This book lays out the different and complex dimensions of urbanisation in India. It brings together contributors with expertise in fields as varied as demography, geography, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, architecture, planning and land use, environmental sciences, creative writing, filmmaking and grassroots activism to reflect on and examine India’s urban experience. It discusses various dimensions of city life—how to define the urban; the conditions generating work, living and (in)security; the nature of contemporary cities; the dilemmas of creating and executing urban policy, planning and governance; and the issues concerning ecology and environment. The volume also articulates and evaluates the way Indian urbanism promotes and organises aspirations and utopias of the people, whilst simultaneously endorsing disparities, depravities and conflicts.
The volume includes interventions that shape contemporary debates. Comprehensive, accessible and topical, it will be useful to scholars and researchers of urban studies, urban sociology, development studies, public policy, economics, political studies, gender studies, city studies, planning and governance. It will also interest practitioners, think tanks and NGOs working on urban issues.
Foreword Preface Introduction: Revisiting Urban India I Debate on Defining the Urban Rurbanisation: An Alternate Development Paradigm Subaltern Urbanisation Revisited II Conditions Generating Work, Living and (In)Security Only ‘Good People’, Please: Residential Segregation in Urbanising India Inclusive Urbanisation: Informal Employment and Gender Resettlement, Mobility and Women’s Safety in Cities Cities for Healthy People III Cities of Contemporary India The Planned and the Unplanned: Company Towns in India The Logistical City Cities and Smartness Public Spaces and Places: Gendered Intersectionalities in Indian Cities Reading the City through Art IV Urban Policy, Planning and Governance India’s ‘Urban’ and the Policy Disconnect Changing Trajectories of Urban Local Governance Urban Development, Housing and ‘Slums’ Engine Urbanism Post-national Urbanism: ‘Ordinary’ People, Capital and the State V Ecology, Environment and Well-Being The Art of Evolution Nurturing Urban Commons for Sustainable Urbanisation The Unsustainable Urban Waste Economy: What is to be Done? The Canal and the City: An Urban–Ecological Lens on Chennai’s Growth Cities: Changing the Metaphor to Quality of Life
Biography
Sujata Patel is National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India. Earlier, she taught sociology at the Universities of Hyderabad and Pune and SNDT Women’s University. Her work is influenced by Marxism, feminism, spatial studies and post-structuralism, and covers areas such as modernity and social theory, history of sociology/social sciences, city-formation, social movements, gender construction, reservation, quota politics and caste and class formations in India. She is also an interlocutor of teaching and learning practices, and has written on the challenges that organise its reconstitution within classrooms and university structures. She is the author of over sixty peer-reviewed papers/book chapters and the Series Editor of Oxford India Studies in Contemporary Society and Routledge’s Cities and the Urban Imperative. From 2010 to 2015, she edited the Sage Studies in International Sociology and Current Sociology Monographs. She is also the author of The Making of Industrial Relations (1997), editor of The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions (2010) and Doing Sociology in India, Genealogies, Locations and Practices (2011) and is co-editor of five books: Bombay: Metaphor of Modern India (1995), Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture (1995), Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition (2003), Thinking Social Science in India (2002) and Urban Studies (2006). She has been associated in various capacities with the International Sociological Association and has been its first Vice-President for National Associations (2002–6). She was the President of Indian Sociological Society from January 2016 to December 2017.
Omita Goyal is presently Chief Editor of the IIC Quarterly, the Journal of the India International Centre, New Delhi, India. She started her career in the voluntary sector with the Indian Social Institute, New Delhi, and then moved into academic publishing where she has spent over 27 years. She worked at Sage Publications India Private Limited for 20 years, leaving as General Manager, and thereafter was a consultant for the World Bank, UNICEF, UNDP, Voluntary Health Association of India, Centre for Women’s Development Studies, WHO, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, and TERI. In 2005, she was invited by Taylor and Francis Group to start a social science programme under the social science and humanities imprint, Routledge, as Publishing Director. She has a master’s degree in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics.
