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Urban Studies: An Exploration in Theory and Practices
Sujata Patel
What is the character of our cities? What are the attributes of inequalities and social
exclusions in towns, metropolises and mega cities? How do urban structures and
forms characteristic of pre capitalist cities of India reorganize itself as capitalist
relations enter into these cities? What role do religion and ethnicity play in Indian
cities today? How does space construct identities? Are these identities embedded and
part of pre-capitalist structures? Or do they resonate the old in a new form? What
forms of collective action takes place in cities? Why is it that cities have been a
theatre of communal riots in India? How are these processes related to local
governance institutions? [To appear as the Introduction of Urban Studies.
Edited by Sujata Patel and Kushal Deb. Series Editor: T.N. Madan,
Oxford University Press, Delhi.]
*Department of Sociology, University of Pune, Pune. Email: [email protected]
Interest in urban sociology has had a long history. One of the first writings penned by
sociology’s classical theorist was The City by Max Weber. Earlier Karl Marx
explored the contradiction between country and town in The German Ideology and
later George Simmel examined the urban dimensions and discussed the sociology of
numbers in the Metropolis and Mental Life and The Philosophy of Money. However,
the discipline’s exact boundaries as a branch of knowledge together with its nature
have been a point of debate, discussion and deliberations among sociologists and
other social scientists. Some of the many questions that still continue to encumber
sociologists in the world and India are:

When we study the urban sociology, do we study the city and its form
and analyse the way a population is organized in a place? Or do we assess
urbanization-the spatial spread of concentrated population over time? This
issue becomes significant as a large part of the world’s population especially
in the developed world stay in cities. And many who do not stay in cities also
experience urban life. Thus does a study of the ‘urban’ denote a study of cities
or are cities merely the critical part of it?

Another strand of thought asks whether urbanization is organically
connected to capitalism. Is the urban experience only 200-300 years? If so,
what is its relationship to industrialization? Are urbanization and
industrialization two distinct processes, which historically repeat with each
other only in the advanced capitalist societies? Or are there different kinds of
urbanizations due to variations in kinds of industrialization? Are these
variations related to patterns that are restricted to the developed as against the

This chapter has benefited from discussions with the late Alice Thorner who read and re-read many
of its sections. Ideas debated here have been discussed in my class on Urban Studies over two years,
2002-2004 and I thank all my students. I am particularly grateful to Dalia Wahdan, Apurva and Shruti
Tambe, my research students for contesting with many of the arguments in this chapter and helping me
to elaborate, reframe and refine them.
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underdeveloped countries? How would we assess the Indian urban experience
in this context?

What is the relationship between the urban experience and modernity?
If urbanity is entwined with modernity does it also imply a mentality, a vision,
and a way of thinking distinctly different from the pre-modern? Does the premodern ebb out once the modern emerges? Or does the pre-modern get
reformulated and yet retain a kind of presence? Is there variance in the way the
pre-modern and modern connect with each other and is this variance related to
developed versus underdeveloped regions? Additionally, can one distinguish
between the urban (and thus modern) and non-urban (pre-modern) in any
given society? Does the rural represent the traditional and the urban the
modern? Or are they part of the same continuum?

Another line of argument examines the way colonial exploitation has
fashioned a new process of urbanization together with a new urban form. Is
post colonialism continuing this exploitative relationship? How does the
relationship between core and periphery construct urban processes and
urbanity in different regions and countries in the South and between them? To
what extent does indigenous processes and features such as the role played by
the nation-state and its policies determine the urban experience? What is its
particular manifestation in India?

Additionally, sociologists have distinguished between early and late
(post-modern) societies. How does post modernity in the form of globalisation
and global city-region formations impact on city structures in underdeveloped
countries like India? How does new forms of cultural consumption define
cities? What impact does these changes have on urban processes and on cities
in the underdeveloped regions and more particularly in India? Have any of the
cities in India become a global city?

Most theorists now recognize that unlike regions in Europe, North
America Japan, and Australia, those in the underdeveloped regions have seen
rapid urbanization; for example, the 2001 census informs us that 43.9 per cent
of Tamil Nadu’s, 42.4 per cent of Maharashtra’s and 37.4 per cent of Gujarat’s
population is urban. Also the same census suggests that Maharashtra leads
with 41 million persons of its population being urban which is 14 percent of
the total population of the country [Census of India 2001]. Additionally, of the
39 cities in the world which has registered a population over five million, 30
are from the underdeveloped countries. The Indian cities in this list are
Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, Banglore, Chennai and Hyderabad. Mumbai’s
population at present is second only to Shanghai and would soon outstrip it
and emerge as the biggest city in the world [Montgomery 2003]. Why is there
such rapid urbanisation in recent times? What is the relationship between the
national economy, national policies and urbanization in context of global
growth?

What is the character of our cities? What kind of distinct structures and
relationships do these promote? What are the attributes of inequalities and
social exclusions in towns, metropolises and mega cities? How do urban
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structures and forms characteristic of pre capitalist cities of India reorganize
itself as capitalist relations enter into these cities? In what way are
contemporary structure and forms related to pre-capitalist attributes of
inequality such as caste? What role do religion and ethnicity play in Indian
cities today? Also how are these inequalities and exclusions, both pre capitalist
and capitalist, related to the way space is organized in cities? How does space
construct identities? What is the relationship between spatial segregation and
identity formation? Are these identities embedded and part of pre-capitalist
structures? Or do they resonate the old in a new form? What forms of
collective action takes place in cities? Why is it that cities have been a theatre
of communal riots in India? How are these processes related to local
governance institutions?
New Urban Sociology
In 1976, Castells asked a polemical yet a fundamental question: is there an urban
sociology, and answered in the negative. His critique was against the US model of
concentric circles as formulated by Burgess, constructed around the industrial city of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century wherein low-income neighbourhoods
were woven into manufacturing districts and adjacent to commercial cores and
middle-income neighbourhoods. Historically, these middle-income groups moved to
the periphery after World War II and were joined by professional and white-collar
middle class. As a result of this pattern of migration, sociologists constructed a prototypical metropolis of central city ringed by suburban enclaves. In time, the
commercial core became the centre and they flourished but when manufacturing
declined in the core, cities perished and hollowed out.
During the same time, Louis Wirth drawing from George Simmel was elaborating the
theory of ‘urbanism as a way life’, wherein he analysed the impact of concentration of
numbers on society’s culture, such as size, density, and heterogeneity. Wirth
suggested that in the cities we see an emergence of a distinct culture characterized by
the breakdown of family ties, individualism and competitiveness, diversity of social
commitment, transition from primary to secondary relations, absence of direct social
control, anonymity, isolation, utilitarianism, role segmentation and anomie.
Castells (Ibid.) critique of urban sociology was based on the discipline’s dependence
on these two models for assessing the urban experience and he critiqued its theoretical
and methodological limitations. The concentric circle model was based on the social
integration paradigm, which started and ended up by giving ecological explanations to
processes, which were economic, social and cultural. How can one accept that the
pattern of movement and settlement of groups is given and that changes in residential
and industrial land use take place because of changes in taste and style of individuals
and firms? Communities, neighbourhoods or suburbs cannot be perceived as selfadjusting organisms with classes, ethnic or racial groups competing over space and
passing through phases of invasion, domination and succession. The problem
according to Castells was that Burgess’ concentric zone theory examined the specific
processes of urban growth in one city, Chicago and made it a universal model.
Wirth’s theorizations, he contended, did not have the specificity of the urban as an
object of investigation, for again, disorganization, disintegration and individualism
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were not necessarily related to city life as these happen in all societies and in all
historical moments. This theory treated urbanism and the city as independent
explanatory variable. Castells contended urban culture couldn’t be reduced to the
culture of one industrial society.
American urban sociologists, according to Castells did not realise that what they were
studying were the processes of capitalist industrialization, the emergence of market
economy and the processes of rationalization of modern society. Instead they were
reducing these processes to a culturist representation (in case of Wirth) or an
ecological explanation (in case of the concentric model). He objected to the fact that
urban sociology had become dependent on urbanism and urbanization as two
concepts, which reflect the experience of one city-Chicago, which was not applicable
even to the cities of Europe. Both these approaches Castells contends did not have an
explicit urban theoretical object and were rather a theory of social structure. What
then is the critical element in constructing a theory for the urban experience?
