Over the last decade though, I have been examining livelihoods spanning the rural-peri-urban-urban continuum. Here, the literature and associated methods to capture dynamic livelihoods appears relatively less developed. Urban livelihoods differ from rural livelihoods in their nature—binaries of safe/unsafe; formal/informal are abound—and in how they are supported by the state (Bhan et al., 2022). They also differ in how much people can earn, who can gain access to what jobs, the centrality of the digital in shaping work; and emerging risks from employers and workspaces but also climate change. 

Peri-urban areas represent liminal spaces, where distinctions between agrarian and non-agrarian livelihoods are blurred. There is a simultaneous blurring of land–labour relations—formal work takes on hues of informality and social-ecological systems are simultaneously in flux and stuck. 

Constructs common in rural livelihoods research, such as ‘community’, ‘common pool resources’, ‘gatekeepers and elites’, take on different meanings and forms in the urban. In an informal settlement, for instance, a local leader may double up as labour contractor and water provider. Lines of gender, caste and class remain, but they take on different forms and confer different types of agency in the urban. Even defining a household becomes tricky, given that households may be stretched across locations (as in the case of migrants) or may take on new forms (e.g., male-only dormitories, women’s hostels, etc.). 

Interrogating all of this through a livelihoods approach requires a lexicon that moves away from agriculture and allied sectors toward factory floors and construction sites; away from nature-based livelihoods towards app-based jobs and domestic work. These shifts also mean traversing discussions around rural landholdings and livelihood portfolios towards understanding how aspirations and desperation are colliding with globalisation and class differences.