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

Abstract

Chinese

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.

Keywords

exclusion governance India infrastructure urban fragmentation urbanisation

Urban studies in India

A 2009 photograph of Cyberabad in the western peripheries of Hyderabad by the urbanist Peter Gotsch juxtaposes the ‘Visions and realities’ of Indian cities in one striking composition (see Figure 1). At the top is a billboard city that calls itself ‘A World Within’ – of ‘premium residential towers, IT park (sic), mall, luxury hotels, serviced apartments, multiplex’ and more. It is an alluring vision of crystalline, vaguely space-age towers, high-rises and trees clustered along a glimmering lakefront. Below the billboard huddles the small-time ‘ordinary city’ of men on mopeds, spindly trees and narrow shopfronts – grocery or kirana stores, ‘washing centres’, repair shops and a ‘Royal Chicken Centre’.

Figure 1.

Visions and realities.

In recent years, urban scholarship in India has interrogated the naïve dualism of the formal–informal divide. Yet Gotsch’s powerful image reminds us why it remains quite so potent. In introducing this Virtual Special Issue (VSI) of Urban Studies with this image, we spotlight its central thematic of multiple contestations over visions and realities in Indian cities. The VSI curates articles from the journal’s published archive spanning over four decades and locates this selection within a broader review of the state of scholarship in Indian urban studies.

Urban Studies as a distinctive scholarly field took shape in India around the turn of the 21st century (Appadurai, 2000; Prakash, 2002; see Sood, 2020, for a survey). Earlier work largely comprised policy-facing studies by economists, planners, sociologists and demographers who commented on the steep waves of urbanisation that overtook Indian cities in the 1960s and 70s, highlighting problems of poverty, slums and infrastructural challenges through quantitative arguments (Buch, 1987; Kundu, 1993; Mathur, 1994; Raza et al., 1979). Simultaneously, a rich body of historical work in the 1990s traced the emergence of urban centres from pre-colonial settlements or colonial economic or administrative imperatives, analysing continuities and ruptures in their industrial structures, labour politics, state–society relations and sociocultural identities (Banga, 1991; Chandravarkar, 1994; Gooptu, 2001). Some sociological/anthropological work in this period (D’Souza, 1975; Parry, 2001) examined transformations in caste, kinship, ritual/religious relations, community structures and political configurations in various urban centres (Donner and de Neve, 2006). But few of these studies focused explicitly on the urban problematic. The urban figured as context, setting or explanation for these transformations rather than as an object of enquiry in itself (Donner and de Neve, 2006).

In the mid-1990s, processes of economic liberalisation began to reframe Indian cities as engines of national economic growth and magnets for global investment (Coelho et al., 2013). The turn of the millennium gave rise to a substantial body of work that framed India’s ‘urban turn’ (Prakash, 2002) in new conceptual terms. This moment, as Prakash outlined it, positioned the urban as the site for the unfolding of national visions and projects, yet disrupted teleological narratives of modernity with newly unfolding socio-spatial politics. Appadurai (2000), Dupont et al. (2000) and Srinivas (2001) identified growing trends of unequal development in urban centres and drew attention to divergent visions, aspirations, meanings and politics of urbanisation. The ‘unintended city’ (Sen, 1996) that repeatedly thwarted elite masterplans was being further transformed by a democratisation of politics as the dominance of colonial and national elites was challenged by new mobilisations of ‘vernacular modernity’ (Hansen, 2001), including of low-caste identities, slum-dwellers associations and populist nativism exemplified by the ascendance of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai.

In some ways, Urban Studies in India has evolved as a statist field, its concerns and preoccupations perennially determined by state policies, analyses and actions. The registers of this statist scholarship have shifted over time, but are rooted in two early strands of urban writings. The first was a developmentalist, policy-oriented strand that responded to research agendas outlined by the National Institute of Urban Affairs established by the Indian Government in 1976. The other was a Marxist-leaning political-economic critique of state urbanisms that began with the sociological work of AR Desai in the 1970s.

Following the millennial turn, the statism of urban studies in India became, if anything, more pronounced, critically engaging with state projects that sought to define India’s urban condition and aspirations in distinctly neoliberal terms. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) launched by the central government in 2005 was a landmark event in India’s urban policy and scholarship. It installed visions of ‘world-class’ cities at the centre of the national development agenda and injected massive funds into metropolitan centres across the country to stimulate urban renewal, infrastructure upgrading and governance reform. Following the JNNURM, a series of allied and successor missions, including Housing for All, Slum-Free Cities, Sanitation (SWACHH) and Smart Cities, sought to fast-track the transformation of Indian cities into global investment destinations through real estate investments, infrastructure enhancement and ‘quality of life’ projects. Together, these programmes invited an array of new players including global consulting and engineering firms, financial institutions and international donor agencies to shape India’s urban agenda.

Policy documents, mission statements and official reports that appeared in the public domain from the mid-2000s came to constitute agenda-shaping interlocutory texts against which a prolific body of critical scholarship on urban India found its voice. In particular, the slate of projects that were rolled out under the ‘world class cities’ banner – including mass evictions of slums and street vendors, eco-restoration through greening/beautification and ambitious infrastructure megaprojects that dispossessed large numbers – spawned an efflorescence of scholarly work that contested these agendas by highlighting the everyday energies of the ordinary city and called for alternative urban imaginaries (e.g. Baviskar, 2002; Harris, 2012; Kennedy, 2014, this volume). Industrial development agencies had a huge, though often overlooked, role to play in these transformations (see Sood, 2015; Sridhar, 2006, this volume).

