Whose City? Whose Security?
Community-Centred Security Imaginaries in Delhi
Introduction: Security, State vs. Society
In today’s global context, the very idea of “security” is undergoing a profound and troubling transformation. Across the world, including in so-called democracies, elected governments are embracing authoritarian tendencies, using the rhetoric of security to justify repression, surveillance, and control. Under the guise of safety, states are systematically eroding civil liberties, dismantling community rights, and enabling unregulated resource extraction to serve entrenched capitalist interests. The result is not just ecological devastation or economic inequality – but a profound sense of insecurity woven into the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Urban India mirrors this pattern. The trajectory of urban development is increasingly marked by the privatisation of public goods, the displacement of working-class communities, and the criminalisation of informality. Basic natural resources – water, forests, land – as well as critical urban infrastructure are being ceded to private players. Landmark urban projects like the Dharavi Redevelopment in Mumbai, the demolition of Kathputli Colony in Delhi, the Sabarmati Riverfront in Ahmedabad, the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor in Varanasi, and the Yamuna “beautification” efforts are symptomatic of this shift. Despite being marketed as models of urban renewal or security enhancement, these projects share a common thread: mass displacement, dispossession, and the erosion of local autonomy.
In parallel, the state is aggressively advancing a technocratic model of security – centred on digital surveillance, CCTV networks, AI-powered governance, and predictive policing. This framework does not protect the urban poor; instead, it often renders them hyper-visible to control while remaining invisible to care. Privacy, mobility, and dignity are compromised in the name of safety. Ironically, these top-down security regimes generate insecurity, especially among those already at the margins.
Yet, alongside this, another paradigm persists – often ignored or undervalued: security through society, rooted in community ties, mutual care, and social proximity. Cities like Delhi still retain rich informal networks of care and protection – auto stands, street vendors, small shopkeepers, domestic workers, neighbourhood elders – who watch over one another, respond in moments of crisis, and help preserve a fragile social cohesion.
The Alternative Security Project emerges from the urgency to explore and amplify these grounded alternatives. It asks: What kind of security do people actually want? Who defines it? And what would it look like if we re-centred well-being, dignity, and solidarity as the core principles of safety? In doing so, the project aims to challenge militarised and privatised paradigms and surface real, lived alternatives from across the Global South.
Imagining and Understanding Alternative Security
In a city like Delhi, the meaning and experience of security vary dramatically across social classes, legal categories, and neighbourhoods. The dominant, state-sponsored security framework – centred on digital surveillance, CCTV cameras, and AI-driven systems – often prioritises state control over citizen well-being. It fails to account for the multi-layered, socio-cultural complexity of urban life and overlooks the deeply differentiated realities of those who actually inhabit and sustain the city.
Delhi is not a single, unified urban space. It is a city of contrasts and coexisting worlds. On one hand, there are elite gated communities like Lutyens’ Delhi, South Extension, Green Park, Hauz Khas, Preet Vihar, and Mayur Vihar – zones with legal housing, planned infrastructure, and access to formal security apparatus. On the other, thousands of unauthorised colonies – such as Sangam Vihar, Uttam Nagar, Vijay Vihar, Bawana, Kirari, and Sant Nagar – exist in legal limbo, developed without formal sanction and often lacking basic amenities. Then there are the slums, resettlement colonies, and dairy colonies, inhabited by millions who live without formal tenure but contribute crucially to the city’s functioning.
It is here that Delhi’s invisible workforce resides – domestic workers, washerfolk, gardeners, cobblers, sanitation staff, security guards, construction labourers, drivers, delivery agents, hotel employees, sewer workers, farmers, artisans, technicians, and migrant labourers. These individuals form the heartbeat of the city, yet their sense of security, and the threats they face, are vastly different from those experienced in walled enclaves. For them, safety is tied to stability of employment, protection from eviction, healthcare access, and neighbourly trust – not surveillance cameras.
Delhi has also historically sustained rich networks of community security, particularly in its working-class and informal settlements. Local vendors, presswalas/pressing cloth people, milkmen, small shopkeepers, and taxi stand operators have not just provided services – they have kept watch, offered help in times of need, and maintained an informal social fabric of vigilance and care. These networks form a grounded system of mutual protection, born not from control but from connection.
