of your very hard work indeed in helping that issue be produced and birthed.

Ritwika Basu 04:37

Thank you. It’s actually been a privilege to sort of work with such an international team working on different angles of resilience and adaptation in majority cities. And just also, I’m humbled to be part of this podcast. I’ve been listening to the conversations in this podcast in the last few months, and it’s an incredible lineup of cutting-edge ideas and speakers talking about frontline communities, to climate finance investment, to, like, a full spectrum of different spheres of climate influence. It’s truly a privilege to situate this work within this larger set of conversations.

David 05:16

So, I need to get to the term majority world or Global Majority versus Global South. But first of all, I need you to introduce yourself and give a bit of your background so our listeners can understand where you’re coming from.

Ritwika Basu 05:30

Sure. So, I’ve had a pretty unconventional sort of route to academia. I have a master’s in natural resource management and governance, so that kind of put me squarely in the discipline of environmental studies and climate change and just, like, development and environment research in South Asia. This was around, say, 2012-14, around that time. Back then, though, climate discourse was still very much limited to sort of mitigation and energy security and sort of the geopolitical dimensions of climate change, so to speak, at least in the Indian context where I was studying. And it took almost a decade for climate conversations to start animating discussions around development and everyday issues around livelihood transition and everyday risks that many communities, frontline communities, were faced with. It was really about teasing out climate risks and adaptation dimensions of lived realities of communities who were situated in these geographies and places that were extremely ecologically as well as economically fragile. And from then, you know, tracing mostly livelihood aspects and development issues around climate and environmental change, I sort of came into the urban space. Because, you know, questions of livelihood transition and fragility somehow led me to study migration from rural areas, from small towns and places that were at the forefront of, really, climate risks back then.

And since then, I’ve kind of studied different aspects of urban life. I’ve looked at institutions and governance. I’ve looked at marginal communities. I’ve also looked at how city leaders and governments and spaces where decision-making and policymaking happens, how they understand climate risks and adaptation. And a lot of local economic issues and local social issues started surfacing. That’s when I kind of understood that, you know, a lot of the way we were taught climate change and climate risk assessments in college were not really speaking to the lived experiences of climate change in both rural and urban contexts. And I pivoted. I moved directly into the space of urban studies and geography to sort of do a deeper dive into, you know, the lived realities of climate. And that’s where the story of people and communities and infrastructures that work for communities at the frontlines really comes into the debate around adaptation and resilience.

[soft ambient music] I’ve researched South Asian cities and South Asian regions in transition. I’ve worked in diverse ecosystems. I’ve worked in coastal areas of Sundarbans in India to Western Ghats and communities that subsist on forest services and are growing coffee in Western Ghats of India. How climate volatility sort of affects different supply chains and different economies. I’ve also worked in sort of rural-urban transitioning context of Southern India and how regions that are facing multiple intersecting risks are planning not just in terms of climate risks, but also are economically sort of changing their pathways and trajectories in response to opportunities opened by climate investments and finance. [music ends]

And right now, I’m working in industrial cities and urban regions that are sort of using climate as a futuring technique, to imagine sustainable urban futures and more resilient futures. So, this is in the context of coastal and industrial cities on India’s west coast.

David 09:31

So, it’s a lot to unpack here. The issue of rural to urban migration is not just an issue in India. It’s an issue even in places like Canada where we have climate refugees every summer when there’s wildfires. There’s a lot to unpack. I need to go back one step though. Can you just talk about the use of the idea of Global Majority as opposed to Global South?

Ritwika Basu 09:53

Sure. Global Majority, the concept has been around for a long time. There’s a pushback on this kind of binary use of Global North and South to talk about majority populations everywhere across Global South and North as geographic constructs that are dealing with different kinds of precarity, structural and systemic barriers to better life, to more inclusive futures, to more sort of dignified life. And the majority usually also sort of subsumes previously oppressed categories of people, colonized people, BIPOC populations, people of color. Different kinds of intersectionalities that have made life challenging, but also structurally constrained for certain populations to imagine. It’s time that our power structures, our systems, start working for the majority and not for the elite minority. So, it’s also very political around class as well as, you know, intersectional categories of people that see themselves in relation to how power organizes resources and opportunities for different communities.