The millennial turn in Indian urban studies sparked transdisciplinary conversations where geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and historians (Bhide and Burte, 2018; Coelho et al., 2013; Desai and Sanyal, 2011; see Sood, 2020 for a survey) contributed to setting agendas, in contrast to the economistic emphases of earlier scholarship. Several new platforms arose to host these conversations, such as the Mumbai Studies Group founded in 2000, the SARAI Reader launched in 2001 by the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, the Review of Urban Affairs initiated in 2011 by the Economic and Political Weekly and the SAGE journal Urbanisation launched by the Indian Institute of Human Settlements in 2015–2016.

Until the 2000s, India’s urbanisation was analysed within two contradictory yet cross-cutting frameworks, evident in the Urban Studies archive. On the one hand, urban processes were studied in derivative terms that drew on classic modernist models of western urbanisation. On the other hand, empirically manifest deviations from this normative frame produced accounts of exceptionalism and distinctiveness of Indian urban trajectories. Consequently, until recently, urban scholarship in India remained in somewhat dependent-peripheral relations with, or sometimes isolated from, global streams of urban scholarship. In a critical take on the representational tropes through which Mumbai has come to figure as a metonym for the contemporary city in global urbanist imaginations, Harris (2012, this volume) discusses these epistemic relations. While welcoming the move away from parochial Northern preoccupations, he contends that it overemphasises global flows and forces in determining Mumbai’s transformations, ignoring the messy local contingencies that shape Mumbai’s urban condition. This reinforces the discourse of the slum-ridden mega-city and consolidates elitist proposals for world-class-city policies. ‘Seeing from the south’, Harris argues, would illuminate what can be learned from the spatial politics and specific forms of modernity that the city embodies.

The corpus of work that has emerged since 2000 has carved out significant conceptual and theoretical ground about the Indian urban condition. It has contributed to wider conversations and undergirds ongoing scholarship on Indian, Southern and even global urbanisms. Among the earliest and most prominent instances are Baviskar’s (2002) concept of ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ as a paradigm of elite environmental activism emerging in cities, and Chatterjee’s (2004) schematic of ‘civil and political society’, as rubrics that characterise distinctive modes of engagement between the state and its citizens or ‘populations’ respectively.

Interrogations of notions of ‘informal’ planning and governance, instigated by Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari (2001), Benjamin (2008) and Roy (2009), provided fruitful levers for theorising the distinctiveness of Southern urbanisms. Indian urban scholars developed a range of schematics to characterise the workings of the vast sphere of informality, demonstrating that the illegal, unplanned and unauthorised are artefacts of law, planning and authority and their highly selective ambits (Bhan, 2013; Bhide, 2014; Datta, 2012; Gururani, 2020). Similarly, the framework of ‘speculative urbanism’ (Goldman, 2011), which not only situates but re-imagines strands of urban entrepreneurialism in the Indian city, has travelled across other settings in the global South (Watson, 2014). Gidwani and Maringanti (2016) analyse urban capital through the lens of waste and the operations of the ‘waste-value dialectic’. Bhan (2019) stresses the importance of realigning Southern urban theory with practice through mobilising productive vocabularies (such as ‘squat’ or ‘repair’) that are grounded in the everyday empirics of Indian and Southern cities.

The VSI

If Indian urban studies can, as suggested above, be characterised as an interdisciplinary interrogation of urban transformations across scales and sectors, critically engaging with state policies and generating theoretical and empirical connections with global and Southern urbanisms, how has this scholarship found space in the pages of the USJ? Over the years, the journal has attracted a fairly diverse range of articles on Indian urban affairs. Our selection for this VSI has attempted to capture this catholicity. No review of Indian urban studies can hope to do justice to the breadth of scholarship in this field. Our curation and thematic categorisation here negotiates a path between representing work published in the journal and capturing the key concerns that have marked the larger field of Indian urban studies since the millennial turn.

A total of 39 articles on India had been published in the USJ before we started work on this editorial (see Routray, 2021; Arabindoo, 2020; and Lee and Radcliff, 2021, among the recent contributions we were not able to include in the VSI). Although the earliest appeared in 1978, there were a total of four before 2000. Another 10 were published in the first decade of the 2000s, and more than 20 since 2010. The selection for this VSI broadly reflects this periodisation, favouring articles published after 2010. In terms of disciplinary profiles, papers even through the mid-2010s were largely based on economic and quantitative foundations. In contrast, the most recent USJ papers are eclectic in their methodological approaches, drawing from a wider array of disciplines, much like the field itself.

The five themes that organise our selection do not reflect sectors or domains but broad, non-exclusive and inevitably overlapping problematics: spatial transformation, urban poverty, politics and governance, exclusions and infrastructures.

Urbanisation and spatial transformations

Despite a slight acceleration in urban growth rates in India in the last census period (2001–2011), India’s official urbanisation figure (31% in 2011) remained low relative to its economic indicators and compared with other middle-income countries, giving rise to vigorous debates over the meanings and measures of urbanisation in India. A body of scholarship ascribes this low figure to an urban ‘undercount’ deriving from the Indian Census’s highly conservative criteria for designating an urban centre, which stipulates that three criteria – population over 5000, density over 400 per km² and at least 75% of the male workforce engaged in non-agricultural occupations – be simultaneously met. Studies proposing alternative methods and criteria have yielded significantly different profiles of Indian urbanisation by reducing definitional cut-offs or the number of criteria (Denis and Marius-Gnanou, 2011; Jana, 2016). Other scholars have argued that a much higher proportion of India’s population would be considered urban if agglomerations beyond official urban boundaries, or daily rural–urban commuter populations, were counted (Denis and Marius-Gnanou, 2011; Uchida and Nelson, 2010). Chandrashekar (2011) found that 8 million rural residents travelled routinely to work in urban centres across India in 2009–2010, constituting about 9% of the urban workforce. The article by Perez et al. (2019, this volume) exemplifies this project of proposing more sensitive ways to capture India’s urbanisation processes by employing alternative methods

Kundu (2011), however, disagrees with the undercount thesis. He claims that urban growth in India has always been sluggish, and attributes this to patterns of imbalanced and exclusionary urbanisation dating from colonial times. This exclusionary ethos has persisted in India’s metros, actively discouraging the entry of migrant workers (Breman, 1996). This, coupled with a failure of statistical and census bodies to capture cyclical migration, explains, in Kundu’s view, India’s low urbanisation rates. In contrast to other Southern cities where migration typically accounts for higher percentages of urban growth, its contribution in Indian cities has hovered around 20% (Bhagat, 2018; Lerch, 2020). Thus rural-to-urban reclassification, that is, territorial transformation, takes on a greater role in accounting for urbanisation.