However, this organic security is increasingly under threat. It is being replaced by outsourced, impersonal systems: underpaid guards at colony gates, impersonal surveillance grids, and centralised monitoring systems. These new mechanisms often fail to understand local contexts, and in many cases, they undermine or displace the older systems of collective safety. Delhi is now at a critical juncture of transition – the old hasn’t disappeared, but the new hasn’t fully taken over. This tension leaves the city oscillating between two paradigms: one built on community, the other on control.
Moreover, the very perception of security is also in flux. A woman travelling alone at night may find more comfort in a well-lit street and a courteous bus driver than in an AI-equipped camera. An elderly person in a gated colony may be more isolated and vulnerable than a counterpart in a densely populated informal settlement, where neighbours still check in on each other. These nuances are not captured by dominant security models.
Through this project, we seek to document, analyse, and uplift these plural experiences of security – from informal settlements to affluent colonies, from migrant workers to older residents. Our goal is to rethink what urban security means in a city like Delhi, and by extension, in rapidly transforming metropolises across the Global South – Jakarta, Mexico, Bogota, Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, and beyond. As part of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, this study contributes to crafting a new, plural, grounded framing of security – one rooted not in fear and surveillance, but in care, co-existence, and dignity.
Study Objectives
- Understanding Citizens’ Diverse Experiences and Perceptions of Security
- To document how different communities – across class, caste, gender, occupation, and locality – perceive, experience, and define security in their everyday lives.
- To surface the contrasts between lived realities and state-imposed security frameworks, especially in rapidly transforming urban environments like Delhi.
- Mapping and Analysing Community-Based Security Ecologies
- To identify and evaluate existing informal and localised systems of mutual care, social monitoring, and community support that function as organic forms of security.
- To understand how these practices are evolving, adapting, or eroding amidst urban transitions and the growing dominance of surveillance-based models.
- Catalysing Dialogue and Imagination around Alternatives to Security
- To create spaces – both physical and discursive – for communities, researchers, and practitioners to collectively reflect on and reframe the concept of security.
- To explore how security can be redefined not merely as protection from threats, but as the presence of care, dignity, belonging, and stability in people’s lives.
- Contributing to Global Frameworks on Alternative Security
- To contextualise Delhi’s experiences within broader conversations across the Global South – particularly with cities like Jakarta, São Paulo, or Nairobi – highlighting shared lessons, tensions, and innovations.
- To contribute grounded, community-rooted insights to the Alternative Security Project of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, enriching the global dialogue with a nuanced urban perspective from India.
Study Area
The study will be conducted in selected locations within the Delhi (NCT) region, chosen to reflect the city’s layered socio-spatial structure and diversity of urban experiences. While the project will not attempt to cover the full expanse of the city due to limited resources, it will strategically engage with a few contrasting sites that illustrate the range of everyday security realities in Delhi. These may include:
- Gated colonies and group housing societies: to understand perceptions and practices of formal, privatised security in planned urban enclaves.
- Unauthorised settlements: where residents live without legal tenure but often have strong local networks of informal security and mutual aid.
- Rehabilitation colonies and slum clusters: where displaced and resettled populations face heightened vulnerabilities yet often rely on community-based coping mechanisms.
- Workplaces and informal hubs of marginalised and migrant communities: such as local markets, transport stands, and construction sites, where everyday risk and resilience intersect.
This limited but diverse sample will allow the study to draw meaningful contrasts across class, legal status, and social cohesion, helping to uncover grounded insights into the plural meanings and practices of urban security in Delhi.
Methodology
The study will follow a qualitative, participatory research approach, grounded in community engagement and critical urban inquiry. Given the limited timeframe and resources, the methodology will prioritise in-depth, localised engagements over broad-scale surveys, allowing for a deeper understanding of lived experiences and community-rooted security practices.
- Qualitative Methods (Context-Specific and Selectively Applied):
- Focus Group Discussions (FGDs): Organised with key occupational and identity-based groups – such as domestic workers, street vendors, sanitation workers, security guards, and construction labourers – to understand shared vulnerabilities and informal systems of care and safety.
- In-Depth Interviews: Conducted with elderly residents, LGBTQIA+ individuals, students, families of sewer workers, and migrant labourers to surface personal narratives around insecurity, resilience, and what constitutes a sense of safety.
- Creative and Visual Tools: Where possible, participatory methods such as poster-making, mapping exercises, or photo storytelling will be used to foster inclusive expression and support community ownership of the research process.
- Community Walks and Neighbourhood Audits: Facilitated in collaboration with residents to observe, document, and reflect on the spatial, infrastructural, and social dimensions of safety and insecurity in their local environments.
