Anupriya Aggarwal

Age: 23

Home Town: New Delhi, Delhi

Education: Bachelor of Planning, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi

Specific Field Interests: Urban Research, Livelihoods, Participatory Planning, Social Justice, Social Impact Design, Citizen-led Action, Governance and Policy

Placement: Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action, Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra

Area of Focus: Documenting the experiences of individuals and communities residing in Mumbai’s informal settlements through active engagement with the youth and curated public walks. Effectively communicating grassroots issues of social justice, governance, and planning to various audiences to create awareness and inform decision-making.

Fellowship Project: Education

Highlights: Anupriya is curious about finding innovation in participatory research to account for multi-layered issues in India’s urban landscapes. Her fondness for research, love for complexity and patterns, and tendency to problem-solve are borne out of the core skills she learned while studying urban planning at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Her experience in fieldwork for her final-year thesis in 2022 led her to get involved in the socially engaged practice “Aao, Jagah Banaye!” (Come, Make a Place!) situated in a cloth vendors’ neighbourhood in Delhi, focusing on enabling informal workers to co-create dignified places of work and sustainable livelihoods. She has been carrying forward this work at City Sabha, a research- and advocacy-based urban practice. Most recently, she is working with different stakeholder groups in underserved localities across Delhi and Pune, including children with disability, women, and transgenders, to co-develop citizen-led inventories of the quality of public spaces. She will be joining the AIF fellowship to document grassroots issues in Mumbai’s informal settlements through active engagement with the youth and communicate key insights to various audiences with the aim of creating awareness and informing decision-making.