Before answering this question, it is imperative to look at the work of David Harvey
(1985) who also wrote and published his major theoretical findings at the same time
as Castells. David Harvey, a geographer-turned-political economist theorized on two
aspects of the urban experience, the production of space and its relation to rights of
people who live in the city. He focused on the process of urbanization and he
understood it as a process of capital accumulation. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s work
(Kofman and Lebas 1996 and Shields 1999), he reframed Marxist theory of capitalist
accumulation and gave it a significantly new direction. Harvey argues that land is a
commodity and that it has peculiar qualities. It is spatially fixed, it is necessary to
human life, and is relatively permanent. Land thus is essential to capital accumulation
and circulation, as it is to human life.
Harvey starts off his discussion on the urban experience by debating on the Marxist
conception of capitalist accumulation. He argues that capitalist accumulation goes
through three circuits. The first circuit concerns the production of commodities within
manufacturing and ultimately gives way to overproduction of goods. Capital thus
moves to the second circuit where it gets invested in fixed capital such as
infrastructure, housing, and construction of offices, leading to the growth of a town or
a city. In the process, land is transformed into built environment, both for production
and consumption and becomes thus a constituent of the process of accumulation of
capital. The state plays a pivotal role in mediating the flows of capital from primary to
secondary circuit through the creation of financial tools and policies such as housing
loans and mortgage facilities. As in the first circuit after some time, there is over
investment in the secondary circuit due to the tendency of capitalists to under invest in
fixed capital (built environment) leading to its flow in the tertiary circuit. This
involves investment in scientific knowledge and technological advancements to
reproduce labour power.
Harvey (1985) explains his theory on the interface between urban restructuring and
economic restructuring in his empirical writings that explore the growth of two cities:
Paris and Baltimore. In his texts he traces how the city’s growth was associated with
changing investment strategies as capital moved from manufacturing to land
development. Harvey shows when capital is invested in the built environment, new
opportunities for capital accumulation in the primary circuit open up again, rendering
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the existing built environment no longer as ‘efficient’ for capital accumulation. As a
result the built environment concerned is abandoned or downgraded and capital
moves elsewhere to restore profitability. Capital accumulation in the built
environment does not resolve the crisis of capital accumulation that takes place at the
first stage but it causes further crises.
How can one intervene in this process of capital accumulation? Harvey’s answer is
class conflict-the organisation of social and political struggles to ‘fix’ the role of
accumulation (1987; 2000). Because the urban process under capitalism is created in
and through the interaction of capital accumulation and class struggle against the
ruling groups that include landlords and developers, only struggles by social groups
threatened by the removal of capital can help prevent capital flight and ensure the
survival of an urban infrastructure.
While for Harvey, production of space defines the theoretical object of urban studies,
for Castells the key concept is ‘society’ more specifically advanced capitalist society
wherein collective consumption (housing, transportation, communication) is a key
element defining that system. Urban social movements organise themselves for
collective consumption and through that fashion define ‘space’. The Chicago
theorists, according to Castells, had also discussed space but they reduced it to a
social unit. On the other hand, for Castells, space is and has a material element. It is
here that human activity is exercised, and is in turn organised in a particular form
through the technico-social complex of which it is part. Space, he argues, should be
considered in the web of social structures, as an element of reality that is embedded in
social processes. For Castells the spatial structure and urban system are the same, and
can be used interchangeably to describe the particular way in which the basic
elements of the social structure are spatially structured and articulated.
Like Harvey, Castells (1977) argues that the state plays a critical and central role in
the organisation of the four spheres that define advanced capitalist society, i.e.,
production, consumption, exchange and politics. The state mediates between the
various elements that constitute the urban system and engages in dialectical
relationships with capitalist interests, elite groups, its own employees and the
‘masses’. Since the city is the spatial location of capitalist development, it is the city,
and hence space, that reflects the workings and outcomes of this relationship. Urban
crisis occurs as a result of state failure to manage resources of and for collective
consumption. Urban social movements articulate the crisis of the system, as city is
the critical element of the means of production of consumption.
It is in this context that Castells suggests that the urban experience be perceived in a
holistic manner, that is, it needs to encompass aspects taken from all fields that have
written on the urban. There is a need for urban sociology to reinvent itself by
enlarging its vision, incorporating perceptions and perspectives from different
branches of knowledge and ultimately reorganizing its epistemic principles in order to
become a science of society, that is, a genuine social science. In this way for Castells,
urban sociology can create for itself its own theoretical object, which while using an
interdisciplinary perspective studies the processes and structures of advanced
capitalist societies.
One of the major contributions by Castells and Harvey is their insistence that just as
time is a critical element in formulating theories regarding society, space is as much a
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central element. Space is not neutral; rather it is embedded in social relations. It is in
perennial dialectical relation with other social forces. There are two ways that these
theorists have theorized space, the first aspect relates to how the economy, or more
specifically capitalism constructs space and secondly the way space in turn structures
the economy and society and thus becomes a source of differentiation between and
within settlements.
Additionally both insist that contemporary society is intimately connected to spatial
dimensions and therefore theorizing the urban implies theorizing contemporary
advanced capitalist society. The two concepts that they devised, i.e. the space of flows
[Castells, 1989] and time-space compression [Harvey, 1990] suggest that their intent
was to contribute to contemporary social theory. Ultimately in their canvas, urban
sociology becomes a lens through which modern society is conceived. Instead of
being a sub-discipline of sociology, it is and becomes a discipline in itself. Both of
these contributions offer a major challenge to sociologists studying the urban
experience in India and simultaneously raise the problem whether such an urban
sociology can frame the contours of contemporary sociological theory of Indian social
experience.
In the last three decades since Castells polemically questioned the theoretical and
epistemological difficulties, the field called ‘urban studies’ or ‘new urban sociology’,
has grown enormously and today Castells [Susser, 2000] is more positive and hopeful
that new urban sociology in the form of urban studies has already emerged.
Urbanologists have embraced seemingly unrelated subjects such as ecology,
architecture, art and aesthetics, with geography, economics, politics, and history to
push the disciplinary boundaries that address urban issues.
The Contours of Urban Studies
Today we have a clearer appraisal of the contours of urban studies or new urban
sociology. Recently, following the seminal work of Pickvance (1976) Lebas (1982)
and Saunders (1981), Kleniewski (2005), Low (2002), Savage and Ward (1993),
Walton (2000), and Zukin (1980) has summarised the major trends in this field.
Developing the perspective introduced by both Castells and Harvey and incorporating
new research completed by contemporary scholars, they argue that the best and the
most appropriate way to study the urban phenomenon is through the perspective of
political economy.
They elaborate four processes that define and constitute the urban. These are, a) the
movement, concentration and extension of capital over space and time-processes that
creates urban forms, towns and cities; b) the contradiction between forces of
production and relations of production-processes that creates social conflicts and leads
to the growth of social movements within the urban arena; c) the way power and
ideology are arranged in and through the state and the way the state organises these in
order to intervene in the process of spatial reorganisation, d) the way cultural
representations are given meaning within the above dynamics. Urban studies, these
authors argue, analyses simultaneously the mode of production as it articulates in
space, the structures and dynamics of power relations and assessment of cultural
processes. Thus, urban studies, they posit, is necessarily interdisciplinary, historical
and comparative.
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The study of capital formation in space cannot be attempted from one disciplinary
gaze. It needs to be culled from more than one discipline. Thus interdisciplinarity is a
critical and crucial element of urban studies. For example, the political processes that
produce specific forms of capital accumulation on space warrant analytical
perspectives from political sciences as well as economics. The resultant spatial forms
and social organizations require the explanatory powers of sociological theories,
whereas the cultural patterns, social movements and belief systems that give meanings
to these processes necessitate the anthropological interpretative lenses. In addition to
the above, equally pertinent is the need to understand perspectives from geography,
architecture, environmental sciences, and urban planning and as well the humanities
and cultural studies. To do urban studies is to be interdisciplinary.