Three major urban forms have defined spatial transformations in India. The first is the growth of census towns in the hinterlands of Indian cities in response to local labour, land and capital dynamics. The second is urbanisation on the peripheries of metropolitan India, and the third is greenfield urban development led by state and increasingly private sector agendas.

The rise of the census town has inspired new theorisations and lines of enquiry, of which perhaps the most influential is the subaltern urbanisation thesis that highlights ‘vibrant smaller settlements – outside the metropolitan shadow – sustainably supporting a dispersed pattern of urbanization’ (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020: 582). Contrasted to urban development led by state and large-scale national or global capital, subaltern urbanisation limns a landscape of organic agglomeration led by locally embedded capital. The subaltern urbanisation framework builds on rich ethnographic studies of small-town capital across India from the 1970s and 1980s (Harriss-White, 2015; Upadhya, 1988). It has also spawned a growing interest in India’s rural–urban interface, encapsulated in newer theorisations of ‘agrarian urbanism’ and ‘recombinant urbanism’ from scholars in disciplines ranging from anthropology to planning (Balakrishnan, 2019; Gururani, 2020). Gururani (2020: 973) situates her framework in the global suburbanism paradigm, arguing that ‘agrarian urbanism [is] generative as it adds an important dimension to the map of global suburbanisms (Keil, 2017) and disrupts the standard conceptual terrain of urban theory that tends to be largely city-centric or even urban-centric’.

What distinguishes this Indian and to some extent South Asian case (Gururani and Dasgupta, 2018) from the global suburbanism literature is the knotty problematic of land. Over the last decade, as urban peripheries have emerged as a productive site for examining the rescaling of urban growth processes, resource flows and power relations across urban–rural boundaries and the new territorial formations implicated in these exchanges, the ‘land question’ has been front and centre. An empirically diverse literature has looked at processes of dispossession and accumulation that have helped make the peri-urban frontier (Gururani and Dasgupta, 2018). Lively exchanges have emerged over how far Marxian paradigms of accumulation by dispossession characterise the active incorporation of rural landowners into real estate circuits (Balakrishnan, 2019; Levien, 2012; Sami, 2013; Sampat, 2016; Vijayabaskar and Menon, 2018). Related to this thematic is an empirical tussle over the relative agency of global versus local capital in shaping the rural–urban frontier (Raman, 2016; Rouanet and Halbert, 2016, this volume). Emerging coalitions of public–private, rural–urban elite actors have shaped this interface (Balakrishnan, 2013; Raman, 2016; Sami, 2013).

The neoliberal state’s role in facilitating urban – and peri-urban – transformation by shaping the ‘rules of the game’ in collaboration with investors is among the most prominent narratives in this scholarship (Goldman, 2011; Mitra, 2018; Shatkin, 2017; see North, 1991). Rouanet and Halbert (2016, this volume) show how financial intermediaries in Bangalore’s real estate sector influence urban planning and policy agendas in favour of an ‘ideal city’ type – the ‘vision’ of Gotsch’s 2009 photograph.

The lure of the greenfield as a tabula rasa has a long-standing lineage in India’s urban history, emerging almost as ‘an idiom of politics in India’ (Kennedy and Sood, 2016: 41). The Smart Cities policy imaginary, which has dominated popular and planning debates in recent years, represents only the most recent iteration of this paradigm. Case studies of satellite townships and new planned cities present a distinct thread in Indian urban studies (Dey et al., 2013; Kalia, 2006; Kennedy and Sood, 2016; Shaw, 2004; Wang et al., 2010). Although the vision of ‘300 new cities’ dates from the early postcolonial period (Kalia, 2006), the ascendance of private developers post-2000 is new (Rouanet and Halbert, 2016; Searle, 2014).

This scholarship links with studies of emerging forms of state and private-led land transformation through corridor development or highway urbanisation, highlighting how local and regional road-construction projects are critical to releasing land for public–private urban development agendas (Anand and Sami, 2016; Balakrishnan, 2013; Mitra, 2018). This ‘real estate turn’ (Shatkin, 2017) in Indian urban studies finds echoes in the experience of urban development elsewhere in Asia (see Sood, 2015).

Rajajinagar, the planned suburb of Bengaluru that forms the subject of Anand and Dey’s (2021) paper in this issue, lies at the intersection of the spatial transformations and the urban forms we have highlighted here. Exemplifying the post-colonial model of state-led urban development in its original planning, Rajajinagar has gone through a spatial ‘industrial destabilisation’ characterised by informalisation and peripheralisation of economic activity following liberalisation in the 1990s. At the same time, it has escaped the interest of private real estate capital that has reshaped so much of the rest of Bengaluru. As such, it presents a provocative contrast to the portrait of Bengaluru’s ‘ideal city’ visions described by Rouanet and Halbert (2016), while offering a fine-grained look into the role of planning paradigms over successive decades.

Urban poverty and the ‘problem of slums’

As suggested above, urban analyses in India before 2000 were preoccupied with perceived ‘pathologies’ of rapid urbanisation such as poverty, slums and crises of housing for the urban poor (such as Mathur, 1994; Pugh, 1991; Schenk, 2001). This focus is mirrored in the USJ archives, where the four articles on India published before 2000 dealt with urban poverty, regional income disparities and affordable housing. Only three of the 25 published after 2010 addressed these problematics directly.

