Unprecedented urbanization coupled with an existing fabric of socio-spatial inequality is increasingly overwriting social, economic, and ecological resilience in the Global South. Changing land-use patterns and resource consumption is leading to a disruption of Ecosystem Services (ESS) - services leveraged from natural ecosystems directly or indirectly to promote human well-being - impacting societies detrimentally. 
Taking Ranchi as a case, this research demonstrates the potential for enhancing the resilience of cities and societies through a decentralized, pro-poor, bottom-up planning process for urban poverty reduction and ecological resilience. The research locates itself within the action-oriented approach relying on collective, collaborative, self-reflective, critical system inquiry to understand and articulate a rationale to improve top-down planning approach.

The city of Ranchi, located alongside the Subarnarekha river evidences urbanization induced fragmentation and disruption of ESS, its concomitant relationship with issues of social equity and justice and its causal relationship with myopic urban planning paradigms.
The research, by engaging stakeholders from various tribal communities, community leaders, local political representatives and bureaucrats, generated evidence to demonstrate the efficacy of ESS based plans in meeting the twin objectives of urban poverty reduction and enhanced resilience at the neighbourhood and city scale. The research explored storytelling (and attendant storyboarding) as a critical tool in instituting a grassroots view of enquiry and analysis. Selective and purposeful stories were illustrated visually and spatially to trace the natural, cultural and urban histories (and embedded knowledge systems and lived experiences) and trajectories leading to the contemporary city.
The storyboards were arrived at through a combination of qualitative and quantitative exercises at multiple scales like household surveys, focus group discussions (FGDs), semi-structured interviews, GIS mapping, stakeholder analysis, eliciting oral histories, conducting transect walks, and observation methods amongst others. 
The research has been operationalized in partnership with Mahila Housing Sewa Trust and was funded by The Nudge Institute: Centre for Social Innovation.