Commons

Commons Sensing: Ep 05 – Urban Commons in India: Cities, Inequality and Shared Spaces | Shweta Wagh & Swati Janu

In this episode of Commons Sensing, Shweta Wagh and Swati Janu explore how urban spaces, rivers, coasts, housing, and everyday infrastructures can be understood as Commons shaped by planning, power, and inequality.

Drawing from research and lived experience, the conversation examines how access to and control over shared spaces in cities is constantly negotiated. It reflects on how these dynamics shape everyday urban life, especially for communities navigating exclusion, displacement, and precarious access to resources.

The episode also asks a pressing question, can urban areas be reimagined as shared spaces in a time of migration, privatisation, climate stress, and rapid urbanisation?

Commons Sensing is a conversation podcast hosted by Kanchi Kohli and produced by Asar and the Common Ground Initiative. The series brings the idea of Commons out of policy discussions and academic debates into lived, everyday realities.

This is the fifth and final episode of the first phase of the series, which explores how shared resources shape livelihoods, governance, and ecological futures.