Rajesh Bhattacharya and Annapurna Shaw, Eds. Urban Housing, Livelihoods and Environmental Challen... more Rajesh Bhattacharya and Annapurna Shaw, Eds. Urban Housing, Livelihoods and Environmental Challenges in Emerging Economies (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan), 2021, ISBN 9789354422331 (pb).
The COVID-19 pandemic and interventions addressing it raise important questions about human mobil... more The COVID-19 pandemic and interventions addressing it raise important questions about human mobility that have geopolitical implications. This forum uses mobility and immobility during the pandemic as lenses onto the ways that routinised state power reacts to acute uncertainties, as well as how these reactions impact politics and societies. Specifically, we propose the concept of "shock mobility" as migratory routines radically reconfigured: emergency flights from epicentres, mass repatriations, lockdowns, quarantines. Patterns of shock mobility and immobility are not new categories of movement, but rather are significant alterations to the timing, duration, intensity, and relations among existing movements. Many of these alterations have been induced by governments' reactions to the pandemic in both migrant-sending and receiving contexts, which can be especially consequential for migrants in and from the Global South. Our interventions explore these processes by highlighting experiences of Afghans and Kurds along Iran's borders, Western Africans in Europe, Filipino workers, irregular Bangladeshis in Qatar, Central Americans travelling northwards via Mexico, and rural-urban migrants in India. In total, we argue that tracing shocks' dynamics in a comparative manner provides an analytical means for assessing the long-term implications of the pandemic, building theories about how and why any particular post-crisis world emerges as it does, and paving the way for future empirical work.
Full article is available at https://www.eth.mpg.de/6184512/Geopolitics_2022.pdf
This in-depth report on employment and labour migration focuses on the role of small cities in sh... more This in-depth report on employment and labour migration focuses on the role of small cities in shaping employment outcomes of migrant youth in India and Indonesia. Secondary and tertiary cities function simultaneously as origins, destinations, and transit points for migrants. Internal migration occurs within and across sub-national administrative boundaries, with implications on access to labor markets, social security, social assimilation and legality. Mobilities of three types are seen: Interprovincial/Inter-state migration, Intra-district, and Inter-district. Emphasis on a demographic dividend located within small cities could turn policy attention towards the potential of small cities in relation to the needs of migrant youth
While metropolitan cities are framed as emancipatory spaces for women migrants, we know less abou... more While metropolitan cities are framed as emancipatory spaces for women migrants, we know less about their experiences in smaller cities, which are driving urban transformation in India. Drawing on pre-pandemic fieldwork with employed youth (aged 15–29 years) in Mangalore and Kishangarh, this article investigates young women’s work, education, aspirations and mobilities in smaller cities which have relatively weak scalar positions in terms of global economic, political and social power. This article finds that small cities act as regional action spaces for women from villages and small towns to capitalise on fleeting opportunities and push against patriarchal boundaries through mobilities. It shows how women use a range of strategies from individual power tactics within households to leveraging institutional support systems to do so. The article suggests that situating migrant-friendly policy initiatives in small cities can potentially improve employment and mobility outcomes for youn...
Cities are seen as the key drivers of growth and managing urban expansion is a major policy chall... more Cities are seen as the key drivers of growth and managing urban expansion is a major policy challenge. But Indian urbanization is marked not just by expansion but also by the transformation of a large pool of rural areas. Together, these two factors contributed about 40% of urban population growth between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, with an equal contribution coming from natural growth, and the rest from migration. India’s urbanization is thus as much a story of its large megacities as it is a story of the in situ transformation of its rural population, not just in the periphery of cities but also beyond.
This special issue carries in-depth case studies1 from five of India’s largest metros, which anal... more This special issue carries in-depth case studies1 from five of India’s largest metros, which analyse the operations of boundaries in diverse subaltern projects of urban regeneration and aspiration.2 Articles in this issue analyse how struggles over land, water, toilets, better housing, and plans and visions of the city serve to dismantle the totalities and highlight the composition of powerful assemblages of capitalist urbanisation such as real estate, finance and planning. The entry point for this enquiry was a cross-city comparative research project3 that explored how concepts of boundaries and ‘boundaryspanning’ could deepen analyses of contestations over the urban from its margins, peripheries and interstices. Starting from an understanding of urbanism as a meaning-making project underpinned by material–infrastructural re-formations, the lens of boundaries in this collection trains focuses on the orders, interfaces and deconstructions enacted in emergent local urbanisms that uns...
