Urban studies in India across the millennial turn: Histories and futures

Abstract

The millennial turn saw a distinct efflorescence in scholarship on urban India. This essay introduces a Virtual Special Issue on urban studies in India that showcases a selection of articles from the journal’s archives. It traces the disciplinary, thematic and methodological shifts that have marked this millennial turn. On the one hand, the social science of the urban has had a statist bent, reacting to the policy focus on cities as growth engines in the post-liberalisation era. On the other hand, critical urban studies has brought attention to the unregulated, deregulated, unplanned and unintended city produced by dynamic processes of informality acting overtly or covertly against the state’s neoliberal agendas. This introductory essay aims to examine the ways this interplay has unfolded both in the pages of this journal and elsewhere. It locates the Virtual Special Issue selection within a broader review of the state of scholarship in Indian urban studies and marks out areas for productive interventions in the future study of Indian cities.

Urban Big Data Analytics: A Novel Approach for Tracking Urbanization Trends in Sri Lanka

“…India considers Municipal Corporation Areas as urban areas. Still, to be considered as urban, Indian Municipal Corporation Areas must have a population over 5000, a population density over 400 people per km 2 , and 75% of the male workforce engaged in non-agricultural activities [5].…”

“…Population statistics mostly come from surveys conducted once every 2-10 years based on countries' census year policy [2,3]. The conventional methods used by most countries consider residential population distribution as the only or the main criterion for the identification of urban areas and the patterns of urbanization [4,5]. Yet, these methods inherit a few limitations with them.…”

Definitional Indifferences and Formal/Functional Equivalences: A Commentary

“…Indeed! From different geographical vantage points around the world, better minds than mine have set about addressing this task (for a sample, see Bowen et al, 2010;Coelho and Sood, 2022;Gutkind, 1968;Gutman, 1963;Iossifova et al, 2017;Judd, 2005;Müller and Trubina, 2020;Paddison, 2001;Sapotichne et al, 2007;Topalov, 1989;Wolman et al, 2022). These have both troubled work that took for granted the experiences of the United States in the generation of definitions of urban studies, while also recovering longer, parallel definitional histories generated out of other countries across the world.…”

SOUTH ASIAN URBAN CLIMATES: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons

“…2 2 A review of some of this literature is provided by Coelho and Sood (2021). For examples of scholarship offering comparative perspectives on urbanization in India, see also the biannual ‘Review of Urban Affairs’ supplement published by the Economic and Political Weekly , which also offers comparative perspectives on urbanization in India, and Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan (2013).…”

“…These terms from Urdu/Hindustani are not easily translatable to English. While we recognize that these terms are not used throughout South Asia, they nevertheless capture particular 'structures of feeling' we want to render about3 The physical and discursive boundaries of South Asia, both external and internal, represent the fraught interaction of biophysical materiality with histories of colonialism, neo-colonial interventions, and geopolitical tensions at various scales.2 A review of some of this literature is provided byCoelho and Sood (2021). For examples of scholarship offering…”