The new town concept originated from the ideal city model of Ebenezer Howard and expanded from Europe to America in the 1900s. It has reemerged as a site for accommodating population from highly dense urban centers of China and India since the early twenty-first century. The massive infusion of public and private investments has enabled the emergence of new towns in China and India as planned centers of worldclass residential, commercial, and work spaces. The rational goal of dedensifying the crowded central cities can lead to a more balanced distribution and use of resources across the metropolitan regions with more spacious housing for the growing middle class in China and India. Yet it is a relatively small number of the wealthy and mobile people who have turned out to be beneficiaries of the mostly high-end housing and $ 319 well-developed transport infrastructure that evokes social and economic polarizations and political contestations. In this chapter, we will examine: (1) how these top-down planned and developed new towns have reshaped the urbanization process of the megacities in India and China, (2) the socio-spatial influence of these settlements on the central city as well as the surrounding rural areas, and (3) the expected and actual spatial users (both old and new residents) of the new towns? We address these questions by organizing two pairs of cases in a systematic framework: Anting New Town and Thames Town in Shanghai, China and Rajarhat New Town and the Kolkata West International City (KWIC) near Kolkata, India.

This article investigates the role played by the state in the production and management of urban space vis-à-vis global agents of change. The proliferation of new towns and special economic zones as urban restructuring strategies in rapidly developing countries like China and India are receiving much attention from the scholarly community, documenting and interrogating urban transitions from centralized planning to more participatory and often privatized modes of decentralized planning. This article seeks to tease out the kinds of relationships between the state and other urban development actors it entails, ranging from conflict to collaboration, from protest to partnerships, and from contestation to collaboration. In the Shanghai Metropolitan context, we focus on Anting New Town and Songjiang New City as two cases for understanding the relative power of the municipal government, global capital, professional planning, and the limited influence of local residents in the process and outcome of large-scale suburban development. As a comparison, we focus on the West Bengal State government's role in the development of two new townships (Rajarhat New Town and the Kolkata West International City) on the fringes of the existing core city of Kolkata (Calcutta), India. Drawing on a number of secondary sources such as development plans, newspaper articles, field-based observations, and informal discussions and interviews with official town planners, architects, and private planners, our goal is to compare and contrast the two strategies foregrounding the practices and the relationship of the state to the forces of privatization and globalization, to local grassroots actors and the precarious as well as multifarious ways in which it seeks to constantly negotiate with the dynamics of development. It seeks to answer: what kind of challenges does the state face in reorganizing the urban? Who are the other actors involved in the negotiations and exclusions, contestations, and collaborations? What are the new sociospatial, economic, and political boundaries and contents of the spaces produced?

This article compares a networked and a non-networked artefact and the diverse practices of everyday governance around these localised configurations of water infrastructure in Baruipur, a peripheral and rapidly urbanising small town in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area. Plagued by arsenic contamination, the state has been pushing to expand and consolidate a networked piped infrastructure bringing in treated surface water. This shift threatens to reconfigure the existing diverse infrastructure configurations that are fragmented, incremental in nature. We examine the scholarship on the situated and embodied forms of Urban Political Ecology to understand how everyday social relations and plural practices at the level of the town, the ‘para’ (roughly neighbourhood), and the household to understand how socio-material artefacts shape lived experiences and local networks of power. The shift in the socio-technical configurations, in turn, lead to new forms of power coalitions, network conflicts, and collaborations. Through an in-depth qualitative examination, we conclude that heterogeneous infrastructure configurations and everyday practices are not only gendered but also intricately embedded within intersections of social affinity, intimate geographies, and embodied class power relations in the ‘para’.

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