Drawing on empirical research with migrant populations, this article identifi es four interlinked... more Drawing on empirical research with migrant populations, this article identifi es four interlinked issues critical to understanding and addressing the contemporary migrant crisis that unfolded in India in the wake of COVID-19. These are (i) labour market segmentation by class, caste, and gender; (ii) inaccessibility of urban housing and services that challenge urban survival; (iii) differential access to documentation, which shapes the hierarchies of citizenship; and (iv) ineffective data that lets migrants slip through the gaps of welfare provision. The authors are grateful to the referee for the comments on a previous version of this article.
The population of Gurgaon, a city of an estimated 2.5 million people located south of India’s cap... more The population of Gurgaon, a city of an estimated 2.5 million people located south of India’s capital Delhi and within the National Capital Region, grew by 73.9 percent in 2001-2011. While Gurgaon’s private sector housing market attracted educated migrants, residents of urban villages built rental housing for low-income migrant workers. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Nathupur village in 2013 and Sikanderpur village in 2017, this paper focuses on the experience of low-income migrant renters in the informal rental markets that are controlled and managed by village landlords. It focuses on living conditions, sense of security and the nature of tenant-landlord relationships. Despite the dominance of landlords, I posit that migrants mediate their housing choices as per their migration strategy and leverage oral contracts to move flexibly through rental housing in different locations at different times. Further, by characterising landlords as benevolent, renters keep their op...
Emerging economies are witnessing the large-scale movement of internal migrants. While the popula... more Emerging economies are witnessing the large-scale movement of internal migrants. While the popular discourse on internal migration imagines migrants from villages flooding into the large metropolis, scholarship is increasingly emphasizing the existence of multiple migration pathways, as well as the emergence of more dispersed patterns of urbanization. To root these discussions in particular geographies, this paper introduces the concept of ‘migrant-intensity’ as an empirical way of understanding the places that experience migration in the most profound and transformative ways—where the challenges and opportunities inherent in transience and mobility are most apparent. Analyzing census data from India and Indonesia, we show that ‘migrant-intensity’—a measure of in- and out-migrant concentration—is highest in a diverse set of non-metropolitan spaces, including secondary and tertiary cities and ‘rurban’ geographies. We argue that migrant-intensity as an empirical tool can advance schol...
A significant proportion of the working poor in Asian cities live in slums as renters. An estimat... more A significant proportion of the working poor in Asian cities live in slums as renters. An estimated 60–90 per cent of low-income rentals in Asia are in the informal sector; 25 per cent of India’s housing stock comprises informal rentals. Yet informal rentals remain an understudied area. Through an empirical study, this article illustrates the typologies of informal rental housing in urban villages and unauthorized colonies in Gurgaon, a city of 1.2 million located within India’s National Capital Region (NCR). Further, through qualitative fieldwork, the article sheds light on how renters, usually low-income migrants, leverage informal rentals to negotiate the city. The research finds that while informal rentals offer advantages of affordability, flexibility and proximity to livelihoods for migrants, they are also sites of exploitation and poor living conditions. Further, the study reveals that social networks that carry over from places or origin as well as household migration strate...
A chapter dedicated to migration in the Economic Survey 2016-17 signals the willingness on the pa... more A chapter dedicated to migration in the Economic Survey 2016-17 signals the willingness on the part of Indian policymakers to address the linkages between migration, labour markets and economic development. This paper attempts to take forward this discussion. The paper comments on the salient mobility trends in India gleaned from existing datasets, and then compare and critique estimates of the Economic Survey with traditional datasets. After highlighting the data and resultant knowledge gaps, the paper comments on the possibility of using innovative data sources and methods to understand migration and human mobility. It also offer ideas on how an enhanced understanding of mobility is important for policy interventions for those individuals who change locations permanently and those who move seasonally.
Rajesh Bhattacharya and Annapurna Shaw, Eds. Urban Housing, Livelihoods and Environmental Challen... more Rajesh Bhattacharya and Annapurna Shaw, Eds. Urban Housing, Livelihoods and Environmental Challenges in Emerging Economies (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan), 2021, ISBN 9789354422331 (pb).