David 11:09

It’s interesting because it’s pretty clear that minority, not the majority, have caused climate change and the majority is suffering from the impacts of what the minority has caused. Your article in the journal focuses on two major textile hubs in India, Surat and Tirupur. Could you just talk about those cities as cities, their role in the global economy and their vulnerabilities to economic shocks and to climate-driven disruptions like worsened and increased seasonal flooding?

Ritwika Basu 11:48

So, Surat is more widely talked about, at least in climate discourses, especially in the context of Global South. It’s a coastal city on India’s west coast. It’s also very prominently placed in global textile supply chains and has been historically quite well placed in different trade routes and different sort of trade networks. Tirupur, on the other hand, has now become a very prominent center for textile manufacturing, for garment industry, and Tirupur contributes more than 66% of India’s exports to European markets but also markets in North America and Southeast Asia. Tirupur is a much smaller city in terms of urban typology. Surat is metropolis. It’s also a major financial district. It has a booming real estate market. It has a number of big industries aside from textile, which is diamond and gemstones, petrochemicals, but also increasingly a huge market for global finance and real estate and development, as well as AI and manufacturing industries.

Both cities are kind of differently vulnerable to climate risks. Surat, being a coastal city, obviously it has a more sort of visible climate profile, which is experienced by, you know, the city government in terms of urban floods, localized monsoonal floods. The city for almost a decade and a half has invested quite a bit in fortifying its economic zones from different kinds of floods, like both riverine and monsoonal floods, through sort of investments in embankments and early warning systems and sort of hard infrastructure that keeps flood risks away. Tirupur, on the other hand, has a more layered kind of vulnerability to climate risks. It obviously has a large informal population, as does Surat, and with informality there are issues around habitat risk, housing, poverty, many different multidimensional health and economic risks that also become a part of the whole climate risk profile.

[fast rhythmic music] But Tirupur is also vulnerable to industrial pollution, and the whole conversation around Tirupur’s climate planning is a mix of both environmental pollution and environmental sustainability, industrial sustainability and climate proofing. Whereas Surat is mostly situated in the conversations around disaster risk management and urban resilience from a very risk centric perspective. [music ends]

Peggy 14:43

[theme music] This episode of Cities 1.5 is produced by University of Toronto Press, with generous support from C40 Cities.

Jess 14:54

Want more access to current research on how city leaders are approaching climate action? We also publish the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy.

Peggy 15:02

Our mission is to publish timely, evidence-based research that contributes to the urban climate agenda and supports governmental policy towards an equitable and resilient world.

Jess 15:13

The journal serves as a platform for dynamic content that highlights ambitious, near-term climate action, with a particular focus on human-centered solutions to today’s most pressing climate challenges.

Peggy 15:25

To read the latest issue, visit jccpe.utpjournals.press or click on the link in our show notes. [music ends]

David 15:35

So, in your article, you have this idea of urban resilience. So, can you speak about that and speak particularly in the context of the efforts that Surat, for example, is making to rebuild the city to cope with things like flooding physically? You know, you can’t fool Mother Nature, as the famous margarine advertisement in the United States in the 80s and 90s said. I have my doubts about whether you can ever build your way out of climate change. Can you speak about that story of resilience in the context in those two cities?

Ritwika Basu 16:14

I mean, it might appear to be, like, a kind of hidden or obscure element in the story of urban resilience for some audiences who are not familiar with informality or the context of labor in some of these emerging economies in South Asian cities. But for South Asian scholars like myself who’ve been working on cities for so long, informality is really something you cannot avoid. Like it’s part of every conversation around urban inclusion, urban equity, sustainability, inclusive development, so on and so forth. And so, when I talk about the hidden story, it’s about this structure of informality, which is deeply intertwined with the political economy of our cities. But it’s also core to how global supply chains target places like Surat as their sort of production base, and how cities like Surat and Tirupur become important nodes in global supply chains. It’s because they have this informal structure of production in place, which makes labor extremely disposable, but also extremely central to the way these economies function.

