Ashima Sood

Increasing numbers of rural workers in India engage in commuting as well as temporary and seasonal forms of migration to cities. Yet, the implications of such large-scale temporary worker movements for urban governance have received little attention. Drawing on a field study of the cycle rickshaw rental market in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, this chapter attempts to highlight the central role of urban informal markets in accommodating and supplying much-needed services to these underserved populations. The qualitative and quantitative evidence from Bilaspur makes a case for recognising the close interdependence of informal markets and mobile workers and offers a critical benchmark for evaluating policy interventions both for informal and multilocational workers in urban settings. Connecting the policy discourses on informal self-employment and rural-to-urban mobility is key to framing an appropriate policy, programmatic and regulatory responses to these most unprotected and invisible segments of the urban population. Three channels for such a policy connection need to be recognised: (1) existing regulatory frameworks for the informal sector impact the livelihoods of temporary migrants, (2) interventions for informal livelihoods that fail to account for mobile workforces may suffer from biased coverage and (3) informal markets that provide livelihoods for temporary and commuter migrants can suggest lessons and programmatic avenues to reach these workers.

New policy and legislative initiatives in India over the last decade, from the Special Economic Zones Act 2005 to subnational state-level counterparts, have encouraged processes of corporate urbanisation, by facilitating the development of ‘industrial townships’ largely by private actors. This emerging policy architecture places a range of municipal functions, infrastructures and services in the domain of the (private) township, paralleling processes of urban gating and enclave growth worldwide. This paper analyses the relevant policies and laws to examine the role of the state in facilitating the growth of such urban clubs in India and fostering privatised provision of public goods. With few evaluations of the scope and impacts of such urban development in India, the case of Jamshedpur, an early prototype of corporate urbanisation, highlights how such sites may encourage patterns of unplanned and under-provisioned growth around the core.

Are informal services greener than their formal or organised counterparts? Beyond their employment potential, non-motorised transport, street vending and waste sorting or rag picking use fewer resources and energy; they also tend to reuse and recycle materials. These possible benefits have been little recognised and rarely calculated. In India, supportive policy frameworks face many hurdles, and protection for workers also needs more attention.

In her pathbreaking essay on modes of production of urban space in the global South, anthropologist Teresa Caldeira (2017) deploys the concept of “peripheral urbanization” to conjure “a problem-space that allows us to investigate logics of the production of the urban that differ from those of the North Atlantic … as a means of exploring processes of both socio-spatial formation and theory-making” (p. 4). Along similar lines, in this special issue, we invoke the concept of the periphery to attend to diverse and heterogeneous forms of extended urbanization that are taking shape in India. Instead of considering the periphery as a spatially fixed zone, hinged to the geographies of metropolitan centers, for instance, we mobilize the notion of the periphery as a conceptual and territorial threshold that allows us to explore the urbanisms unfolding across the country. For us, the periphery, or the peri-urban as it is often referred to, may be located on the edges of metropolitan cities and entangled with their regimes of labor, capital, and governance, or it may be further afield, in smaller towns and settlements and enmeshed with agrarian and rural rhythms and dynamics that propel such peripheral urbanization. Irrespective of their location, amid intense competition for land and other resources, peripheries have not only become key sites of contestation, social exclusion, and speculation but they have also come to embody hope and aspirations for diverse social groups. They are attractive to investors seeking to capture gains from rapidly rising land value, to migrants who come from rural areas to live and work in the peripheries, as well as to upwardly mobile city-dwellers who have placed their bets on materializing their middle-class dreams and aspirations in these urbanizing frontiers. Located materially and symbolically at the intersection of multiple modalities of rural, urban, and agrarian; of desire and displacement; of loss and possibilities, the peripheries fully embody and give expression to Doreen Massey’s (2005) conception of space as “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity” (p. 9).

What is urban about the peri-urban? This paper explores the speculative frontier of volatile real estate investments and exceptional and transitional forms of local government that characterize this peri-urban terrain. By definition lying outside the municipal norm of the metropolitan core, the peri-urban frontier that is outlined in this analysis through a novel database of large-scale investments in residential and commercial capacity across India represents an arena where the statutory definition of the urban, i.e., elected municipal governance, is politically contested. Drawing on case studies of Greater Hyderabad and Noida in the Delhi National Capital Region, this paper traces the divergent modalities of peri-urban government.  In Greater Hyderabad, the trajectory leads to institutional fragmentation. In Noida, it results in the concentration of powers in non-representative agencies. In either scenario, I argue that the speculative frontier remains hostile to claim-making by poor groups through the channels of occupancy, even as it empowers propertied classes.