The COVID-19 pandemic and interventions addressing it raise important questions about human mobil... more The COVID-19 pandemic and interventions addressing it raise important questions about human mobility that have geopolitical implications. This forum uses mobility and immobility during the pandemic as lenses onto the ways that routinised state power reacts to acute uncertainties, as well as how these reactions impact politics and societies. Specifically, we propose the concept of "shock mobility" as migratory routines radically reconfigured: emergency flights from epicentres, mass repatriations, lockdowns, quarantines. Patterns of shock mobility and immobility are not new categories of movement, but rather are significant alterations to the timing, duration, intensity, and relations among existing movements. Many of these alterations have been induced by governments' reactions to the pandemic in both migrant-sending and receiving contexts, which can be especially consequential for migrants in and from the Global South. Our interventions explore these processes by highlighting experiences of Afghans and Kurds along Iran's borders, Western Africans in Europe, Filipino workers, irregular Bangladeshis in Qatar, Central Americans travelling northwards via Mexico, and rural-urban migrants in India. In total, we argue that tracing shocks' dynamics in a comparative manner provides an analytical means for assessing the long-term implications of the pandemic, building theories about how and why any particular post-crisis world emerges as it does, and paving the way for future empirical work.
Full article is available at https://www.eth.mpg.de/6184512/Geopolitics_2022.pdf
This in-depth report on employment and labour migration focuses on the role of small cities in sh... more This in-depth report on employment and labour migration focuses on the role of small cities in shaping employment outcomes of migrant youth in India and Indonesia. Secondary and tertiary cities function simultaneously as origins, destinations, and transit points for migrants. Internal migration occurs within and across sub-national administrative boundaries, with implications on access to labor markets, social security, social assimilation and legality. Mobilities of three types are seen: Interprovincial/Inter-state migration, Intra-district, and Inter-district. Emphasis on a demographic dividend located within small cities could turn policy attention towards the potential of small cities in relation to the needs of migrant youth
While metropolitan cities are framed as emancipatory spaces for women migrants, we know less abou... more While metropolitan cities are framed as emancipatory spaces for women migrants, we know less about their experiences in smaller cities, which are driving urban transformation in India. Drawing on pre-pandemic fieldwork with employed youth (aged 15–29 years) in Mangalore and Kishangarh, this article investigates young women’s work, education, aspirations and mobilities in smaller cities which have relatively weak scalar positions in terms of global economic, political and social power. This article finds that small cities act as regional action spaces for women from villages and small towns to capitalise on fleeting opportunities and push against patriarchal boundaries through mobilities. It shows how women use a range of strategies from individual power tactics within households to leveraging institutional support systems to do so. The article suggests that situating migrant-friendly policy initiatives in small cities can potentially improve employment and mobility outcomes for youn...
Cities are seen as the key drivers of growth and managing urban expansion is a major policy chall... more Cities are seen as the key drivers of growth and managing urban expansion is a major policy challenge. But Indian urbanization is marked not just by expansion but also by the transformation of a large pool of rural areas. Together, these two factors contributed about 40% of urban population growth between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, with an equal contribution coming from natural growth, and the rest from migration. India’s urbanization is thus as much a story of its large megacities as it is a story of the in situ transformation of its rural population, not just in the periphery of cities but also beyond.
This special issue carries in-depth case studies1 from five of India’s largest metros, which anal... more This special issue carries in-depth case studies1 from five of India’s largest metros, which analyse the operations of boundaries in diverse subaltern projects of urban regeneration and aspiration.2 Articles in this issue analyse how struggles over land, water, toilets, better housing, and plans and visions of the city serve to dismantle the totalities and highlight the composition of powerful assemblages of capitalist urbanisation such as real estate, finance and planning. The entry point for this enquiry was a cross-city comparative research project3 that explored how concepts of boundaries and ‘boundaryspanning’ could deepen analyses of contestations over the urban from its margins, peripheries and interstices. Starting from an understanding of urbanism as a meaning-making project underpinned by material–infrastructural re-formations, the lens of boundaries in this collection trains focuses on the orders, interfaces and deconstructions enacted in emergent local urbanisms that uns...