While cities and towns were recentred in the new millennium as engines of national prosperity and progress, the problematic of urban poverty took on sharper contours in official reports and scholarship. Discussions on ‘pro-poor’ and ‘inclusive’ approaches to neoliberal economic restructuring called for renewed engagement with the changing meanings, materialities and measures of poverty. As Coelho and Maringanti (2012: 40) note, ‘Classic difficulties in defining and measuring poverty [were] further compounded in urban contexts by issues of legality, legitimacy, visibility and mobility of the urban poor’. Debates over whether urban poverty had increased or decreased raged in the early 2010s, as India’s Planning Commission claimed a decline in the urban poverty headcount ratio and critics disputed the measures used to make this claim. These controversies highlighted the all-too-common problem of undercounting the poor in cities and made the case for metrics that could encompass multiple dimensions of urban poverty (Harriss-White et al., 2013; Vakulabharanam and Motiram, 2012). Baud et al. (2008, this volume) proposed a pioneering index of multiple deprivations which includes measures of access to state-provided resources and asset ownership along with livelihood and income measures, to map the spatial concentration of poverty in New Delhi and enable better targeting of poverty alleviation measures.

The ‘problem of slums’ has come under critical scrutiny in more recent work. The terminology of ‘slum’ itself has been critiqued for its material and discursive effects (Rao, 2006). Its definitional boundaries in Indian central and state laws are seen as both too restrictive and too encompassing. The Census’s quantitative cut-off for designating slums, for example, excludes small clusters of the most vulnerable urban poor (Bhan and Arindam, 2013). Yet, the term’s definitional focus on the substandard quality of the built environment and services indexes a wide range of urban spaces (old city centres, unauthorised developments, squatter settlements, hutment clusters, resettlement colonies), compressing diverse political-economic, architectural and infrastructural relations within a single rubric. This generalises stigma across the landscape of non-normative urban settlements (Coelho, 2016). Designation as a slum positions settlements as spaces of exception subject to the discretionary exercise of executive power through ad hoc schemes (Datta, 2012). But the politics of slum terminology in India also encompasses the active pursuit of slum notification by shelter movements, as this designation entitles settlements to legal protection from arbitrary evictions and to ameliorative measures under national and state Slum Clearance Acts in India.

An understanding of urban poverty as spatially concentrated in slums – underlined by the concept of ‘shelter poverty’ proposed by the High Level Empowered Committee on Infrastructure Financing (HPEC) (2011) – renders housing provision a significant domain of poverty alleviation policies. Such a formulation not only ignores wider structural and distributional dimensions of urban poverty such as the growing informalisation of urban labour markets since the 1990s (Breman, 2004; NCEUS, 2008), it also dictates supply-side solutions. A growing body of scholarship, including Baud et al. (this volume), have questioned the extent to which slums serve as a proxy for urban poverty. Several studies have mapped the complex spatialities of poverty in Indian cities, wherein the slum represents only one node in a continuum of shelter conditions ranging from pavement dwelling to housing as real estate (Bhan and Arindam, 2013; Coelho, 2016; Roy, 2003). Lall et al. (2006, this volume) investigate the determinants of residential mobility among slum-dwellers, examining what factors enable them to make autonomous transitions to formal or improved housing. Das et al. (2017, this volume) adopt an unusual demand side analysis of slum housing, asking to what extent neighbourhood amenities determine its prices.

Studies of affordable housing – the structure and dynamics of its markets and the role of states – remain a significant domain of urban scholarship in India (Mahadevia et al., 2018; Mukhija, 2004; Naik and Kunduri, 2020). Sengupta and Tipple (2007, this volume) examine the performance of public housing in Kolkata in a context of mass poverty and the liberalisation of economic and financial systems within a socialist political economy. The paper identifies the balance and synergies between public and private providers needed to produce adequate stocks of affordable housing. A recent volume co-edited by the same author situates housing in India in a larger pan-Asian panorama of state–market relations in housing provision (Sengupta and Shaw, 2017).

Attention to ‘slum clearance’ as a domain of critical scholarly enquiry has been sparked by the series of national missions aimed at Housing for All and Slum-Free Cities rolled out from the mid-2000s, stimulating large-scale drives by state governments to clear slums and build mass housing for the urban poor in metropolitan cities across the country. Numerous studies have critically assessed the outcomes – typically private developer-led slum redevelopment projects or state-built mass tenements on urban peripheries. They have highlighted the poor quality of design, construction and services in these projects, their ghetto character and the disruptive effects of relocation on the livelihoods of residents, analysing how these effects have exacerbated the vulnerabilities of the urban poor and engendered new geographies of segregation, disconnection and risk in metropolitan India (Coelho, 2016; Desai et al., 2020; Doshi, 2013; Williams et al., 2021). Scholarship on peripheral urbanisation in India has yet to contend fully with the (mostly hidden) presence of large state-built slum-resettlement colonies in metropolitan peripheries across the country (cf. Coelho et al., 2020).

Urban governance and urban politics

We started this essay with the claim that Indian urban scholarship has had a decided statist bent, often reacting to (but rarely informing) policy initiatives in domains ranging from housing to infrastructure. Yet after 2010, this trend was offset by a burgeoning literature that dwelt on everyday forms of governance, civil society mobilisations and subaltern urban politics (Chatterjee, 2004; Coelho et al., 2013; Desai and Sanyal, 2011; Benjamin, 2008).

India’s urban transformation is underwritten and constantly contested by shifting and evolving political formations, from the ‘new politics’ of neighbourhood associations and propertied civil society to the local electoral politics through which the urban poor stake their claims to urban resources. The state–civil society divide is straddled, challenged or erased on an everyday basis in these processes (Baviskar, 2020; Coelho et al., 2013). A body of empirical work in Indian urban studies has sought to illuminate and explain the complexities of governance and politics in this contentious and divided terrain.