The second major contour of urban studies concerns history. By opening up the
ground for inquiries about processes of how capital and space are interconnected in
specific contexts, urbanologists investigate the history of urbanization and
industrialization “rather than merely document the successive emergence of urban
forms (e.g. the change from the pre-industrial to the industrial city, or the
reproduction of metropolitan urban forms in colonial and post-colonial capitals”
[Zukin as cited in Walton 2000:300]. Historical explanations have allowed us to
highlight how urbanization and industrialisation have not been universally
coterminous not only in the colonised worlds but also in North America and the rest
of Europe. As was previously mentioned, the model of the evolution of Chicago city
did not meet the realities of other cities in the west. The experiences of cities in other
regions of the world are even further apart. Urban studies thus have opened up the
field of intellectual interest to study individual cities historically across the last two
hundred years.
History and interdisciplinarity provide a wider scope to the study of the
interconnections of capital and space. Thereby these introduce a comparative
perspective for urban studies. To do comparison implies that analysis need be
empirically grounded. For instance, in assessing the differences between urban forms
and patterns of their evolution, there is a need to compare empirically relative
densities of cities, the stage of development of their means of communication and
transportation. These comparisons can be then extended over different urban systems
regionally and nationally. This would yield an understanding of the universals and the
specifics of the processes of spatial concentration and urbanisation.
These contours have set the stage for the development within contemporary urban
studies of five themes. These are: inequalities-the nature and extent of their
prevalence in cities and their causes and consequences; the study of global cities,
sometimes also called world cities, and their relationship to globalisation;
contemporary forms of urbanism-the nature of urban culture and its relation to
modernity and post modernity; the role of the state in promoting urbanisation and the
nature of social movements around ethnicity and identity. Lastly, a significant section
of work is done on the urban phenomenon in the non-advanced capitalist regions-the
South and asks the question what is its nature and characteristics of cities in the South
and their relationship to the capitalist system. It is to the last theme that we now turn
to.
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Urban Studies in the South
After the Second World War scholars who started studying the South initially used
the evolutionary approach to study the urban phenomenon. [Gugler 1996;1997] Later
in the seventies with the growth of the dependency approach a new perspective was
introduced in the field of urban studies-that of uneven development and world system
theory. Drawing on the above perspective, these theories highlighted the historic
networks of subordination and domination between advanced (capitalist) and less
advanced (dependent) countries and their respective political economies, thereby
inaugurating a paradigm shift in understanding the linkage between capitalist
developments, the state, cultural representations, space and forms of urbanisation.
[King 1990a; McGee 1969; Safa 1982; Smith 1996].
Theorists started by making a critique of the evolutionary and modernization
approach. Critiques expanded to question the universal modernity paradigm and four
main lines of inquiry were elaborated. The first concerned the ahistoricity of such
paradigm and the image portrayed of a uniform trajectory that failed to deal with the
historically specific spatial forms. The second was a critique of the ecological
perspective as imposed on the Southern cities, which could not explain the way
uneven development, and inequalities were sustained. The third took issue with how
evolutionary theories, which did not and could not account for human agency or of
social conflicts. Lastly there were contentions over how such theories were overdeterministic in explaining the character of places and cities rather than deriving
explanations from the processes of uneven development themselves.
These developments were reflected in a number works. For example, McGee (1969)
and later McGee, T. and Armstrong W. (1985) critiqued the theory that urbanization
starts with early industrialization when people migrate from rural to urban areas
proceeding with industrial expansion and proportionate increase of urban population.
He also critiqued those theorists that highlighted the decline in the process of
urbanization by means of the model that uses demographic and economic aspects of
understanding city growth. For example, he showed that unlike cities in the North
which showed a phase of ‘relative decentralization of population and economic
activities and leads to ‘absolute decentralization’ as people move out of the center of
cities, cities in the south would not at all experience this process in a similar manner.
Rather, they experience hyper-urbanization and pseudo-urbanization, that is an
increase of population in urban areas without the expansion of manufacturing
activities to absorb this increase.
Safa (1982) has argued that capitalist penetration shapes the process of urbanization in
the South in several distinctive ways. She discusses four aspects. These are the
dependent nature of capitalist development in the third world; an assessment of the
historical processes of integration of these regions within the world market; the nature
of class structure and especially the role played by the elite in organising capitalist
accumulation; and the role of the state in orchestrating these aspects. She further
explicates the processes by which patterns of urbanisation emerge. On one hand there
is disintegration of the rural subsistence sector and on the other there is the growth of
and increasing reliance on the urban informal economy. Following the work already
done by Keith Hart (1973) and others, she argues that the urban informal sector is not
distinct, rather it is integrated with the formal sector. These processes result in
increasing inequalities and thereby creating a new stratification system within cities.
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Additionally, the experience of colonialism has not allowed an autonomous state to
evolve and dependent capitalism has further weakened this possibility. The state in
some regions has not played an active role in providing public services and
infrastructure and wherever it is has it has resulted in increasing inequalities.
Collective action against the state and for access to the services such as housing, jobs,
transport and education has also been uneven.
Castells (1977, 1983) has entered into this debate by extending the dependency
approach to study cities in the South and combining with it, some of his earlier
concepts of collective consumption and social movements. He argued that as a result
of dependent capitalism, countries vary in regard to their urban systems, regimes of
accumulation and surplus extraction, social organizations and conflicts, as well as the
nature and extent of collective action. He refers to social movements emerging as a
result of ‘urban contradictions’, namely those related to the production, distribution
and management of the collective consumption of goods and services and states that
the urban crisis is directly linked to the phenomenon of marginality.
Additionally, Castells (1983) had argued that dependent capitalism has implications
on the occupational structure of cities-characterized by a large chunk of the
population working in the informal sector and living in squatter settlements. These
‘urban poor’ are the new subjects of the process of social change representing a new
ideology and politics. He perceives the mobilisation of these urban poor as
representing a new class conflict replacing the traditional opposition between the
bourgeoisie and the working class.
Henceforth with these contributions, the study of urbanization, urbanism and cities
has taken a decisive turn. The theory of uneven development has influenced the
discussions, debate and scholarship of urbanization in the South. This is particularly
true in the last decade when globalisation has reorganized the world economy and
organically reconnected it in new ways. The World city and Global city paradigms
had already established that cities in the west were increasingly playing a pivotal role
in the international economy as centres of commerce, sites of production and bases for
specialized economic activities [Friedman and Wolff 1982; Sassen 1991] This line of
argument has now been extended to study cities in the south which are now
functionally interconnected in a hierarchy of the global economy and international
division of labour [Gugler 2004; King 1990a; Smith 2001].
Based on the above-mentioned discussions concerning the study of the ‘urban’ in the
north and the south, we can discern the following as themes that need to be
incorporated within urban studies.
Uneven Development and Urbanization
Processes of urbanization and counter-urbanization refer to the stages of growth and
decline of the demographic and economic aspects of cities. Urbanization starts with
early industrialization when people migrate from rural to urban areas. It proceeds with
industrial expansion and the proportion of urban population increases. A state of
‘relative centralization’ occurs when cities stretch over their boundaries and begin to
develop suburbs. The latter leads to ‘relative decentralization of population and
economic activities and leads to ‘absolute decentralization’ as people move out of the
center of cities, which in turn become more specialized in tertiary activities. The final
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stage is that of ruralization and the complete deindustrialization of urban areas. [Safa,
1982].
The theme integrates the notion of uneven development and urbanization to the world
system approach. In this perspective cities are seen as occupying specific spaces in the
world economic system organized in terms of an international division of labour that
places nation states and cities on a core – periphery continuum. Under this perspective
the core defines cities in the underdeveloped areas in terms of economic processes,
organization of production and nation state policies. This dependence is reconstructed
within nation states and regions in which these peripheral cities are located in a
cascading unevenness created as every core city integrates a periphery.
This approach has mainly been used to study Latin American cities where the rate of
urbanization, as defined by the proportion of population is high and equals that of
Europe-75 per cent. Despite this, Latin America does not compare well with Europe
in terms of urban infrastructure, employment and living standards. Additionally Latin
American cities are characterized by high inequalities (unlike Europe) with a high
proportion of its population living in squatter settlements where drugs, prostitution
and other illegal activities flourish and where there is high incidence of crime and
violence. Discussing these processes, urbanologists studying Latin American cities
had initially highlighted external constraints as a variable leading to economic and
cultural dependence. [Safa, 1982].