Drawing on empirical research with migrant populations, this article identifi es four interlinked... more Drawing on empirical research with migrant populations, this article identifi es four interlinked issues critical to understanding and addressing the contemporary migrant crisis that unfolded in India in the wake of COVID-19. These are (i) labour market segmentation by class, caste, and gender; (ii) inaccessibility of urban housing and services that challenge urban survival; (iii) differential access to documentation, which shapes the hierarchies of citizenship; and (iv) ineffective data that lets migrants slip through the gaps of welfare provision. The authors are grateful to the referee for the comments on a previous version of this article.
The population of Gurgaon, a city of an estimated 2.5 million people located south of India’s cap... more The population of Gurgaon, a city of an estimated 2.5 million people located south of India’s capital Delhi and within the National Capital Region, grew by 73.9 percent in 2001-2011. While Gurgaon’s private sector housing market attracted educated migrants, residents of urban villages built rental housing for low-income migrant workers. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Nathupur village in 2013 and Sikanderpur village in 2017, this paper focuses on the experience of low-income migrant renters in the informal rental markets that are controlled and managed by village landlords. It focuses on living conditions, sense of security and the nature of tenant-landlord relationships. Despite the dominance of landlords, I posit that migrants mediate their housing choices as per their migration strategy and leverage oral contracts to move flexibly through rental housing in different locations at different times. Further, by characterising landlords as benevolent, renters keep their op...
Emerging economies are witnessing the large-scale movement of internal migrants. While the popula... more Emerging economies are witnessing the large-scale movement of internal migrants. While the popular discourse on internal migration imagines migrants from villages flooding into the large metropolis, scholarship is increasingly emphasizing the existence of multiple migration pathways, as well as the emergence of more dispersed patterns of urbanization. To root these discussions in particular geographies, this paper introduces the concept of ‘migrant-intensity’ as an empirical way of understanding the places that experience migration in the most profound and transformative ways—where the challenges and opportunities inherent in transience and mobility are most apparent. Analyzing census data from India and Indonesia, we show that ‘migrant-intensity’—a measure of in- and out-migrant concentration—is highest in a diverse set of non-metropolitan spaces, including secondary and tertiary cities and ‘rurban’ geographies. We argue that migrant-intensity as an empirical tool can advance schol...
A significant proportion of the working poor in Asian cities live in slums as renters. An estimat... more A significant proportion of the working poor in Asian cities live in slums as renters. An estimated 60–90 per cent of low-income rentals in Asia are in the informal sector; 25 per cent of India’s housing stock comprises informal rentals. Yet informal rentals remain an understudied area. Through an empirical study, this article illustrates the typologies of informal rental housing in urban villages and unauthorized colonies in Gurgaon, a city of 1.2 million located within India’s National Capital Region (NCR). Further, through qualitative fieldwork, the article sheds light on how renters, usually low-income migrants, leverage informal rentals to negotiate the city. The research finds that while informal rentals offer advantages of affordability, flexibility and proximity to livelihoods for migrants, they are also sites of exploitation and poor living conditions. Further, the study reveals that social networks that carry over from places or origin as well as household migration strate...
A chapter dedicated to migration in the Economic Survey 2016-17 signals the willingness on the pa... more A chapter dedicated to migration in the Economic Survey 2016-17 signals the willingness on the part of Indian policymakers to address the linkages between migration, labour markets and economic development. This paper attempts to take forward this discussion. The paper comments on the salient mobility trends in India gleaned from existing datasets, and then compare and critique estimates of the Economic Survey with traditional datasets. After highlighting the data and resultant knowledge gaps, the paper comments on the possibility of using innovative data sources and methods to understand migration and human mobility. It also offer ideas on how an enhanced understanding of mobility is important for policy interventions for those individuals who change locations permanently and those who move seasonally.
The smart city’s pursuit of a top-down approach to city planning and management defies the core ... more The smart city’s pursuit of a top-down approach to city planning and management defies the core ideas of participation and citizenship that must drive the urban project
As citizens come together to stop the destruction of Aravalli, is now the time for a new imaginat... more As citizens come together to stop the destruction of Aravalli, is now the time for a new imagination of ecologically smart cities?
micro Home Solutions’ core idea is to impact social inclusion in cities by influencing the growth... more micro Home Solutions’ core idea is to impact social inclusion in cities by influencing the growth of self-built neighbourhoods that are mixed-use and where improvements to the quality of housing has multiplier effects. Design Home Solutions (DHS) was conceptualized to improve self-construction practices of urban low-income households through access to formal construction finance and professional construction assistance at an affordable fee.