So, the argument I make in this article is that it’s this invisible population of labor that actually absorbs the cost of economic shocks and climate shocks without getting replenished over time. So, it’s essentially a very sort of Marxist argument around, you know, you have to refuel the capacity of your weakest link, that is your labor population. Unless you do that, the economic resilience that the city survives on and the entire global supply chain also, you know, rests upon is not going to last long. So, there is a question of sustainability as well around that.

David 18:17

So, if you have a city which is focused, as both these cities are, on an external export-based economy, it’s part of the global supply chain, and the workers live in—for the most part, in the informal economy, in informal settlements, what are the consequences of a climate disaster and what have you learned about the resilience of a city based on what you’ve seen in those communities?

Ritwika Basu 18:50

A lot of these informal settlements, not just in Surat but across cities in South Asia, also in the African context, we see are vulnerable to first-order risks of climate events like floods, but also, like, subsequent impacts of those risks, which have a very sort of protracted and ongoing effect on populations that are structurally ignored. But also, I think, increasingly, communities that have lived in informal settlements and low-lying areas have had the resources and the time to adapt to some of these, you know, first-order risks. But what they are increasingly faced with is the risk of planned adaptation that is not inclusive and is leading to outcomes like evictions and relocation, which is not really aligned with those communities’ capacities to sustain themselves.

So, the risk of climate events is one kind of risk that communities are faced with. The risk of planned climate responses that are not designed for people is a bigger risk, in my opinion, after having studied many informal communities and settlements. So, the perceived risk of being targeted by city planners and sort of intermediaries for climate action is actually a cause of immense anxiety and stress for a lot of these communities if they’re not included in the process right from the beginning.

David 20:32

The solutions that are being posed for resilience don’t work for these communities because they’re not part of the process to come to them. In some ways, make it worse. Is that a fair way to put it?

Ritwika Basu 20:45

Yes. And also, because informality is often seen as very narrowly construed as the main source of climate risks, whereas it’s not seen as a system upon which the city relies greatly. Like, it’s the system that keeps different economies and our cities going.

David 21:09

If I understand your argument correctly, it’s that the real infrastructure of the ability of cities to be resilient in the face of a climate-related or economic-related crisis is actually the people and the workers, and I think in particularly people who are in or adjacent to the informal sector. Can you speak to that really powerful idea of hidden infrastructure?

Ritwika Basu 21:37

[soft ambient music] Sure. There’s an entire discourse around people as infrastructure in certain disciplines at least. In urban sociology and geography this phrase has been used quite a bit. If you look at the definition of infrastructure, it essentially is something that facilitates flows of services, action, it holds things together. The function of infrastructure is to keep things moving, to keep the functionality intact of whatever it is a part of. So, critical urban infrastructure, we think of roads and transport and housing. [music ends]

When we talk about invisible infrastructure in cities, we think about drainage systems, sewage pipes, underground networks. These are all very essential elements that keep our cities functional and keep our cities running. Likewise, the hidden infrastructure of economic resilience of cities is informal networks of labor as urban constituents without whom, you know, economic resilience would kind of fall flat on its face. So, in times of crisis, like we saw during COVID-19 pandemic, the informality of these working populations actually came to the rescue. Women workers who were working for power looms or working in the textile industry, their labor was used to quickly sort of fill gaps in the formal health industry, which couldn’t keep up with the pressures of the COVID-19. And these women then started stitching PPE kits and they started working from home, trying to sort of plug the gap in terms of resources and health labor.

Similarly, a lot of these textile workers are expected to forego their extra bonuses and wages whenever there’s an economic shock, whenever the industry suffers from any kind of geopolitical or economic volatility. This happened very recently during—when the tariffs were raised to almost 50%. A lot of power looms shut down for, like, a couple of weeks to a couple of months and many workers were laid off. They were asked to go back. So, this is presented as the city’s ability to cope with stresses, to cope with different kinds of shocks. But if you actually get to the bottom of it, it is precarity which is protecting these economies from either going bankrupt or paying the price for the different kinds of shocks that different industries are faced with in today’s context.

David 24:22

The economy of the city is resilient because the workers pay the price in a crisis. What should Global South cities be doing? What should they be doing in this context?