The urban economy including its infrastructure was dependent on imperial needs.
Profits from industries were exported to the core countries; most studies highlighted
the dependent role played by the indigenous bourgeoisie. Increasingly however, social
scientists have started discussing urbanisation as a two way process in which a critical
role is played by nation state and its policies on one hand and by the ruling elite on the
other. (after all they are the ones who make the choices regarding capital
accumulation) Thus the focus of the research now is towards the dynamics of
domination-subordination in cities and the class conflicts.
How does one translate these concerns to encapsulate the Indian experience?
Contemporary cities in India, such as Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and later Delhi grew
directly out of needs of the colonial economy. How can we use this theory to help us
understand the dynamics of these cities? Additionally India has had a long history of
pre capitalist urban growth, such as religious centres, administrative headquarters and
market towns. How have the structures of these towns and cities enveloped
themselves in the new system?
Another issue that has been discussed by the Latin American theorists is that of urban
primacy. Why is it that urbanization in Latin America is not spread over regions and
gets concentrated in big cities? (In 2000, 32 per cent of Latin American lived in cities
with at least 1 million residents. By 2015, the percentage will increase to 38.
[Montegomery, 2003]. What is the relationship of urban primacy with the core
regions of the world? This trend is now visible also in India where rapid urbanization
is leading to medium sized towns becoming metropolis. Today in India there are 35
cities with more than 1 million population. To what extent is this trend related to
regional unevenness and over concentration of infrastructure in big cities? To what
extent is it related to commercialisation of agriculture? Do town and cities grow
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because of underdevelopment? How are these trends also related to national and
State/provincial policies? Can and do national policies counter such uneven
development?
Global City, Information City and Flexible Accumulation
Recently, a battery of conceptual tools has evolved to reflect on the nature of
contemporary cities and urbanisation in the developed world. These concepts discuss
spatial dispersal of economic activities and global integration that are characteristic of
the ‘new regime of accumulation’ and the ‘new global division of labor’ triggered by
new information oriented technologies. This literature encompasses the debate
regarding the definition of cities geared by globalisation, (does one call them world
city, global city, city-region or mega city?) and as well recent work done by Castells
on new information city and by Harvey on flexible accumulation.
In the early seventies Friedmann and Wolff (1982) borrowed Patrick Geddes’s
concept of ‘world city’ to initiate a discussion on those cities that have increased in
size as they become centers of new global economy. Sassen (1991) calls these cities,
such as, New York, London and Tokyo, global cities. These cities act as command
and control centers for the new global economy. Both Friedmann and Wolff (1982),
Sassen (1991), and earlier Hall (1966) argue that these cities are distinct because they
have become nodes for the operation of the global regime and a critical foci for a
‘new regime of accumulation’. In these cities, one can find transnational corporate
headquarters, business services such as international finance, transnational institutions
other than those mentioned above, as well as telecommunications and information
processing. Their social organization and spatial forms expand or contract as the latter
intervenes in the organization of economies of scale. The combination of spatial
dispersal and global integration, which is the characteristic of the new regime of
accumulation, creates new strategic roles for these major cities as well as other cities,
which link themselves to these in terms of a hierarchy of functional specialization.
Scott (2001) calls this formation ‘region-city’.[See alternative definition of region by
Massey et al., 1994].
Recently Castells in a three volume work (1989;1996;1997) argued that contemporary
society has seen a complete change as a result of the growth of a ‘new age’, i.e. the
Information Age. He argues that by the middle of this century we will see a new kind
of urbanization spread over the entire world, functionally integrated and socially
differentiated and multi-cantered. This is possible because of telecommunications,
which allow both spatial concentration and decentralization leading to new
geographies of networks and nodes within and between the countries in the world, and
between and within metropolitan areas. This world is dominated by a dual system,
one that includes those who enter the transnational networks and excludes others
spatially creating extreme inequalities as communication patterns breakdown between
individual and cultures and extreme segregation fuels criminal culture and violence. A
weak state is the outcome, weak because it does not invest in collective consumption
and thus caters to its own population but is strong because it is extensively networked
with other governments, inter-governmental and even NGO organizations. In this
context, urban social movements develop on two lines- both of which Castells
considers as defensive strategies. The first, attempts to defend the ‘community’, and
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11
its place so that it has access to minimum of services. These sometimes become
identity movements and the second is the environmental movement, which while
discussing quality of life, most often than not defends one ‘community’.
David Harvey (1987) has also reflected on contemporary globalisation. He
distinguishes between Fordist (mass assembly line, mass political organisation and
welfare state interventions) and post Fordist mode of flexible capital accumulation
(the pursuit of niche markets, decentralisation coupled with spatial dispersal of
production, withdrawal of the nation-state from interventionist policies coupled with
deregulation and privatisation). Post Fordism triggers shrinking of markets,
unemployment, rapid shifts in spatial constraints, and global division of labour,
capital realignment, and technological and financial reorganization. These had spatial
implications; physical infrastructures in core cities becoming devalued. Cities are now
pushed to compete for a) position in the international division of labour, b) control
and command functions, c) position as centres of consumption, and d) for
governmental redistribution.
How do we apply these ideas and relate them to cities in the underdeveloped region?
To what extent has globalisation impacted the economies of underdeveloped countries
and have these changes affected the structure of cities in India? Have Indian cities
become global cities or have they become part of the functional hierarchy of cities?
What kind of uneven development and dependencies does this relationship structures?
Harris (1995) has suggested that this trend is best represented by Bombay in India and
that it has become a global city. On the other hand, Patel (2003; 2004) has argued that
globalization has not changed the city’s economy and spatial structure in the way it
has in global cities of the developed countries. Like other cities in India, Mumbai’s
economy remains dependent on the informal sector. This informal sector combines
technologies that range from primitive and labour intensive to advanced. In turn this
asymmetrical integration of technologies creates enclaves of uneven infrastructural
and built environment across the city.
Exclusions and Inequalities in Urban Arenas
What is the structure of cities? What is the nature of inequality in these cities? Sassen
(1991) argues that a new stratification system has developed in global cities. While
the manufacturing city saw the growth of a pyramidal stratification system with a
small elite class, a large middle class and still larger blue-collared class, in the global
cities the hourglass structure has evolved. Globalisation has opened up opportunities
to the skilled and they have become a mobile group. But this process has also
squeezed the middle class downwards and thus increased the number of those who are
at the bottom. Wilson’s (1997) research on Chicago suggests that those who are in the
bottom find themselves trapped in that world as they are excluded not only in terms of
employment but also in terms of housing and other services. As most of those in the
bottom are African Americans, material exclusion has become associated with racial
and other divisions such as gender. [Massey, 1994]
Recent work on European cities has confirmed this trend. These studies have argued
that immigrant ethnic and religious groups face exclusions from employment together
with other services including state welfare programmes, as the state has started
withdrawing from the social sector. Additionally some communities such as migrants
also face exclusions in terms of political rights, such as right to vote. In these studies
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inequalities are being redefined as exclusions to portray the multi-dimensionality of
experiences faced by those at the bottom. This concept now incorporates five
dimensions of inequalities. These dimensions concern livelihoods (e.g. income and
secure jobs), access to services (land, housing, education, waste disposal etc.), group
rights (e.g. rights to practice ethnic, caste, and community customs etc.), citizenship
rights (as in legal rights and freedom of expression), and moral rights (right to
security, community and humanity).
How do we assess the nature of stratification in Indian cities? Cities that grew in the
colonial period in India had a developed manufacturing base. Did a pyramidical
stratification system develop in these cities? What is the situation now after
manufacturing has declined? How does the combination of formal and informal
sectors structure stratification? Additionally, following from the above, does this
stratification system implicate itself in the entire society? If so what role does caste,
ethnic and religious affiliations play in the structuring of this stratification system?
Those living at the bottom in the underdeveloped regions of the world face enormous
difficulties in reproducing life worlds; a large number of people in big cities live in
squatter settlements and slums and have little to no access to services such as water
and sanitation. Most of the people remain unemployed or underemployed, and if
employed they are visible only in the ‘informal sector’, which do not guarantee
minimum securities. In addition some, who are migrants, who do not have the right to
vote and most of them cannot be guaranteed security. Most, if not all, belong to
groups described as deprived, backward and marginal. Caste locations, together with
language, ethnicity and religious affiliation also structure these exclusions within the
excluded in Indian cities. How can we reformulate the concept of exclusion to analyze
the structure of inequalities in India?