The poor and low-income households resettled by government as part of slum evictions programs are given tiny empty plots of land in city suburbs with unclear legal titles. They usually comprise informal sector workforce that are unable to have mortgage documents, and thus lack access to affordable construction loans or design assistance. To make a positive impact on the built environment called for a comprehensive project design, an inter-agency collaboration and vision. It has required communicating the vision of inclusive cities and working at multiple tiers to address the socio-economic and institutional challenges. The overall aim is for the pilot project to influence the design of larger government and bilateral lending programs on the complexity of working in the urban built environment.
http://www.universitasforum.org/index.php/ojs/article/view/161/577
On the cusp of its demographic dividend, 1 India seeks to boost economic growth by transitioning ... more On the cusp of its demographic dividend, 1 India seeks to boost economic growth by transitioning large numbers of its working age population out of low productivity agricultural work, which currently absorbs 44% of the country's workforce. 2 While farm productivity is vital, urbanisation remains a key opportunity for large-scale employment transitions to the relatively productive non-farm sector. Moreover, cities have the potential to be ' engines of economic growth' for national economies, powered by an increase in productivity and innovation that emerges from the clustering of firms and labour, and tacit information spillovers between them. 3
Despite being classified rural, the renowned Dong Ky furniture cluster near Hanoi, Vietnam needs ... more Despite being classified rural, the renowned Dong Ky furniture cluster near Hanoi, Vietnam needs to find urgent solutions to ‘urban’ problems like congestion and pollution in order to remain competitive
A sweeping indictment of cash needs to be replaced with a more nuanced understanding of the cash-... more A sweeping indictment of cash needs to be replaced with a more nuanced understanding of the cash-driven economy. We need measures to protect those who are genuinely cash-dependent. The cash economy is multilayered, involving cash payments at multiple points in the chain.
The urban team at the Centre for Policy Research carried out intensive field work over two weeks,... more The urban team at the Centre for Policy Research carried out intensive field work over two weeks, where the researchers interviewed workers across categories of informal work in Delhi, such as construction workers, sabjiwalas, dhaba workers, small shopkeepers, industrial contract workers etc., to understand how they have coped with the impact of demonetisation or ‘notebandi’, as it is commonly called.
In the seventh episode (above) of CPR’s podcast, ThoughtSpace, Richa Bansal talks to Senior Researchers Mukta Naik and Ashwin Parulkar and Research Associates Eesha Kunduri and Manish to unpack their findings on informal workers' strategies of coping with ‘notebandi'.
"Delhi has taken much from the poor and given relatively little. Unfortunately, the script seems ... more "Delhi has taken much from the poor and given relatively little. Unfortunately, the script seems ready to repeat itself with the Delhi government’s suggestion to relocate those facing eviction from railway lands to far-flung parts of the city, where an estimated 45,857 publicly built affordable housing units are lying vacant, in varying states of disrepair and completion."
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Full article is available at https://www.eth.mpg.de/6184512/Geopolitics_2022.pdf
Full article is available at https://www.eth.mpg.de/6184512/Geopolitics_2022.pdf
The poor and low-income households resettled by government as part of slum evictions programs are given tiny empty plots of land in city suburbs with unclear legal titles. They usually comprise informal sector workforce that are unable to have mortgage documents, and thus lack access to affordable construction loans or design assistance. To make a positive impact on the built environment called for a comprehensive project design, an inter-agency collaboration and vision. It has required communicating the vision of inclusive cities and working at multiple tiers to address the socio-economic and institutional challenges. The overall aim is for the pilot project to influence the design of larger government and bilateral lending programs on the complexity of working in the urban built environment.
http://www.universitasforum.org/index.php/ojs/article/view/161/577
In the seventh episode (above) of CPR’s podcast, ThoughtSpace, Richa Bansal talks to Senior Researchers Mukta Naik and Ashwin Parulkar and Research Associates Eesha Kunduri and Manish to unpack their findings on informal workers' strategies of coping with ‘notebandi'.