Cities in crisis: examining the pandemic through urban planning and state capacity

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent migrant crisis has exposed and magnified the cracks in the politico-economic arrangements of our cities. Going beyond the pandemic, however, the article argues that the crisis is rooted in the manner in which our cities have been imagined, planned, and developed under the modernist paradigm and further guided by the neoliberal framework. The problems that have surfaced today have been always present but been brushed aside or given symptomatic treatment in the governance and policy sphere. Engaging with the planning and its interrelated dynamics in Delhi from a social justice perspective, the article explores the imagination of the city as formulated over the years through urban planning, how it impacts the integration of the migrant labor in the city and how the state capacity is central to these questions.