Urban Social Movements and Collective Action
The fourth theme implicated on the debates over urban sociology relate to the
perception of cities as sites of ‘new urban social movements’. Castells had argued that
the city was a system organized over the provisions of services necessities of
everyday life, such as housing, health care, and transportation. State intervention was
necessary to provide these services to all; thus the investment in urban infrastructure.
This infrastructure determines the relationship between people and the state; cities
grow and change on the basis of the contradictions and conflicts that emerge between
the state and the people over who needs this infrastructure, what should be its nature,
how does this infrastructure differentiate between strata in the city and controls its
mobility and growth, and what kind of investment needs to be made. New urban
social movements reflect these conflicts and question political decision-making
regarding such decisions and postulate alternatives.
This research has opened up an entirely new domain of knowledge with urban social
movements being conflated with new social movements. Researches have not only
studied movements for reclaiming homes, for expanding infrastructure in outlying
areas of the city or where most immigrant families live but also the women’s’
movement and environmental movement as movements that stake claims on these and
ask for the reorganization infrastructure so that all of the city’s population live a
healthy and a secure life. India has seen the growth of such movements (mainly from
the middle classes) in recent times. These movements have raised issues of traffic
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congestion and its impact on air pollution and they have also raised issues regarding
air and water pollution as a result of industry. Additionally the poor in the city are
being organised to demand housing rights and other rights and services such as water
and sanitation [Evans, 2002; Smith and Feagin, 1987].
While class issues such as access to continuous employment together with adequate
housing and services remain paramount in India, cities in India are also witnessing the
growth of a new kind of politics that is of identity politics, where modern claims are
being made through a redefinition of traditional ethnic identities. This politics claims
the city for the majority community, and the majority is defined by language, region
or religious affiliation. For example, in Bombay, the Shiv Sena demanded that
employment opportunity and new investments taking place in Bombay benefit
individuals who are from Maharashtra and speak Marathi. Today, it has expanded its
definition of community to include all Hindus. Promoted by national trends, cities in
India have become locale for identity politics to flourish. This kind of identity politics
has provoked communal conflict and thus communal riots have become a
characteristic feature of some cities, such as Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Godhra,
Hyderabad, Meerut, Moradabad among others. In this context it is imperative to ask
how the control of the local governance structures by a majority community aids and
sometimes instigates such conflicts? Why is it that tradition becomes a site for
reclaiming identity? Why is it that riots have become a form to claim a space in the
city rather than social movements? (It would be interesting to contrast the answers
with the case of Los Angeles, which saw riots in late eighties [Davis 1992]. Why is it
that cities in India despite lack of infrastructure do not have movements around the
issues of what role urban planning, state intervention in collective consumption? and
employment structure play in aggravating these conflicts.
In this context how do we frame the agenda for urban studies in India? Sociologists
have studied the urban phenomenon in terms of a ‘structure’---the traditional society,
which is changing and the new process, that of urbanisation which is emerging to take
its place. A large part of the work on urbanization and urbanism in India derived its
theoretical perspective from the ecological and/or behavioural schools. Also a great
number of works is descriptive and statistically derived. Urban communities have
been defined in terms of family, kinship, caste and ethnicity and questions have been
asked about their forms and structures in context to urbanisation.
Given that the process of urbanisation has been seen from a demographic and
economic lens the ‘urban’ phenomenon has been increasingly studied from different
disciplinary perspectives. Urban geographers studied various aspects of space and its
organization within cities and regions defining the latter mainly as sub-national
territories. Historians studied the evolution of cities and their functions at different
periods of time. Economists examined land use as well as the occupational
classification of the urban populations tracing migration trends over time and their
implications on macro-economic indicators across the country. Anthropologists
compared urban to rural and tribal cultures. Also, political scientists studied power
and authority in cities, at times analysing local politics with reference to regional and
national structures.
Contemporary sociology in India has moved to embrace many new perspectives and
new positions. In this context the emergence of dependency and world systems
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theories has underscored the importance of an extended inquiry into the relationship
between capitalism and modernity. Now the historical development of cities was
placed in the broader contexts of the world capitalist system. This furbished insights
into the specificity of cities and their inter-relationships as well as reformulations of
the relationship between cities and their hinterlands. As such cities were no longer
seen as self-contained objects with clear boundaries or as exemplars of a universal
modernity
Urban as a cultural representation
The fifth theme discussed by contemporary commentators concerns the cultural
aspects of the ‘urban’. While urbanism was stigmatised as ‘mythical’ during the early
phases of urban sociology [Castells 1976] it is now becoming a theme most pertinent
to discuss current spatial transformations. Smith (2001) and Zukin’s (1980,1995)
works discuss the urban as cultural representation and argue that it is part of the new
culture of consumerism that has emerged in contemporary society. The revolution in
communication technology and the growth of virtual reality are redefining space.
Today architecture, art markets, urban planning and capital investments are
organically linked in defining urban developments. New urban forms (both
architecture and interior designs) such as malls integrate internationalised production
and consumption. It is difficult to identify the differences between a MacDonald’s and
a Benetton in London or New Delhi. Recently, Harvey (1987) has related his concept
of flexible accumulation to culture and the creation of symbolic capital, such as
branded products, designer apparel and accessories and more recently in spectacles
such as beauty contests, music festivals and sports events.
In India we see such capital accumulation in the organisation of spectacles in religious
festivals, (such as Ganapati festival in Mahrashtra, Durga Puja in Bengal or Dandiya
Raas in Gujarat) cricket matches and film-music shows. These new urban forms
create new social relations as these promote styles and icons and redefine the
constructions and meanings attached to space and place. Through such a process new
forms of traditions are constructed and created. Films and television act as important
mediators in this process. Do these integrate the populous to a virtual space and
culture outside their local, regional and nation-state identities and boundaries? What
influences do these cultures have on the city? Do these create new social inequalities
and how does such inequalities affect identities of caste and religion?
The Urban Phenomenon in India
Urbanisation in India is organized in a web of complex configurations and aspects,
which have articulated themselves unevenly. This unevenness is a consequence of the
way capitalism has historically and spatially structured the Indian economy and linked
it with various actors, political and social institutions and their structures and the way
these in turn have impacted on capitalism. Because capitalism was introduced through
colonialism, the urban phenomenon and its actors, need to be analysed in two phases:
colonial and post independence
The vast territory that constitutes India is spatially differentiated into geographical
units, administrative units, and regions of political influences, which might not
necessarily coincide. Culturally, India inhabits actors with multiple identities,
affiliated to many communities that are ethnically, linguistically, and religiously
differentiated. In addition, caste and gender intersects across these ethnic distinctions
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thus creating complex social networks. Politically India presents a complex case that
is characterised by a variety of regimes, which span the two phases mentioned above.
The developments of and within the state structures and regime dynamics have been
regionally uneven. This has shaped and continues to shape capital accumulation and
distribution as well as the way collective action takes place. Such unevenness
warrants that urban studies incorporate a spatial sensitivity in its appraisal of the
urbanization process in India. Thus, students of urban studies need to understand the
ways the processes of capitalist formation have spatially organised actors, and the
varied economic, political and the social institutions in distinct and different ways.
We also need to distinguish between the processes of urbanization, as cross regional,
nation-state and worldwide process from those features of urbanization that govern
city growth. This assessment would help to perceive the many variations regarding
the urban process in India For example, global economic processes may influence the
general urbanization process of various regions within India differentially. On the
other hand, its impact on cities may vary, in terms of regional political processes. For
example, in cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore, the weight of the international
economic process and regional politics is different and this difference is related not
only to the distinct role of international division of labour and regional politics within
these cities, but also to the way local and national processes intervened to create these
distinctions.
The above argument leads us to another methodological qualification. It is imperative
to keep in mind that in some cases, what one identifies as causes of urbanization are
in other cases, identifiable as the consequences. For instance, if we take patterns of
migration it becomes clear that in India, it is not only the economic factors that
operate to shape migration trends but also the availability of infrastructure, such as
transport and communication and other ecological factors that differ across space.
