Nidhi Subramanyam
Biographic Data
| ID | 1259593 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nidhi Subramanyam |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nidhi |
| FAMILY NAME | Subramanyam |
| SIGNATURE | SUBRAMANYAM N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1177-360X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Differentiated Infrastructural Citizenship
This article develops the concept of differentiated infrastructural citizenship (DIC) to explain how infrastructural citizenship is materially mediated, socially differentiated, and unevenly exercised in a rapidly urbanizing small city. It advances scholarship on infrastructural citizenship and everyday claims‐making as political participation by arguing that the material‐institutional terrain structuring infrastructural claims is not a neutral b…
Migrating injustices in the small city
Climate stresses like droughts amplify economic precarity, pushing low-income, caste-oppressed communities across India to pursue temporary rural-urban migration as an adaptation strategy. This paper develops an intersectional framework on ‘migrating injustices’ to examine how caste and regional identity mediate interstate rural-urban migrants’ experiences of vulnerabilities and injustices, particularly as these experiences move and endure with m…
The community benefits of choosing grey over green infrastructure in planning the Rockcliffe Riverine Flood Mitigation Project in Toronto
Green infrastructure (GI) is increasingly promoted for urban stormwater management, but its adoption remains limited. This paper investigates the Rockcliffe-Smythe Riverine Flood Mitigation Project (RRFMP) in Toronto, where a naturalised channel was eschewed in favour of a traditional, grey concrete channel. Through project document and interview content analysis, we find that the planning process unfolded through a fundamentally grey infrastruct…
Planning the Liveable If Not the Ideal
Millions of urbanites across the Global South receive intermittent water supply (IWS). This paper examines how discretionary action by street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) in everyday water supply planning in IWS systems redistributes water quantities and service quality to alleviate unequal scarcity burdens. Ethnographic findings from the small city of Tiruppur, India, reveal that SLBs’ supply plans aim to distribute water volumes equitably within th…
Untapped transformative potential in decentralised groundwater systems that improve households' resilience in India's water-scarce urban environments
Off-grid, decentralised water infrastructures are increasingly being promoted to help cities meet their water delivery targets and build resilient water systems in the face of changing water availability. Against this background, this paper examines how integrating off-grid, decentralised groundwater systems with centralized piped supply helps water utilities and urbanites achieve transformative resilience under conditions of chronic water scarci…
Smart cities in Asia
Making Mangaung Metro
Metropolitan reforms, which include the creation of unified metropolitan governments through municipal mergers and reclassification, are emerging as one strategy to address planning and service delivery challenges in the wake of increasing urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa. Although metropolitanisation adds service area and mandates, well-functioning secondary cities that are part of a two-tier governance system in South Africa are pursuing …
Getting home during lockdown
This paper uses the Covid-19 induced migration disruption in India as a lens to interrogate what this acute moment reveals about the precarity of India’s migrant workers and their experiences of work in ordinary times. Interviews with interstate migrants from north India employed in the Tiruppur region in the southern state of Tamil Nadu present their narratives of being stuck at work when lockdown began, their subsequent struggles to get home, a…
A small improvement
This paper investigates how progress towards meeting the sustainable development goal of providing universal and equitable access to drinking water for all is distributed across the spectrum of urban settlements. The study measures how urban local governments (N = 3,547) in a rapidly urbanizing country, India, have increased their coverage of water supply to households between 2001 and 2011. I use theories on multilevel governance of urban servic…
Acquiescence in the face of dispossession in the Mahindra World City Special Economic Zone, Tamil Nadu, India
Scholarship on community responses to land grabs for Special Economic Zones (SEZs) has overwhelmingly analysed cases of mobilization against SEZs or the subsequent trajectories of anti-dispossession struggles. We build on the role of the neoliberal broker state developed within this scholarship as well as theories on state and capital rescaling, and quiescence to power to explain the production of acquiescence to dispossession. Our in-depth case …
Getting home during lockdown
This paper uses the Covid-19 induced migration disruption in India as a lens to interrogate what this acute moment reveals about the precarity of India’s migrant workers and their experiences of work in ordinary times. Interviews with interstate migrants from north India employed in the Tiruppur region in the southern state of Tamil Nadu present their narratives of being stuck at work when lockdown began, their subsequent struggles to get home, a…
Making Mangaung Metro
