India’s Emergent Urban Formations

As the world is projected to urbanize at a continued fast pace, urban forms, processes and outcomes are becoming increasingly varied and complex, especially in the global South where most of the world’s urbanization is expected to take place. Much of this growth will occur outside the large cities and mega cities, in a range of smaller settlements, dispersed across former rural regions. These urbanization processes are largely outside the purview of today’s urban theoretical and conceptual debate, despite their major impact on the daily existence of hundreds of millions of people. The big (Northern) city still remains the privileged terrain for urban theorization and research. This dissertation directs attention away from the big city, and contributes to the urgent need to improve our understanding of the nature of urbanization processes at the lower ends of the urban hierarchy. The geographical focus is on India. The dissertation is a comprehensive investigation of India’s emergent urban formations. The findings call into question how we conceive and theorize the urban and processes of urbanization, and are more generally relevant to our understanding of urbanization in the global South. The study finds aspects that highlight the non-conventional nature of this incipient urban growth, which challenge how we have historically come to understand the nature of urbanization processes. In important ways, the dissertation contributes to and intersects with theoretical debates at the core of the field of urban studies including postcolonial urban studies, agglomeration theory, the planetary urbanism literature, and urban socio-cultural studies.