Additionally, in some cases, caste and kin linkages together with community, as also
kin and family support structures, play an integral role in decisions of actors to
migrate. Thus urban growth in some cases may be triggered due to the history of caste
networks that has propelled migration. This in turn leads to the growth of
infrastructure and employment opportunities. On the other hand in other cases, the
establishment of townships of industrial activities together with infrastructure through
policy measures have created the conditions for migration.
It should be clear from the above that it is extremely difficult to generalize on the
urban phenomenon. Below I outline in broad strokes some of the patterns. In the last
decade studies on Indian cities have been published from different social science
perspectives, such as Gupta (1981,1998) and Dupont et al (2000), on Delhi, Calcutta
[Chaudhuri,1995] Hyderabad, [Naidu,1990] Vijaywada [Parthasarthy 1997],
Lucknow [Graf, 1997] Banglore [Heitzman, 2004; Nair, 2005] and Bombay [Patel
and Thorner 1995; Patel and Thorner 1995a; Patel and Masselos 2003], This Reader
wishes to extend the dialogue initiated by these efforts with the one placed below. 
.

Though this introduction suggests that there is tremendous diversity of and about urban experience, I
have been able to include examples mainly from metropolitan cities. Unfortunately, there is very little
published work on small and medium towns of India.
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This Reader argues that in many ways we, that is, those who research and write on
urban sociology in India, are at the same conjuncture as was Castells in the late
seventies. And like then, there seems to be an increasing interest in assessing the
urban process in contemporary India through new perspectives. The first network was
that of urban historians, called the Urban History Association of India. (Banga, 1991,
1992) Now, three new research networks have been established to study and assess
the contemporary urban processes, two of which are based in Bombay -the Mumbai
Study Group and PUKAR, Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research. The
third research network, SARAI, is located in Delhi. It describes itself as a space for
research, practice and conversation about the contemporary media and urban
constellations. Sarai has published four readers. Additionally innumerable
conferences and workshops on cities have been organized. In January 2003, the first
South Asia wide conference on cities titled City One took place [Sarai 2003].
Colonial Urbanisation
As mentioned earlier, colonialism is a critical benchmark to understand contemporary
urbanisation. It inaugurated a new political economy and linked India to the
imperialist powers in a dependent relationship. This relationship restructured old
cities and established new ones. It is not that India did not have city formations
earlier. Indian cities emerged across time in different locations and within distinct
economies. During the pre-colonial period, cities were predominantly functionally
related to religious, military and/or administrative purposes for which it needed to
have production and trade functions. . In these cities, distinct kinds of urban forms
and styles of architecture evolved, reflecting the way incipient state formation
intersected with the hierarchical social structures of caste and religion [Gillion 1968].
How did colonial capitalism shape Indian urbanisation? Colonial and indigenous
power brokers, such as khatris, Gujarati banias and Agarwals, in North India shaped
new developments as existing towns (kasbas and ganj) were linked to new city centres
of international trade [Bayley 1992]. Two kinds of settlements emerged. On one
hand the administrative, military and security requirements of the imperial economy
led to the growth of administrative and cantonment towns. For example, New Delhi’s
urban structure is a representation of this development [King 1990]. The same is true
of cantonment towns such as Pune or Lucknow [Kosambi 1986; Oldenburg 1984].
On the other hand, other settlements grew which were related to international
commerce or trade and the growth of major infrastructure projects such as railways
and ports. These projects reshaped the national landscape and facilitated the
integration of the national economy as well as its regions and cities into the imperial
economy. The majority of these new urban settlements, such as Calcutta [Gupta
1993], Madras [Neild 1979], and Bombay [Dossal 1991] served as entrepots or
trading posts within the British capitalist empire. As the hinterland became organized
and connected, further developments of towns and cities ensued. Later, from the late
nineteenth century onwards, manufacturing emerged thus increasing migration into
new cities, and thereby increasing the urban population. These developments had had
immediate and long-term implications on the trajectories of urbanization in India;
implications that still resonate till the present day.
During the colonial period, cities came to be internally differentiated along civil and
military lines and in terms of ‘white’ and indigenous districts or towns [for Madras
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see Neild 1979] and for Bombay [Dossal 1991] and for Calcutta [Sarkar 1997). These
spatial divisions were superimposed and extended into other divisions such as
occupational, as also those of castes, guilds and social status. The construction of
administrative buildings, residential compounds, as well as bungalows are other
examples of how space was both an outcome and a reflection of the power structures
characteristic of colonial capitalism. Additionally, these structures demarcated living
spaces along lines of hygiene and contamination, a distinction that was already well
entrenched into the Indian social structure albeit differently (see King in this volume).
Colonial dependency organised urbanization in a distinct manner. The spatial division
of labour characteristic of western capitalist development from pre-industrial to
industrial did not crystallize in India. Rather, Indian urbanisation was not coterminous
with industrialization and Indian cities did not develop solely as centres of
manufacturing industries. A new capitalist class emerged dependent on the foreign
masters. It was involved in colonial trade and commerce with a few going later into
industries in cities, such as Calcutta and Bombay. This industrialization remained
limited, in terms of technology, employment and capital [Bagchi 1972]. Whereas in
the West, industrialization created a concentration of economic, political and cultural
activities in one space, the city, and organized these in terms of zones. In the case of
Indian cities, such an organization was imposed through planning mechanisms by the
colonial state rather than through organic developments [Menon 1997].
Additionally, another factor shaping the nature, patterns and trends of urbanization
was the nature of agrarian economy. Unlike Europe, agricultural relations within India
did not change radically enough to create an alienated uprooted peasantry that could
flood cities. The dependent nature of agriculture made urbanization in India not only a
slow process, but also created an internal organic relationship with agriculture, as
dependent capitalist relations could not make either independent of each other. Marx
had earlier conceptualised the transition in Europe from feudal to capitalist system as
that of conflict between country and town. Such a conflict seems to be largely absent
in India. The landed retained their presence in the rural world, simultaneously creating
a space for themselves as an elite group in towns and cities and the labouring poor,
could not break connections with the villages, and its support structures given the
limited nature of manufacturing and organized industry in India. Thus the economies
of colonial towns and cities came to be organized around a huge mass of working
class involved in providing labour intensive work and services. One of the immediate
implications of this predicament is the fact that an urban-rural continuum remains an
important aspect of conceptualising urbanization in the country in all its aspectseconomic, social and cultural. This will be elaborated in detail in the next section.
These processes organically intersected with the hierarchical caste system. This
system had found resonance and roots within pre-colonial urban formations [Shah
1988]. Now it organized itself in a decisive way with the new emerging economy.
One can identify two simultaneous processes with regard to the interface of caste with
the new economy. On one hand, the capitalist economy gave opportunities for
individual mobility to members of all castes. This process had particularly
significance to those who were members of the deprived castes. Spaces to live and
work no longer were related to caste status. Additionally, access to modern transport,
communication and travel has dissolved their received identity markers so that they
remained undistinguished from other groups. These processes did not seem to have
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benefited all individuals within these castes. Caste discrimination continued in new
and different ways. For example, scheduled castes were not recruited in the weaving
department of Bombay’s textile industry [Chandavarkar 1994]. Thus capitalism and
the hierarchical caste structure interfaced each other in complex ways as urbanization
spread all over the territory.
Such processes gave opportunities to women in upper classes and labouring
underclass to make differential claims to the city space. Paradoxically this space was
not accessible to them for the entire duration of the day as sexualities defined their
bodies differentially according to time. Women’s visibility and claims to public space,
also came to be divided within the city and was structured in terms of their class,
caste, ethnic identities as they interspersed with notions of labour and sexualities. For
example certain spaces/areas came to be demarcated for sex work stamping women’s
bodies with a particular definitions of sexuality, thereby creating new forms of
exclusions and lessening their visibility [Nair, 2005].
Yet and in spite of these trends and processes, the metropolitan city, became during
the colonial period site for the growth of organized political movements, both of the
working class and that of nationalism [Masselos, 1974]. On the other hand, small and
medium towns and metropolitan cities saw the growth of community action and
conflict, sometimes leading to communal riots [Freitag, 1990; Masselos,
1993].Through these forms of collective action, actors created a public space in the
city for themselves, by organizing protests, demonstrations and strikes. Processions
both religious and political helped to claim space of the city for its citizens and create
new stakeholders in the colonial city, which till then was defined by the colonial and
indigenous elite groups. As Ravinder Kumar (1983) has shown the Gandhian strategy
of using prabhatferis was a significant intervention in this process as was the ganpati
processions in marking the Mumbai city space as nationalist space.
