Mellon Forum: Souvanik Mullick and Shivani Shedde

Breathe Easy: The "Shapeshifting" Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Government on Air Management in Delhi
Date
Feb 5, 2025, 12:00 pm1:15 pm
Location
School of Architecture

Details

Event Description

Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment // (UN)SETTLEMENTS

Breathe Easy: The “Shapeshifting” Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Government on Air Management in Delhi

Souvanik Mullick, Princeton-Mellon Fellow

Shivani Shedde, PhD candidate, School of Architecture, Princeton University


Across the globe, countries and cities are learning to mitigate climate change. Air pollution, while under the broad umbrella of environmental issues, is less understood. Unlike other agents of the environment, air pollution sources are difficult to calibrate. Air is impossible to tame, flowing across regions, traversing borders and jurisdictions. In Delhi in recent years, air pollution in the winter has caught the attention of the world. There’s a global audience for this local chaos, and India’s ability to balance economic growth with environment protection could bear lessons for everyone. Developing new cost tech is just half the problem; devising an effective regulatory pathway is the other half of it. This talk will analyze the air pollution imperative in Delhi. Air’s overwhelming agency alters the decision-making process of the city and its people. The term ‘shapeshifting’ is used to show the changing State during air pollution season: the capture of administrative/bureaucratic jurisdiction by the courts and the consequential streamlining in bureaucratic organization to tackle this intractable problem that defies internal administrative specializations and jurisdictions. Whatever Delhi and India develop in this arena will be of prime interest to the rest of the global South and the North.


The Spring 2025 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment is kindly sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and the following Princeton University departments and programs: African Studies, Anthropology, Art & Archaeology, Brazil LAB, Center for Collaborative History, Chadha Global India Center, Effron Center for American Studies, English, French & Italian, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Humanities Council, PIIRS, Politics, Program in Latin American Studies, Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the School of Architecture.

Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. Lunch is provided while supplies last.