Hidden Infrastructure of Urban Resilience: Labor, Precarity, and Economic Adaptation in India

In the textile, urban regions of Surat and Tirupur, migrant workers constitute the hidden infrastructure of “urban resilience.” While policy discourses valorize infrastructure upgrades and financial instruments as solutions to climate-economic volatility, in practice it is the forced adaptability of precarious labor—through wage reductions, relocations, and unpaid work—that sustains cities and industries amid repeated crises. Drawing on ongoing research on climate and labor in Indian cities, this commentary illustrates how resilience frameworks frequently operate to mask extraction, entrench inequality, and corrode social trust. I argue that urban resilience cannot be understood solely as a technical or risk-informed endeavour; it requires centring labour and vulnerability within adaptation and planning processes. Realizing this entails a fundamental reconfiguration of resilience governance: shifting from approaches that externalize human costs onto precarious workers toward strategies that integrate welfare, human security, and public goods, thereby recognizing labor as constitutive of urban economic and social life rather than an invisible adjunct to the socio-technical infrastructure of risk governance.