- Data Analysis:
- Thematic Analysis: To identify patterns, categories, and key concerns emerging from the FGDs, interviews, and observational data.
- Narrative Documentation: To preserve the richness of personal stories and community memory, with attention to voice, tone, and lived context.
- Participatory Feedback Analysis: Community feedback sessions (where feasible) will be used to validate findings, co-reflect on interpretations, and build a shared understanding of the study’s insights.
Expected Outcomes
- A Multi-Layered Urban Security Framework Report
A comprehensive analytical report that outlines the findings of the study, mapping divergent understandings of security across Delhi’s social and spatial divides. The report will contrast dominant, state-centric security narratives with grounded, community-based practices, and propose a nuanced framework for rethinking urban safety rooted in care, dignity, and equity.
- Documented Citizen Narratives and Visual Materials
A curated set of first-person accounts, oral histories, and community experiences that bring to life the diverse meanings of security in Delhi. These will be complemented by visual materials – photographs, sketches, maps, and potentially short video clips – produced through participatory activities and creative documentation, offering a textured portrait of urban everyday life.
- Policy Brief for Policymakers and Urban Practitioners
A succinct, accessible policy brief drawing from the study’s findings, addressed to municipal authorities, urban planners, and government officials. The brief will highlight key recommendations for recognising and supporting community-rooted security ecologies, integrating these into inclusive and humane urban policy.
- Stimulating Community-Led Dialogue on Security
One of the key goals of this project is to initiate a broader cultural shift in how security is discussed and imagined. Through community meetings, feedback loops, and locally grounded engagements, the study aims to seed a culture of dialogue, encouraging communities to articulate their own visions of safety, care, and urban belonging. This can be sustained and adapted beyond the project duration through local collectives and partner organisations.
- Contribution to the Global Discourse on Alternatives to Security
The Delhi case study will feed into the Global Tapestry of Alternatives’ broader Alternative Security Project, offering valuable urban insights to complement rural and Indigenous experiences from other parts of the Global South. It will help build a comparative and cross-contextual body of knowledge around decolonial, care-based, and community-led security alternatives.
Expected Support and Collaborators
To achieve its goals, the project will draw on the expertise, participation, and collaboration of multiple actors, including:
- Academic Institutions, and Social Research Organisations
For methodological guidance, peer learning, and dissemination through research and teaching platforms.
- Municipal Authorities, Women’s Groups, CSOs and Urban Planning Professionals
For consultation and policy engagement, particularly with a view to integrating insights into public safety strategies and inclusive planning models.
- Artists, Cultural Practitioners, and Theatre Groups
To creatively support participatory methods such as storytelling, community mapping, visual documentation, and performative dialogue that enrich the research process and its communication.
- Community-Based Organisations (CBOs)
As critical partners in anchoring the study locally, building trust with communities, facilitating field engagement, and ensuring follow-up after the formal project ends.
Duration of the Study
- 12 Months (One-Year Project Cycle)
The study will be conducted over a one-year period, allowing for phased implementation of design, fieldwork, analysis, and dissemination. Given the limited scope and resources, the project will remain focused, targeting selected sites and representative groups, while maximising depth, learning, and impact through strategic partnerships and documentation.
Eligibility and Desirable Qualifications
- Master’s degree (or final-year postgraduate) in Urban Studies, Sociology, Development Studies, Social Work, Political Science, Gender Studies, or a related field.
- Prior experience with qualitative research and field-based work, preferably in urban contexts.
- Strong interest in issues of urban justice, informality, community resilience, and security.
- Ability to work collaboratively across disciplines and with diverse communities.
- Fluency in Hindi and English (written and spoken).
- Familiarity with Delhi’s socio-spatial context will be an advantage.
Remuneration and Duration
- This is a full-time, one-year contractual position based in Delhi (with possible travel within NCR).
- The Research Associate will receive a monthly consolidated honorarium commensurate with experience and qualifications.
- The project is expected to begin in September 2025
Application Process
- Please email your application as a single PDF to: prc.india@yahoo.com
- Cover letter and Writing Sample
- With the subject line: Application – Research Associate – Whose City? Whose Security?
- We strongly encourage applications from women, Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Muslim, queer, and other marginalised communities. Lived experience and commitment to social justice will be valued alongside formal qualifications.
- For further queries, feel free to write to us at the email address above.
- We look forward to working with individuals who are passionate about challenging dominant paradigms, co-producing knowledge with communities, and imagining more dignified, caring urban futures.