A strand of scholarship on urban civil society in the 2000s examined the class character of middle-class associations and their dominance in the invited spaces of citizen consultation, deepening the exclusion of the urban poor (e.g. Coelho and Venkat, 2009; Kamath and Vijayabaskar, 2009; Tawa Lama-Rewal, 2007; Zérah, 2007). Distinctive modes of collective action between middle classes and the poor were described, as in Harris’s (2007) ‘operate versus agitate’. These echoed Chatterjee’s (2004) schematic of ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’ as characterising state–society relations across the class divide in India, wherein civil society denoted the orderly associational forms through which the legal citizenry, typically middle/affluent classes, organised vis-à-vis the state, while political society indexed the politically mediated strategies through which the urban poor existing outside legal systems staked their claims. But scholars have also questioned the dualism of this scheme, pointing to forms of political engagement by middle-class associations (Coelho and Venkat, 2009; Tawa Lama-Rewal, 2007; Zérah, 2007) and legal-associational forms of action by the urban poor.

Meanwhile, an incipient literature in Indian urban studies reminds us that modalities of urban governance are the lynchpin upon which the fragments of the Indian city rest. Exclusions may be baked into planning processes themselves as Chatterjee (2004) hints, but it is through the formal institutions of governance that they are sustained (North, 1991; also see Sood, 2021). Tracing the post-liberalisation and even more, post-millennial dynamics of state spatial rescaling, Kennedy (2014) shows how state governments have emerged as powerful actors deploying cities as growth engines. But Kennedy and Zérah (2008) also highlight tensions between the entrepreneurial ambitions of state governments and the demands of the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (CAA) of 1993, which instituted elected urban local bodies (ULBs) as a critical third tier of government after the centre and states (Sivaramakrishnan, 2011). Recent studies have shown how the establishment of ULBs in census towns remains a messy and deeply contested process (Samanta, 2014; Sood, 2021).

The 74th CAA and its state-level versions have been riddled with exceptions, allowing specialised governance regimes in industrial enclaves, growth hubs and Special Economic Zones to proliferate. Sood’s (2015) paper in this volume lays out a larger agenda focused on such ‘zones of exception’ (Ong, 2006). Through a close textual analysis of national and state-level policy and legislative instruments, including the 74th CAA and Special Economic Zones Acts, Sood highlights the pivotal role of industrial development agendas and agencies in developing urban enclaves. Drawing on the public economics concept of club goods, Sood contends that the policy actively encourages the rise of enclaves. The case of Jamshedpur, an early 20th-century company town in eastern India, illustrates patterns of haphazard and under-provisioned growth fostered by such enclave-led urban development, both through exclusions built into planning and enclave-focused modes of infrastructure provision and governance. The neoliberal state, continuing and intensifying this tendency, has fostered informal growth through sheer neglect and oversight (Kennedy and Sood, 2016; Kennedy et al., 2020). What is more, this literature shows how the participatory rhetoric of middle-class associations shapes these exclusions through a variety of governance instruments, such as development authorities, notified area committees and state-level ‘local authorities’ that scaffold such regimes of exception (Sood, 2021; Sood and Kennedy, 2020).

In many ways, these exceptional regimes also avoid political resistance thanks to the transformed politics of labour, especially in the wake of the industrial transitions that have shaped metropolitan India since the 1970s. In Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Mumbai, the closure of jute and cotton mills unleashed processes of informalisation and often inspired reactionary politics, most starkly manifested in the success of right-wing formations such as the Bharatiya Janata Party and Shiv Sena in western India (Breman, 2004; Gooptu, 2007; Hansen, 2001; Mahadevia, 2002; Spodek, 2010).

The landmark National Commission on Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) provided striking official evidence of the near-complete informalisation of the Indian economy, with over 92% of its workforce informally employed (NCEUS, 2008). Its definition of informal employment includes self-employment, employment in informal enterprise as well as employment without protection in formal enterprises. Chen and Raveendran (2011) found that by this definition over 80% of urban employment was informal. Numerous studies have interrogated the boundaries and relations between formal and informal economic spheres (Bhattacharya and Sanyal, 2011; Chen and Raveendran, 2011) and explored the governance of informal economic activities such as street vending (Anjaria, 2016). Schindler’s study (2014, this volume) of efforts to regulate street hawking in Delhi reveals divergent regulatory practices among different state authorities in a fractured state system and suggests that categories of formal and informal are not given but constructed and contested across numerous sites, such as the court, the street and the government office (see also Pierce, 2020, this volume).

Focusing on Bengaluru, Balakrishnan and Pani (2021, this volume) argue that the terrain of struggle for the working classes of Bengaluru effectively shifted from work and labour to land and housing. Where once work and housing entitlements were coupled in the public sector townships of pre-liberalisation Bengaluru, in the ‘unauthorised’, unregulated and unplanned layouts of the post-liberalisation period following the closure of public sector units, they were delinked. This decoupling, they argue, blunts the potential of land struggles to emerge as sites of radical labour politics and allows capitalist accumulation processes to proceed unchecked.

Simultaneously, as the influence of trade unions in electoral politics declined, new electorally powerful land brokers aka ‘real estate politicians’ emerged to respond to the housing insecurities of the unorganised workforce. Balakrishnan and Pani’s (2021) intervention casts a valuable urban politics lens on the spatial transformations described by Anand and Dey’s (2021) ‘industrial destabilisation’ narrative. Equally it elaborates Benjamin’s (2008) influential occupancy urbanism thesis, which linked the diversity of tenure regimes in Bengaluru’s informal settlements to the role of low-level local bureaucrats and municipal representatives.

