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Improv cities -- urban peripheries and the future: Malini Ranganathan at TEDxAmericanUniversity

2,404 views · Published 24 May 2014 · 18:16 · Indexed 28 September 2026

Channel: TEDx Talks · 2014 · Nonprofits & Activism

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Malini Ranganathan has a passion for cities—for living in them, for digging into their complicated histories, and for documenting them through ethnographic research. Having grown up and worked in some of the world's most dynamic cities, including Beijing, Addis Ababa, Moscow, Paris, New Delhi, Dakar, Manila, and Bangalore, she brings a comparative lens to the study of global urbanism. As Assistant Professor at American University's School of International Service in Washington, DC, she teaches courses in urban political ecology, sustainability, and global health. Her research focuses on water politics and flooding at the informal urban fringes—those difficult to map moving edges where most of the world's new population is expected.

Improv Cities: Urban Peripheries and the Future
Filmed by Ford Fischer and Justin Parker
Edited by Ford Fischer

As the world becomes more urban, it is also defying taken-for-granted spatial categories and assumptions. Much of the world's population growth is expected at the outskirts of cities at the "urban peripheries". Used as shorthand for depicting the crisis that has come to define the Third World city, the discourse of the "slum" has limited use in understanding this broader phenomenon of informal fringe urbanization. This talk asks us to recognize that cities are made through ordinary people's improvisations and that the notion of the "right to the city" has political and practical value in this process.

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