Nearly 12 years after the publication of the first issue of the Review of Urban Affairs, the present issue offers an occasion for reflecting on the growth and direction of the scholarly agenda it set into motion. The selection of papers included here reveals a welcome turning towards questions of identity – caste, class, gender and more - and their intersections in the city. Nonetheless, the policy visions examined in the papers in this collection remain incomplete in their attention to diverse and intersectional identities and their interaction with the dynamics of agglomeration. Urban scholarship would benefit from a wider geographic canvas beyond the largest metropolitan centres.

Focusing on the Industrial Area Local Authority (IALA), a governance regime widely applied in the south Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this paper examines pathways to illiberal governance within ostensibly liberal democratic contexts. The history of the IALA exemplifies the modes by which the movement towards representative government at the local level in India was subverted at its very origins by the insertion of exceptions into the legislation that purported to establish and empower urban government. Applied to demarcated territories, both established industrial areas and spaces dedicated to globalized information technology and financial services, the IALA instrument devolves the powers and functions of the municipality to an agency controlled by the state government. The career of the IALA thus demonstrates how neoliberal agendas are enacted in enclave settings through the interplay of discursive logics of participatory governance and strategies of entrepreneurial governance in practice. Using Hyderabad as an empirical case, the paper argues that special purpose enclaves, subject to regimes of exceptional urban governance, represent vectors both of neoliberalism and neo-illiberalism in avowedly liberal democratic contexts in the Global South.

In the years since liberalization, state power has been rescaled in India's polity and this is both a cause and consequence of greater inter-state competition for footloose capital. In this context, some state governments are designing special regulatory tools to attract and concentrate investments by easing ‘doing business’ for private investors and leveraging land resources—primarily in their largest cities. Equally important, they ensure public investments are channelled to these select spaces and that resources are available for maintaining high standards of infrastructure. In Hyderabad, the ‘Industrial Area Local Authority’ (IALA) is a powerful tool that allows privatised management by state and non-state actors of recently constructed productive spaces, mainly concentrating globalised service sector activities, including by collecting local tax revenues and various development charges to be spent exclusively within the industrial area. In this way, governance and fiscal functions are outsourced to non-elected bodies, outside the purview of democratic institutions. By essentially replacing municipal authorities, the IALA framework produces new forms of governance at the same time that it generates fragmentation of the institutional fabric of urban spaces. In effect, it creates a tool for by-passing urban politics, or in the case of periurban spaces does not allow an urban politics to emerge. Building on recent research, this paper examines the implications of IALAs in Hyderabad on urban governance and local state sovereignty.

A February 2010 judgment of the Delhi High Court called into question several assumptions underlying policy thinking on the cycle rickshaw sector. Examining these assumptions in the light of new research and advocacy efforts, this article considers the prospect of policy and
regulatory reform. With the cycle rickshaw sector as a case study, it argues that the punitive regulatory framework governing the sector embodies the dualist or even parasitic models that inform policy on informal services more broadly. Assessing the larger viability and
contribution of informal sector activities requires more attention to local and sector-specific micro-processes.

Relationship-based contract enforcement is commonly thought to limit market expansion. In contrast, this paper illustrates how relationship-based contract governance accommodates new entrants into market exchange using a case study of the cycle-rickshaw rental market in a city in central India. Migrants face a higher penalty for default that introduces a gap between the ex ante risk for out-of-network agents and the ex post risk. As a result, cycle rickshaw owners are more likely to rent to migrants and migrants are more likely to participate in rental contracts. With primary data on multi-dimensional measures of migrant status, we confirm that migrant status is a significant predictor of rental contract participation, even controlling for other variables that moderate the rickshaw driver's ability to own a cycle-rickshaw. Our findings thus introduce a new perspective into current understandings of relationship-based contract governance.

Increasing numbers of rural workers in India engage in commuting as well as temporary and seasonal forms of migration to cities. Yet, the implications of such large-scale temporary worker movements for urban governance have received little attention. Drawing on a field study of the cycle rickshaw rental market in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, this chapter attempts to highlight the central role of urban informal markets in accommodating and supplying much-needed services to these underserved populations. The qualitative and quantitative evidence from Bilaspur makes a case for recognising the close interdependence of informal markets and mobile workers and offers a critical benchmark for evaluating policy interventions both for informal and multilocational workers in urban settings. Connecting the policy discourses on informal self-employment and rural-to-urban mobility is key to framing an appropriate policy, programmatic and regulatory responses to these most unprotected and invisible segments of the urban population. Three channels for such a policy connection need to be recognised: (1) existing regulatory frameworks for the informal sector impact the livelihoods of temporary migrants, (2) interventions for informal livelihoods that fail to account for mobile workforces may suffer from biased coverage and (3) informal markets that provide livelihoods for temporary and commuter migrants can suggest lessons and programmatic avenues to reach these workers.