The endurance of the slum, to paraphrase Weinstein’s (2014) evocative descriptor for Mumbai’s Dharavi, often in the face of state hostility, has been one of the central preoccupations of Indian urban studies. Most recently, the work of Auerbach (2019) and Auerbach and Thachil (2018) has shed much-needed light on the specific channels of clientelist, associational and electoral politics that allow unplanned and often unauthorised settlements to ‘demand development’ and claim public services. In this issue, Jonnalagadda (2021) and Pierce (2020) approach the problematic of claim-making in Hyderabad from different directions. Pierce systematically organises and categorises the strategies through which marginalised urban residents secure basic services, analysing them in terms of the different levels of pressure they apply on the official governance system to respond to citizens’ needs. Jonnalagada’s paper is distinguished by its close ethnographic attention to political entrepreneurs who build their influence in these settlements through flexible collaborations with NGOs, local associations and political parties, positioning themselves as ‘obligatory intermediaries’ for outsiders seeking entry into the settlement, managing the production of political subjectivities among residents and ‘leverag[ing] … opportunities to assemble something called a “community” out of heterogenous populations’ (2021: 3).

Boundaries and exclusions in the Indian urban

Theorisations of the divided ‘colonial city’ have long dominated historiographies of urban India (Beverley, 2011; Haynes and Rao, 2013; King, 1976). Some historical scholarship has mapped how pre-colonial or colonial-era dispositions of urban infrastructure and amenities continue to inscribe inequalities in the spatial imprint of Indian cities (Legg, 2007; McFarlane, 2008).

These inequalities deepened after the 2000s as urban renewal programmes sought to sanitise and beautify city spaces, instituting a sharp polarisation between lifestyle and livelihood values and exacerbating the exclusionary politics of space. As upper-caste, middle-class urban residents emerged as important actors in aiding the neoliberalisation of urban India (Coelho et al., 2013; Ghertner, 2015; Nair, 2005; Upadhya, 2009; Zérah, 2007), evictions of slums, pavement-dwellers and street vendors and the rise of elite enclaves barred to the general public gathered pace across the country’s metros. The ethos of bourgeois environmentalism (Baviskar, 2002) wedded middle-class concerns with aesthetics, safety, leisure and health to state and corporate agendas of attracting global capital to Indian cities. Chatterjee’s (2004) ironic question: ‘are Indian cities becoming bourgeois at last (alas)?’ encapsulates the political logics that have generated these exclusionary trends.

Four contributions in this VSI illustrate this vein of analysis of the new urban social in India and its complex politics of categorisation, segregation and exclusion. Fernandes (2004, this volume) posits the emergence of a ‘new middle class’ from the global consumer-oriented and world-class aspirational economy of the late 1990s. This class, she argues, is not a homogenous category nor an empirically discernible social group, but a discursive cultural formation defined by attitudes, lifestyles and consumption, produced and sustained by advertising and media. The rising visibility and voice of this class served to delegitimise and render invisible specific marginalised groups in the city, through a spatial reconfiguration of class inequalities that removed slums and hawkers to the peripheries.

Urban scholarship has contributed to vigorous discussions over the meanings, boundaries and (re)structuring of the category of class in India. Nijman (2006), working on Mumbai, argues, like Fernandes, that the Indian middle class is defined by parameters of consumption more than production and remains a slippery category. Indeed, Deshpande (2006), analysing consumption expenditure data from large national datasets, argues that what is commonly glossed as the middle class in India is actually a small affluent class located at the apex of the income hierarchy and accounting for no more than 5%–15% of urban and rural populations. Mawdsley (2004: 80) emphasised early ‘the importance of recognising diversity and dynamism within the middle classes in relation to the environment’, and numerous studies since then have flagged evidence of increased segmentation, conflicting interests and varied modes of activism within the metropolitan middle classes (Kamath et al., 2009; Sundaresan, 2011).

Yet, more attention is needed on the economic underpinnings and new formations of this class, especially in light of the transformations in labour relations wrought by late neoliberalism. Studies by Upadhya (2009) and Krishnamurthy (2017) trace how IT call centres and Business Process Outsourcing centres (popularly called BPOs) in the late 2000s helped form a large new middle-class segment, as young workers from smaller towns were systematically trained in the performances, comportment and aspirations of cosmopolitan urbanity. Yet, the current rise of platform and gig economies along with pervasive contractualisation across the government and corporate sectors put into question the prospects of India’s much-heralded middle class. The gendered and casted nature of these tides of informal employment threatens to complicate the conventional dualisms that have long framed understandings of the Indian city.

In our second selection for this theme, McDuie-Ra (2013) also sketches a complex picture of boundary dynamics in the Indian metropolis. Migrants from the marginalised states of North-east India encountered everyday racism, discrimination and violence in Delhi, but also found substantial economic opportunities and inclusion in the new service sector establishments of the city. The notion of the ‘exclusionary city’, he argues, fails to account for the ways that neoliberal urbanisation is ‘connecting heartland cities to frontier regions in ways previously unimagined’ (2013: 1625).

While the VSI showcases some influential studies on the social formations and dynamics animating the Indian city, it also reflects some gaps. A marked absence in the USJ archive on India, partly mirroring a failing in the wider body of Indian urban scholarship, is a focus on caste. Some recent work in India has examined the workings of caste within occupations such as waste collection or ‘manual scavenging’ (Kornberg, 2019; Sreenath, 2019). But an important body of critical social sciences in India has argued that while practices and discourses of modernity entail a denial of caste, forms of caste are reproduced in the Indian modern – including in cities – in disguise or ‘by other means’ (Pandian, 2002). Deshpande (2013: 33) argues that the key problematic of caste in contemporary India is ‘the “naturalisation” of the upper castes as the legitimate inheritors of modernity’. Efforts of the Indian republic to ‘abolish’ caste through reservations for lower castes in jobs and education were caught between social justice compulsions and caste-blindness. This yielded a predicament where upper castes perceive and represent themselves as ‘casteless’ citizens in contrast to the hyper-visibility of caste among lower-caste subjects.

