This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with Mukta Naik, a Fellow at CPR, whose work focuses on informal housing, internal migration and what these subjects can tell us about India's urban transformation. Naik is an architect and urban planner, who works with the Initiative on Cities, Economy & Society at CPR. Prior to joining CPR, she worked with a social enterprise – Micro Home Solutions – on community-based interventions aimed at improving housing in informal settlements. Naik is a graduate of the School of Planning and Architecture, and has a Master's Degree in urban and regional planning from Texas A&M University. In the first part of the conversation with Naik, we spoke about her pathway into the policy space, the importance of 'boundary-crossing' when tackling subjects like migration and urbanisation and her work on the Small City Dreaming project, looking at the aspirations and lives of young Indians beyond the big cities. In the second part of the conversation, which you will receive in two weeks, we spoke about how Covid changed the conversation on migrants in India, whether the learnings from that time are taking root, what it means to look at cities and urbanisation from a Global South perspective and why she advises young scholars not to over-define their career pathways.