Ritwika Basu 24:35

I feel like there is a need for fundamentally rethinking our frameworks of urban adaptation. It cannot just be about securitizing assets and infrastructure in cities through narrow definitions of risk, but fundamentally more about the geographies that these cities represent. So, there are labor communities, there are all kinds of populations. These are also dense relational spaces where networks mediate the quality of life, access to services, basic infrastructure. And by risk, I mean returns on investment kind of logic that governs risk. So, what is seen as risk is directly to do with economic losses and trade-offs, and that shapes a lot of our planning decisions around where adaptation measures need to be focused, what kind of investment, what kind of infrastructure, so on and so forth. So, if our risk-based frameworks are disruptive of how cities function, how people inhabit cities, it’s actually at loggerheads with people. Like, the climate industry is actually harming people in a big way.

David 25:58

So, take those lessons. You start with the impact on people if you want a successful city, and how do you make their lives better? That’s at least one of the lessons I’m taking from you. Apply that, if you can, to cities like Philadelphia, New York, London, Beijing, where there are marginalized populations, but maybe not in informal settlements in the same way as Surat. Can you speak to that?

Ritwika Basu 26:29

Sure. It is now widely recognized that it’s not just cities in emerging and low-income countries that need to adapt, that need to invest in climate resilience and urban adaptation. It’s a conversation that we see coming from different cities, even from, like, advanced economies like London and New York, just to say. And, you know, the conversation around adaptation is obviously different because adaptation is very context sensitive. So, we have heat action plans and affordable housing and sort of, you know, thermal precarity, these kinds of coalition of ideas coming together from cities in the Global North. And what really bridges the conversation between Global South and Global North in terms of urban adaptation, if you like, is the conversation around how our city governments respond to the needs of marginalized populations that are contextual. Like marginalized populations in Global North cities may look different from marginalized populations in Global South cities, where there’s informality as a structure. But essentially, it’s about access to public goods. It’s about affordability. It’s about opportunities—economic opportunities. It’s about visibility and agency in urban decision-making processes. So, it boils down to fundamental aspects of how cities are run, for whom and by whom, and questions of effective governance, good governance, and agency.

David 28:11

A fundamental question, are cities only for those who have power or do they include those that do not?

Ritwika Basu 28:18

[slow rhythmic music] Power is the axis that collapses geographic differences and makes it about people.

David 28:26

Ritwika, you’ve made that case eloquently and based on superb and fascinating research. I want to thank you so much, not just for being with us here today on Cities 1.5, but your ongoing work in peeling back the layers of what really needs to be done to ensure our society as a whole in our urban areas is resilient. Not just the physical place, all of it. Thanks so much.

Ritwika Basu 28:53

Thank you. Thank you, it was a pleasure speaking with you. [music ends]

David 28:58

[soft ambient music] The cities, and especially the workers of the Global Majority, aren’t waiting for the world to catch up. They’re absorbing climate, economic and social shocks, often without the proper resources or policy frameworks. But as we’ve heard today, there is knowledge being built, community by community, worker by worker, academic by academic, and the job now is to make sure that knowledge reaches the people with the power to act on it. If this conversation has sparked something for you, share it with a colleague, a councillor, or someone making decisions in your city. Because that’s how research travels from the page into policy. [music ends]

[theme music]

On the next episode of Cities 1.5, we tackle an issue that continues to generate headlines: ports, shipping, and the impact of current global disruption to these systems on climate. You won't want to miss it.

This has been Cities 1.5, leading global change through local climate action. I’m David Miller. I was the mayor of Toronto, Canada, and I know firsthand the role cities can play in solving the climate crisis. Currently, I’m the editor-in-chief of the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, published by the University of Toronto Press in partnership with the C40 Centre, the thinktank for cities and climate, where I’m also the managing director.

This podcast is produced by Jessica Schmidt and edited by Morgane Chambrin. Peggy Whitfield is our writer and executive producer with narrative and communication support from Chiara Morfeo. Our music is by Lorna Gilfedder. The future isn’t waiting and neither are cities. To learn more, visit the show’s website linked in the episode notes. See you next time. [music ends]