The naturalised rendering of caste capital into modern capital by India’s upper castes has come to be expressed through the language of merit. Subramanian (2019) traces the production of meritocracy in an elite engineering institution, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, showing how the overrepresentation of Tamil Brahmins in higher education and the professions resulted from hierarchies instituted by colonial educational policies, where craftspersons and artisans were relegated to lower tiers of the technical education systems.

A new strain of work maps the Indian city as the terrain of socio-spatial inequality fashioned by powerful centrifugal forces that segregate Dalit, Muslim and other groups from better-endowed upper-caste, upper-class localities. Dupont (2004) compellingly demonstrates how the post-colonial city instituted housing disparities in the very heyday of public housing. A new generation of quantitative social science is now delineating the contours of residential segregation based on caste and religious identities at various spatial scales and over time in Indian cities (Balakrishnan and Anand, 2015; Bharathi et al., 2019; Haque et al., 2021; Singh et al., 2019; Susewind, 2017). Singh et al. (2019) finds caste-based residential segregation persisting or intensifying in 60% of Indian cities, although the pattern differs by region and city size. Motiram and Vakulabharanam (2020) demonstrate how higher spatial (neighbourhood-level) mixing or integration of class, caste and religious groupings – what they call ‘grayness’ – produces better development outcomes.

Another arena that merits closer attention is the manifestation of social identities in public space in Indian cities. Following Chakrabarty (1992) and Kaviraj’s (1997) seminal interventions on the distinctive character of Indian public space, a lively literature has examined contestations around streetscapes (Anjaria, 2016; Gambetta and Bandyopadhyay, 2012). Another incipient but important body of work has brought to light gendered modes of constituting and inhabiting public space (Phadke et al., 2011; Srivastava, 2010). Phadke et al. (2011) interrogate discourses around women’s safety in public spaces by spotlighting complex questions of class and caste and the multiple exclusions of ‘unfriendly bodies’ that such discourses purvey. Our third selection for this theme is a recent piece by Chowdhury (2021, this volume). that employs ethnographic interactions with auto-rickshaw drivers in Kolkata to characterise urban transport systems, here exemplified by a private ‘para-transit’ sector, as a heavily gendered public space structured by working-class masculinities. Auto-rickshaw drivers, denigrated as lumpen menaces on Kolkata’s streets, struggle to fulfil masculine norms of breadwinning for their families in an overworked and under-remunerative informal occupation. In doing so, they collaborate with peers and passengers to build everyday infrastructures of support, even as they practise ideologies of masculinity by asserting proprietorial control over their (often rented) vehicles and engaging in risky speed-games on the city streets. Offering a strong segue to our next theme on the politics of infrastructure, this article situates its exploration of urban working-class masculinities within the critical study of urban infrastructure as a site of contested subjectivities and socialities. This remains an area that is little represented in the USJ archive and is a productive avenue for future scholarship.

And finally, a recent article by Kamath (2020) on how affordable housing schemes are received, resisted and negotiated in a tribal-dominated city of North-east India raises the question of ‘indigenous urbanisms’, another neglected theme in Indian urban studies.

The political ecology and economy of urban infrastructure

The urban infrastructure agenda was launched in India by the JNNURM in 2005, which – in line with the global ‘infrastructure turn’ of this period (Dodson, 2017) – injected massive central government funds into upgrading metropolitan infrastructure across the country. The JNNURM’s larger thrust, of leveraging this funding to strengthen the financial and administrative autonomy of Urban Local Bodies and empower them to access market finance for urban infrastructure, was further advanced by the High Level Empowered Committee on Infrastructure Financing set up in 2008. The Committee’s Report (High Powered Expert Committee (HPEC), 2011) reiterated the need for large investments to bring public services up to the required norms for supporting urban-led national growth, and pushed for a new and improved JNNURM that would focus on institutional reforms to build capacity in ULBs, strengthen metropolitan and regional planning and expand urban renewal to all urban centres.

Scholarship on urban infrastructure from the 2000s, in responding to these policy moves, converged with the scholarly infrastructure turn in Northern Urban Studies (Larkin, 2013), wherein urban water, electricity and transport systems – hitherto the domain of economics, engineering and sectoral planning studies – began to be examined from critical geographical, sociological and anthropological vantage points. Starting slowly in the 2000s (e.g. Coelho, 2006) and gathering pace in the 2010s (Anand, 2017; Bjorkman, 2015; Ranganathan, 2015) this scholarship in India analysed urban infrastructures as sites of contestation over meanings, symbolic framings and politics of the urban.

Two strands can be located within this scholarship. Often focusing on megaprojects at various scales, the first literature attended to the legal and governance modalities that coalesced around new spatial and territorial formations created through and in service of capitalist accumulation (Anand and Sami, 2016; Balakrishnan, 2013; Bon, 2015; Follmann, 2015; Kennedy et al., 2014; Sood, 2015). The political economy of land assembly has been a major preoccupation of this literature (Levien, 2013).

A key feature of infrastructure provision in such contexts has been its spatially targeted focus on masterplanned enclaves (Idiculla, 2016; Sood, 2015, 2019). This is the topic of Sridhar’s (2006, this volume) study of spatial instruments that seek to fill infrastructure gaps in industrial productivity – the so-called ‘growth centres’ set up in the late 1980s to provide power, water and telecommunications so that states could attract industry. While Sridhar (2006) merely sought to assess the ‘local employment impact’ of these sites, it is now possible to see this scheme as an early harbinger of a larger panoply of place-oriented ‘city as growth engine’ policies that received a fillip in the post-liberalisation period, especially at the state level (Kennedy, 2014; Sood, 2015).