Contemporary Urbanization
Though the broad patterns of urban growth followed from the structures imposed
through colonialism, there were some significant changes as the state directed
industrial growth to ensure regional evenness’. Thus while earlier towns and cities
developed around coastal areas, and where natural resources were concentrated,
henceforth its spread was not restricted, mainly to these concerns. We thus can
discern a complex pattern of urbanization emerging after independence, in which the
demands of the market, its organization within the nation-state, together with the
nature of state policy on industrialization, an ideological affirmation of the values of
urbanism and its equation with development, all played roles in propelling the growth
of urbanization in India.
No wonder, in the period immediately before and after independence, urbanization
increased rapidly. In the decades 1931-41, while the total population increased at a
rate of 1.10-1.42 per cent, the urban population increased at a rate of 1.75-2.79 per
cent. Also, in 1951, while the total population grew at 1.33 per cent (less than the
previous decade), the urban population grew at the annual rates of 2.79-3.46 per cent.
From the 1971 onwards the urban population grew at higher rates than the total
population. In 2001, India’s total population was 1027 million individuals compared
to 846 million in 1991, 683 million in 1981 and 548 million in 1971. And though out
of the 1 billion plus individuals in India in 2001, only 285 million (27.7 per cent). are
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19
considered urban, this figure constitutes ten per cent of the total world urban
population.
Two other trends are necessary to highlight for our purposes. The first is that some
States, like Tamil Nadu and Maharshtra but also Karnataka and Gujarat have
urbanized rapidly with the first two States having now, more than forty per cent of its
population designated as urban. Second, there has been rapid growth of towns and
between 1981 and 2001. Today there are 5161 urban centers in the country, a
thousand more than 1981. Of particularly significance for us is the fact that a large
number- 68.6 per cent, of those who lead a city life are located in Class I towns, that
is towns with more than a lakh population. Additionally, India has more than 35 cities
with a population of more than ten lakhs. That is, nearly 37.8 per cent of India’s total
urban population lives in large cities [Sivaramakrishnan et al. 2005].
These trends are drawn from the successive censuses. Although these figures are
helpful there are a number of shortcomings that should be considered in relying on
them. The first problem concerns the definition of towns against villages. As various
scholars have pointed out, in addition to a demographic and economic characteristics,
a population of more than 5000, a density 400 persons per square kilometre with 75
per cent male workers employed outside agriculture, towns are defined, when they
were given this status by the State government, through the conferment to them of a
municipality, or a corporation or a cantonment. Thus the census lists both statutory
towns and census towns. Given that these decisions are in most cases political
decisions, it is possible to discern unevenness in the growth of towns between
censuses.
The second problem relates to the difficulty to have reliable longitudinal comparisons
of levels of urbanization based on these censuses [Mohan 1996]. The cut-off point for
identifying a town and distinguishing it from a village is the figure of 5000. Scholars
argue that given the population of the country this is an extremely low figure. This
definition fails to account for or appreciate the unevenness of the urban process across
regions, States and across the country. For example, Maharshtra, which has very high
urbanization levels need to have higher cut off points. On the other hand Arunachal
Pradesh, which has a very low rate of urbanization, need to have lower cut off point.
For our purposes, it is important to note that urbanization cannot be measured only
through demographic characteristics but is also related to economic development,
infrastructure growth, migration and employment patterns, together with social and
cultural institutions. Additionally, as mentioned in the earlier section, urbanization in
India is intimately linked to patterns of agricultural development. In some regions,
agricultural growth has led to the growth of agro industries and thus of new towns and
cities, such as Anand and Vijayawada, which are intimately connected to the
hinterland. The opposite has also happened-towns and cities have grown without these
linkages and thus the relationship with the hinterland is significantly different. These
variations have affected the nature of rural-urban linkages. In some parts of the
country, we witness a convergence of life styles and infrastructure in urban and rural
areas. This is not the case in other regions where we witness same lifestyles without
the relevant development of infrastructure. Such distinctions have also shaped
inequalities between towns and cities and within them.
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Disparities notwithstanding, contemporary urbanization has been characterized by
three phases of growth - first the development of capital intensive industrialization
which dates back to the 1940s, with the formation of cities such as Bokaro, Bhilai,
Durgapur, Rourkela. The second phase is associated with the development of the
small scale labour intensive industrialization, which started in the 1960s, with
provincial towns such as Surat, [Shah, 1994, 97] Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Ludhiana,
Kanpur and Meerut and lastly the service economy associated with globalisation,
which started in the late 1980s, with cities such as Bangalore [Heitzman, 2004], and
now Hyderabad and Pune. In some cities these phases coexist while in others they
remained distinct. This variation is a function of the way the regional and global
economies are linked to the local processes as well as of the nature of the migration
process, and the role of the state and its policies together with the nature of
agricultural growth.
This pattern of growth deviates from the pattern of industrialization and urbanization
in Europe and other parts of the North as also some other parts of the South such as
Latin America where more than 65 per cent of the population is urban. And yet there
are some similarities with the areas of the South. The urban population in India, like
many others areas of the South are organized around the huge migrant and naturally
increasing population organized into an informal economy dominated by insecure
work, which straddles both rural and urban sectors. This working class infiltrates
economic sectors such as mining, quarrying, and service industries.
Breman (1994) distinguishes two strata in this group, the petty bourgeois and subproletariat, whilst Harris (1986) draws our attention to another section, that of ‘labour
elite’ or wageworkers, which dominates manufacturing cities, such as Mumbai,
Ahmedabad and Coimbatore in addition to the petty bourgeois, workers in
unregistered factories, poor traders and producers, and casual workers, in domestic,
retailing and manufacturing employment. The city also consists of groups of people,
mainly children and women who are not employed but are self-employed, who use
their homes for generating incomes by participating in the growing service industries,
such as food processing. This trend has inverted the process of freeing women from
the home thereby decreasing their visibility in public spaces. This in turn has affected
their negotiating on the ways sexualities connote spatial structures. [See Phadke in
this volume]. Of course there are at least two other sections that live in cities, both of
which form part of the elite of the city. These are first, the professional and skilled
employed and self employed, such as lawyers, teachers, doctors, engineers and now
IT experts. The second is the group of successful businesspersons, traders and
company owners.
This urban population is internally segmented on the basis of caste, language, ethnic
and religious identities with gender crisscrossing these. Some of these segmentations
are spatially organized in settlements and neighbourhoods within towns and cities
affirming these identities over that of the working class. These trends has not led
primordial identities to decline rather the economy has become cluttered by the way
caste and kinship networks, as well as affiliation to gender, ethnicity and religion has
trapped it into its fold not allowing it to grow and be competitive. These networks
have sometimes proved a bottleneck for entire groups to move up the ladder, though it
has given opportunities for some individuals from these groups to move up the
mobility ladder.
eSS Working Paper/Urban Studies
October 2006
21
State Policies, the Discourse on Urbanisation and Urban Politics
Most commentators agree that there is a lack of coherent policy on urban issues in
India and that this affects the way the state intervenes both in the urbanisation
process, as a process affecting the entire country and those policies relating to issues
and problems within towns and cities. This lack of coherence has incapacitated the
organisation of ideas on the urban process in India, such that most intellectuals do not
think the ‘urban’ needs to be understood, studied and explained as a separate area
outside industrialisation. Additionally this process has had an implication on the way
governance structures are designed for assessing and evaluating the urbanisation
process in India more generally and as well specifically, for the towns and cities in
India.
For instance, within cities socio-economic planning is replaced by physical planning.
Physical planning involves zoning and does not integrate issues of poverty,
infrastructure with the needs of the various deprived communities within the city. For
example, planned cities did not allow economic activities for the informal sector in
which more than fifty per cent of India’s urban population work. On the other hand
socio-economic planning is incorporated in the country’s Five Year Plan, which till
the third Five Year Plan had not allocated financial and legislative measures for urban
development. Even after that, there has been little effort to organise a comprehensive
planned programme of urbanisation, because the emphasis has been on investment
and management policies. Why is this so? [Shaw, 1996, 2004:39].