Metropolitan reforms, which include the creation of unified metropolitan governments through municipal mergers and reclassification, are emerging as one strategy to address planning and service delivery challenges in the wake of increasing urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa. Although metropolitanisation adds service area and mandates, well-functioning secondary cities that are part of a two-tier governance system in South Africa are pursuing …
Acquiescence in the face of dispossession in the Mahindra World City Special Economic Zone, Tamil Nadu, India
Scholarship on community responses to land grabs for Special Economic Zones (SEZs) has overwhelmingly analysed cases of mobilization against SEZs or the subsequent trajectories of anti-dispossession struggles. We build on the role of the neoliberal broker state developed within this scholarship as well as theories on state and capital rescaling, and quiescence to power to explain the production of acquiescence to dispossession. Our in-depth case …
A small improvement
This paper investigates how progress towards meeting the sustainable development goal of providing universal and equitable access to drinking water for all is distributed across the spectrum of urban settlements. The study measures how urban local governments (N = 3,547) in a rapidly urbanizing country, India, have increased their coverage of water supply to households between 2001 and 2011. I use theories on multilevel governance of urban servic…
Acquiescence in the face of dispossession in the Mahindra World City Special Economic Zone, Tamil Nadu, India
Scholarship on community responses to land grabs for Special Economic Zones (SEZs) has overwhelmingly analysed cases of mobilization against SEZs or the subsequent trajectories of anti-dispossession struggles. We build on the role of the neoliberal broker state developed within this scholarship as well as theories on state and capital rescaling, and quiescence to power to explain the production of acquiescence to dispossession. Our in-depth case …
Smart cities in Asia
Making Mangaung Metro
Metropolitan reforms, which include the creation of unified metropolitan governments through municipal mergers and reclassification, are emerging as one strategy to address planning and service delivery challenges in the wake of increasing urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa. Although metropolitanisation adds service area and mandates, well-functioning secondary cities that are part of a two-tier governance system in South Africa are pursuing …
Getting home during lockdown
This paper uses the Covid-19 induced migration disruption in India as a lens to interrogate what this acute moment reveals about the precarity of India’s migrant workers and their experiences of work in ordinary times. Interviews with interstate migrants from north India employed in the Tiruppur region in the southern state of Tamil Nadu present their narratives of being stuck at work when lockdown began, their subsequent struggles to get home, a…
Planning the Liveable If Not the Ideal
Millions of urbanites across the Global South receive intermittent water supply (IWS). This paper examines how discretionary action by street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) in everyday water supply planning in IWS systems redistributes water quantities and service quality to alleviate unequal scarcity burdens. Ethnographic findings from the small city of Tiruppur, India, reveal that SLBs’ supply plans aim to distribute water volumes equitably within th…
Untapped transformative potential in decentralised groundwater systems that improve households' resilience in India's water-scarce urban environments
Off-grid, decentralised water infrastructures are increasingly being promoted to help cities meet their water delivery targets and build resilient water systems in the face of changing water availability. Against this background, this paper examines how integrating off-grid, decentralised groundwater systems with centralized piped supply helps water utilities and urbanites achieve transformative resilience under conditions of chronic water scarci…
Migrating injustices in the small city
Climate stresses like droughts amplify economic precarity, pushing low-income, caste-oppressed communities across India to pursue temporary rural-urban migration as an adaptation strategy. This paper develops an intersectional framework on ‘migrating injustices’ to examine how caste and regional identity mediate interstate rural-urban migrants’ experiences of vulnerabilities and injustices, particularly as these experiences move and endure with m…
The community benefits of choosing grey over green infrastructure in planning the Rockcliffe Riverine Flood Mitigation Project in Toronto
Green infrastructure (GI) is increasingly promoted for urban stormwater management, but its adoption remains limited. This paper investigates the Rockcliffe-Smythe Riverine Flood Mitigation Project (RRFMP) in Toronto, where a naturalised channel was eschewed in favour of a traditional, grey concrete channel. Through project document and interview content analysis, we find that the planning process unfolded through a fundamentally grey infrastruct…
Differentiated Infrastructural Citizenship
This article develops the concept of differentiated infrastructural citizenship (DIC) to explain how infrastructural citizenship is materially mediated, socially differentiated, and unevenly exercised in a rapidly urbanizing small city. It advances scholarship on infrastructural citizenship and everyday claims‐making as political participation by arguing that the material‐institutional terrain structuring infrastructural claims is not a neutral b…
Economics (7 works) · Geography (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (6 works) · Economic growth (5 works) · Environmental Science (5 works) · Environmental planning (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Corporate governance (3 works)