Second, late in the last decade, studies influenced by Urban Political Ecology (UPE) began to engage with scales, distributions, flows and the social shaping of infrastructure regimes along with the politics of maintenance, repair and everyday socio-technical management of these systems. Urban water, energy and waste systems were analysed as historically determined techno-natural systems that constantly reconfigured social relations and landscapes (Anand, 2017; Bhattacharya, 2018; Bjorkman, 2015; Coelho, 2018; Coelho et al., 2020; Ranganathan, 2015; Schindler and Kishore, 2015; Zimmer, 2015).

This VSI carries two articles from 2019 that employ the rubric of ‘nexus’ to examine interconnections between technological and social systems in restructuring urban ecologies in locally and historically contingent ways, effecting social inequalities and discrimination. Castán Broto and Sudhira (2019, this volume) trace how electricity and water networks co-evolved within the social and political drives of state modernisation projects to create a dynamic nexus that shaped Bangalore’s urban landscape. Linking urban infrastructural regimes to wider political changes, they show how this nexus produces hegemonic visions of urban futures and outcomes of inequality. De Bercegol and Gowda (2019, this volume) examine the techno-financially driven ‘modern nexus’ of waste-to-energy plants in Delhi, promoted at the expense of alternate possibilities such as the nexus of informal waste recycling chains populated by low-caste workers pursuing their livelihood.

Recent UPE work has also turned to analyses of how intensifying ecological crises in cities, manifested in recurrent flooding, droughts, storms and air pollution, are produced, framed and acted on (Arabindoo, 2020; Ghertner, 2019; Negi and Srigyan, 2021; Ranganathan, 2015; Weinstein et al., 2019; Véron, 2006). Our fourth selection on this theme for the VSI, Chitra (2021), examines how the state’s response to floods in Mumbai set off a reframing of the city’s intricate estuarine ecologies as a ‘river’. Tracing the disparate histories of the Mithi as a socio-natural assemblage of gutters, drainage channels and fragments of creeks, the author describes how the discourse of recuperating the ‘Mithi River’ as part of a lost heritage is driven by both infrastructural and ecological imperatives. This assertion of a riverine ecology is linked to new rationalities of disaster preparedness, flood management, drainage efficiencies and infrastructure upgrading. Projects of ‘river restoration’, seeking to control the edges and flows of the Mithi, inscribe a new hydro-social order involving the displacement of informal settlements, the reclaiming of marshlands, destruction of mangroves and the capture of lands for real estate.

Conclusions

If the nature of the urban is fragmentation (McFarlane, 2018), the Indian city is no exception. Even though Indian scholars have argued persuasively against the imaginary of the dual city, it exercises a powerful spell. Indeed, the field of urban studies in India itself, we have argued, has been shaped by the competing demands for its attention made by state action and non-state or even anti-state processes.

Important debates remain about the relative role of multi-scalar state processes at the centre, state and local government levels. How can we theorise the relationship between planning processes, formal modes of governance and social stratification in shaping the landscapes of exclusion that mark the Indian city? What imprint do ascendant forms of religious nationalism leave on the urban fabric in India? What kinds of theoretical frameworks can straddle scales and disciplinary boundaries while remaining attentive to the diversity of local Indian urbanisms?

Questions of fragmentation are difficult to avoid when we consider the future both of Indian cities as well as of the scholarship on them. As Zérah (2008) reminds us, the modern infrastructure ideal of standardised basic service networks has never been obtained in India; instead, the topography of public services has been made uneven by planned enclaves (Dupont, 2004). The pervasiveness of the privately governed enclave may yet play a critical role in shaping the future of Indian cities. Questions of ‘infrastructure governance’ – ‘the set of institutions and arrangements that determine how decisions about the location and allocation of infrastructural services are made, about who is included, who is excluded and how disputes are resolved’ (Sood, 2019) – could then assume even greater importance.

The new map of urban India being shaped by the growing salience of real estate capital also heralds a future of mega-metropolitan regions (Sood, 2021). New forms of regional polarisation may emerge, as the subaltern urbanisms of small-town India continue on increasingly precarious trajectories. These are futures emerging in the shadow of risk – of both speculative finance (Goldman, 2011) and global warming-induced environmental change (Khosla and Bhardwaj, 2019) – creating in their wake new geographies of disparity in resource access (Das and Skelton, 2020).

India’s middle classes have been the mainstay of India’s urban transformations since colonial times (Joshi, 2001). The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to a head the crisis in their economic prospects. A Pew Research Centre analysis found that the Indian middle class may have shrunk by as much as a third relative to pre-pandemic projections (Kochhar, 2021). Indian scholarship has often defined the middle class in terms of patterns of symbolic and material consumption. It is likely, however, that its economic basis was also rendered more uncertain by the relentless contractualisation and casualisation of employment in the post-liberalisation era.

The contours of the post-pandemic city around the world remain hazy (Batty, 2020). In India, the COVID-19 crisis has intensified the contradictions of the pre-COVID status quo. Exclusionary urbanisation has long manifested in the relatively low contribution of migration to overall urban growth. However, the economic disruptions of the last year put policy notions of structural transformation into existential doubt as migrants began to journey from towns to villages (Mehrotra and Parida, 2021). What, if any, will be the long-term impact of this reverse migration on discourses of urban poverty? How will it rework the formal–informal spectrum of habitat and livelihoods in metropolitan India?

A future that presents hazards, however, also calls for new imaginaries. That is a task Indian urban studies, long committed to vigorous traditions of critique, must confront.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors of Urban Studies for comments on previous drafts. Many thanks also to Anant Maringanti for valuable inputs and thoughtful exchanges over the course of writing this piece and to Loraine Kennedy for conversations on these themes. Last but not least, thanks to Ruth Harkin for timely and valuable support through the selection and editorial process.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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