Greenfield urban development can be seen as an enduring idiom of politics in India, with state initiative from precolonial times to the present day responsible for establishing iconic capital cities such as Jaipur, Kolkata, or Chandigarh. However, a renewed interest in building new cities, variously labelled "smart," "green" or "integrated," is now accompanied by an increasing tendency to instrumentalise the urban in pursuit of economic growth and a competitive drive to attract global financial flows. Situated at the intersection of several recent literatures from speculative urbanism to theorisations of rescaling and bypass, the papers in this special issue foreground the struggles over land that animate debates about these greenfield sites while looking beyond these concerns to question the urban futures they presage. Synthesising the insights from these papers, this essay flags critical issues for the politics of urban development and sketches pathways for future research.

New policy and legislative initiatives in India over the last decade, from the Special Economic Zones Act 2005 to subnational state-level counterparts, have encouraged processes of corporate urbanisation, by facilitating the development of ‘industrial townships’ largely by private actors. This emerging policy architecture places a range of municipal functions, infrastructures and services in the domain of the (private) township, paralleling processes of urban gating and enclave growth worldwide. This paper analyses the relevant policies and laws to examine the role of the state in facilitating the growth of such urban clubs in India and fostering privatised provision of public goods. With few evaluations of the scope and impacts of such urban development in India, the case of Jamshedpur, an early prototype of corporate urbanisation, highlights how such sites may encourage patterns of unplanned and under-provisioned growth around the core.

If Gurgaon epitomizes the maladies of private sector-led urban development, could Jamshedpur provide their cure? Drawing inspiration from the case of Jamshedpur, commentators in recent years have increasingly posited the company town as a viable model for privatized provision of public goods and urban infrastructure. Moreover, over the last decade, in settings such as Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and integrated industrial townships, policymakers have sought to implement key aspects of a deconstructed company town framework through spatially targeted infrastructure provision and specialized governance regimes. Yet, the experience of private and public sector company towns in post-Independence India raises important questions about the provision of basic amenities and infrastructures around these sites. Looking at labour histories and Census data, we ask: who belongs within the ambit of the plan of the company town? Who remains outside?

What defines a city’s borders? Are they determined by geography and landscape? Or by municipal limits? In the context of a company town like Jamshedpur, which represents the realization of a singular corporate vision, these questions find new resonances. How do we understand the contemporary city through the lens of the broader region it has engendered? What are Jamshedpur’s connections with the neighbouring bazaars of Jugsalai, the manufacturing hub of Adityapur, the rising real estate in and around Mango and the Adivasi villages beyond Parsudih? By assessing the past and present of these areas, this essay discusses the planned and unplanned dynamics that have shaped Jamshedpur and its suburbs. * The research on which this article is based was conducted with the support of a Research Grant from the Azim Premji University Foundation.

A recent two-day international workshop on the “Governance of Megacity Regions in India” in Mumbai revealed the multiple conceptions and contestations that drive metropolitan growth in India and around the world. Though cities globally face similar competitive pressures in an era of footloose capital flows, there were few readymade models of metropolitan governance on offer. Instead the international experience suggests that democratic processes matter as much as getting institutions right. Although questions of sustainability and resilience remained an intriguing but underexplored theme in the workshop, the increasing urgency of environmental governance agendas for India’s megacity regions emerged as a key area for future research and policy.

Scholarly attention to Indian cities took a sharp upward turn in the new millennium. A constellation of social, economic, political and cultural forces came together in this 'urban turn’. The International Monetary Fund-mandated economic reforms of 1991 overtime brought cities to increasing policy prominence as nodes for national and transnational capital flows. At the same time, the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act provided statutory status to urban local bodies as the third tier of elected government in India,after the center and states. Together, the unfolding of these changes created a profound shift in the political economy of Indian cities. Equally powerful transformations reconfigured the socio-cultural landscapes of Indian cities starting in the 1980s and 1990s. The English-educated middle classes had been influential in the politics and cultures of Indian cities since colonial times. However, a sustained period of economic growth in the 1980s and the rise of skill-intensive and eventually globalized services sector economies in the following decades allowed this increasingly urban middle class access to new forms of material and symbolic consumption. Alongside these emerging cultures of consumerism, new global imaginaries of the post-industrial city shaped both popular and policy visions of ‘world-class’ cities. Yet vast swaths of urban India remain outside the ambit of elite discourses. Nearly four in five urban workers are informally employed i.e., they lack even basic job protections.

The concept of " speculative urbanism " has over the space of only a few years informed a large and growing literature on the intersections of real estate capital flows and processes of urban planning and governance in cities of the global South. Speculative urbanism can be said to embody urban governance as " investment strategy " ; it represents the turbulent trajectory of world-class city making projects in an era where the returns to capital are their primary driving force and metric. Based on a case study of Bangalore, India, speculative urbanism brings to light a number of undercurrents hitherto missed by global city theorists, such as the rise of transnational policy networks, processes of inter-referencing and the rise of entrepreneurial parastatals as key actors in land acquisition and development.

