Urban Action School 2026 Reimagining Cityzenship with Local Governance

March 23 - 28, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala

Indian cities are living through a paradox. They are engines of economic growth, cultural churn, and political aspiration, yet they remain administratively fragmented, fiscally constrained, and democratically thinned out. Over the years, urban governance has been reduced to a narrow conversation around municipal functions, projects, and schemes, while deeper questions of power, participation, care for the commons, and collective decision-making have steadily slipped out of view.

The 11th Urban Action School emerges from this growing unease, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that urbanisation in India has grown much faster than projected—particularly when measured through data on mobility, labour markets, density, and built-up areas.

The Urban Action School (UAS) is not a training programme in the conventional sense, nor a toolkit of “best practices”. It is a space to think, argue, unlearn, and re-imagine what governing cities could mean in the decades ahead—at a time when climate stress, informality, digital mediation, and social fragmentation are reshaping urban life.

This note is meant to serve as a guide for prospective participants: what the Urban Action School 2026 (UAS’26) is about, what it is not, and how it draws its intellectual and political energy from the idea of collective local governance.

Read more at https://www.actionaidindia.org/events/urban-action-school-2026-reimagining-cityzens-with-local-governance