Are informal services greener than their formal or organised counterparts? Beyond their employment potential, non-motorised transport, street vending and waste sorting or rag picking use fewer resources and energy; they also tend to reuse and recycle materials. These possible benefits have been little recognised and rarely calculated. In India, supportive policy frameworks face many hurdles, and protection for workers also needs more attention.

This resource assesses the scale of rural to urban migration and its contribution to urban growth in India. It considers the major paradigms of rural to urban migration and highlights the salience of circular migration streams and forms of rural-urban circulation. Examining the connection between migration and the urban informal economy, it critically interrogates the ramifications of neoliberal transformations in contemporary India.

This module highlights the link between transport and land use in Indian cities. It contextualizes issues of motorisation against data on trips undertaken. The module examines the political economy of transit policy, in the context of public transport options such as metro rail, bus rapid transit and intermediate public transport Keywords Land use-transport feedback cycle; motorisation; bus rapid transit system (BRTS); metro rail; intermediate public transport; non-motorised transport Please cite as follows: 1 Sood, A. (2016). Transit and the shape of Indian cities. Sociology of Urban Transformations. EPG-Pathshala: http://epgp.inflibnet.ac.in/index.php

Starting with the concept and definition of spatial segregation in cities, this module provides an overview of the history and conceptual evolution of segregation in the United States context. It then provides an international perspective on approaches to understanding segregation. It then presents existing studies of patterns of residential segregation in Indian cities. Finally it highlights the connection between forms of segregation and spatial inequalities in India.

This module examines critically the city-nature dichotomy. It aims to provide an overview of the major conceptual frameworks that have been applied to understand linkages between the city and the environment. It traces the antecedents of the ideas underlying paradigms such as urban political ecology. Not least, it seeks to analyse the political economy of contestation over the urban environment in Indian cities.

This module aims to situate the significance, and the contemporary growth trajectories of the megacities of Bangalore and Hyderabad against their historic contexts. It grounds the major paradigms that have emerged to explain urban growth in Bangalore, such as occupancy urbanism and speculative urbanism, and traces the major thematics of the literature on Hyderabad.

This module presents the economic theorizations and empirical foundations underlying city-centric growth strategies. It attempts to delineate the impacts of the increasing application of such growth strategies under the sway of neoliberal policy regimes. It traces the impact of city-centric growth strategies on urban governance processes and offers a variety of theoretical lenses to understand the rise and repercussions of such growth strategies in the Indian context.

This essay highlights alternative theorisations of informality, including Marxian notions of accumulation and need, and occupancy urbanisms. It also explores the applicability of ideas of splintering urbanism in explaining informality. Finally it examines ideas of informality as an idiom of planning and planned Illegalities in India.

This essay aims to help readers develop an understanding of select urban planning paradigms in the Anglophone world, trace the influences and dominant frameworks guiding urban planning in contemporary India, and critically evaluate the contributions of planning paradigms to the present condition of Indian cities.

This module aims to provide an overview of the genesis and evolution of the informal sector. It considers alternative definitions and perspectives on the informal economy to grasp its size and dimensions. It attempts to understand the processes underlying informalisation, and place them in a broader historical context. Finally it traces the spatial correlates and dynamism of the informal economy.

City-building has been an enduring idiom of politics in India. Iconic capital cities such as Jaipur, Kolkata and Chandigarh, among others, have their origins in state initiatives, from precolonial times to the present.
In contemporary India, the impetus behind new cities has been reworked by the prominence of private real estate actors. One compelling and emblematic image of millennial urban transformation is the high-rise gated community. Promising high-quality infrastructure and ‘amenities’, aspirational lifestyles and sanitised vistas of work and leisure, these housing developments signal a decisive break from older ways of living in the Indian city. This discontinuity is also apparent in the geographic location of these enclaves, which are largely a feature of the peri-urban and ‘greenfield’ frontier areas—the Gurgaons and Greater Noidas, Navi Mumbais, Rajarhats, Whitefields and Cyberabads, Lavasas and Sri Citys.
Shaped by real-estate dynamics and policy-promoted growth agendas, especially around high-end services sector, greenfield urban development has brought with it economic and structural change.  India’s Greenfield Urban Future explores this ‘urban frontier’ and the constellations of public–private interests underpinning it through ten essays by urban scholars who have remained deeply involved in their respective field sites while engaging in debates within global urban studies. The themes are wide-ranging and varied: from struggles over land acquisition and real-estate dynamics to emerging forms of governance and place-making in these sites of township development. 
Spanning diverse geographies across the country, from metropolitan hubs to industrial corridors, this collection offers a multifaceted understanding of greenfield urban development in India.