Scholars such as Ramachandran (1989) and Shaw (2004) have identified three
conflicting tendencies at work in the developmental discourse in India. The first relate
to ideological conflicts regarding the significance of the city and urban life in India
and for Indians versus the importance of the village and rural life for the nation
(Prakash 2002). This ideological conflict also affected another debate-that of
modernity versus tradition. Second, there were conflicts among intellectuals regarding
spatial concentration of power. On one hand there were one group evoking the Soviet
experiment demanding centralization of power within spatial locations and on the
other those who demanded localization in small spaces. This conflict emerged
frontally in the context of discussions regarding the policies of expanding big cities or
small and medium towns. Third, related to this, there has been conflict regarding
strategies of intervention in the urban process. Should there be an intervention by the
centre or should the various states devise their own policies. Associated with the last
two points is a similar conflict –this time, between the city and the state. Should there
be a policy for cities or should there be a policy of particular administrative regions?
Scholars have argued that continuous opaqueness characterizes Indian town planning
process. The state has intervened at four levels within the planning process. The first
is regulatory method that is an intervention at the legislative level. This occurred
when the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act was passed in 1976. The second
was that of urban expansion, through the creation of satellite towns, (New Mumbai,
Gandhinagar, Gurgaon, NOIDA, Secunderabad, Mohali, Bhubaneshwar) the third was
through capital improvement techniques (the improvement of basic infrastructure) and
the fourth is urban renewal, such as slum clearance and slum up-gradation).
eSS Working Paper/Urban Studies
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22
Indian town planning has found it easier to follow the strategy of urban expansion as
increasingly it has become caught up in demand politics, unleashed in India since late
sixties, whereby articulate political actors (such as land developers and sharks) used
various instruments of the state to demand and obtain benefits for themselves leaving
a large part of the urban population that expanded enormously after the sixties to fend
for itself. Regulatory interventions, such as the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation
Act, (ULCRA) did not decrease inequalities in housing (Narayanan 2002) Thus while
there was an increase in investment in both old and new urban towns, these towns and
cities remained caught into an urban structure that catered mainly to the upper and
mobile middle classes of India. No wonder we see in the cities of India, the working
of the concept of ‘dual city’ and the confrontation between an articulate labouring
underclass and an organised middle class.
The origin of the ‘dual city’ process is rooted in the colonialism [King 1990]. During
colonialism the city was divided into the white and native or black towns [Neild
1979]. Amenities and infrastructure was invested and made available to the former at
the expense of the latter. In point of fact, the latter were never acknowledged as
citizens (even after independence) who could intervene as political actors. It was only
during the Seventh Plan period that urban local bodies were given constitutional
status. Thus there was little recognition that within the city a large number of its
populations lived without having access to basic infrastructure such as housing, land,
sanitation and water, leave alone good education and healthy environment.
And as cities started expanding these inequalities and exclusions over access to
infrastructure increase as they get structured with identities, such as class, caste and
ethnicity and gender. One arena where conflicts are emerging relates to access to
housing and related infrastructure [Shah, 1994;1997] Statistics reveal that the slum
population in Mumbai in 1991, was 43.2 per cent and in 2001 it was 48.9 per cent.
Today most cities, including new satellite cities, have a huge slum populationFaridabad-46.6 per cent, Meerut, 43.8 per cent, Nagpur 35.5 per cent and Kolkata,
32.6 per cent [Sivaramakrishnan et al. 2005:110].
Staying in slums implies a lack of access to facilities such as potable water, sanitation,
and sewerage. This has its impact on health and environment and determines life
chances, especially for women and children who do home based work and people the
ever-expanding informal economies. As a large number of these poor households are
female-headed ones, other conflicts emerge, as oftentimes these women do not even
have legal rights over these homes.
And yet despite these conflicts primate cities are still growing faster than small and
medium towns because the latter not equipped with even the limited infrastructure
that the former has-a function of the lack of comprehension and planning that besets
urbanization in India. Additionally there is always work available in big cities- even
though it is in the unorganised sector. No wonder urban areas have low poverty levels
than the rural areas [Sivaramakrishnan et al. 2005:104].
Given these conditions, why is it that India has not seen the growth of consumption
movements as Castells has argued? Since the early 1970s Indian cities have been a
witness to the growing consciousness among individuals and groups for asserting
citizenship rights-whether to housing, and related infrastructure or to transport and
eSS Working Paper/Urban Studies
October 2006
23
means of communication or to public space by women without being violated
sexually [Chatterjee, 2004]. In addition, there has been a growth of strong advocacy
movements. On one hand these have demanded redistribution of land and creation of
an adequate policy of housing for the poor on the other hand, other organisatons have
represented middle class interests, which are in conflict with the interests of the first.
Unfortunately political parties as mentioned above have not been involved actively in
resolving these conflicts. The latter have tended to have short-term interests and have
rarely advocated a long-term comprehensive policy for city level problems, though
they do put forward strategies that need to be implemented just before municipal
elections.
In these circumstances, collective violence has sometimes embraced this political
space rather than an organized movement. This violence is usually triggered when
small and big conflicts emerge over access to infrastructure, such as when slum
dwellers are displaced, or when landlords evict tenants to sell houses to developers, or
when state creates new rules that distinguish legal from illegal slums and through
such rules create an entire new category of citizens or when it reorganizes the city’s
boundaries forcing villagers to integrate with the city. Since the seventies, these
conflicts have taken a turn towards communal confrontations as urban issues have
been reshaped by religious conflicts [Naidu and Kamalkar, 1988; Naidu, 1990,
Engineer 1994]. Authors evaluating this violence argue that the politics of
vigilantism, that create this violence, such as is the case of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai
is organic to urban life. [Hansen, 2001].
Urban Culture
Urban culture embrace a melange of practices dealing with the organisation of
immediate necessities such as food, clothing and housing-that is lifestyles; to the
intellectual activities such as publishing books, journals and periodicals, and
newspapers; to the aesthetic activities, the arts-literature, theatre, painting and dance,
music and the mass media- television and films; to sports; to celebrations and
festivals, both religious and non-religious; and to the creation of spaces, styles and
identities of disposition, both of individual and communities. These cultural practices
are enmeshed in the political, either overtly when it represents dominant ideologies or
expresses protest against this domination or covertly in various invisible forms and
representations of domination and resistance.
This culture is influenced by size, density, demographic and ethnic compositions, and
spatial organizations of urban settlements, all of which have undergone tremendous
transformations under an emerging democratic process and as citizenship has got
defined. As Indian cities become hybrid economies and societies, the linkages
between what is urban and rural and what is local, regional and global has become
ever more versatile and have defined and reorganised received culture in new ways.
These practices can be divided in terms of work time and leisure time, those that are
practised in private and public spaces, those related to the individual and the
community, and those that are elite and popular.
Leisure activities such as walking in parks or beaches, participation in religious and
cultural festivals, celebrations and sports, such as in wrestling and playing gulli
danda, attending plays and films, have defined urban culture for both elite and the
mass. Earlier film going was a mass activity. However now with the growth of
eSS Working Paper/Urban Studies
October 2006
24
multiplexes it has started becoming restricted to a certain class. Technological
changes have also made some public activities private. Films can now be watched at
homes through television sets or through vcds and dvds.
As cities have become divided into classes, the divisions of cultural practices have
occurred as these now cater to specific classes and ethnic communities and sometimes
to a specific gender. Associated with these distinctions are lifestyles that classes
embrace and create for themselves. For example, practices such as going to the
theatre, discos and pubs have come to be exclusively identified to the elite. These
practices are related to food, clothing and styles of living inside and within homes and
outside them. Additionally the body has now come to be colonised, as an object of
production, through the fashion and beauty industry, thereby redefining new
sexualities-both masculine and feminine.
Historically, those cultural activities that were restricted to the private space of the
family life, such as playing cards or celebrating religious festivals have now been
introduced as public activities. As a result of commercialization, sports such as cricket
or football have become part of the public domain. Even religious celebrations when
organized at a city level, as in the case of the ganapati festival, have become public
and thus have become a facet of popular culture. Paradoxically, some traditional
forms of cultural practices, such as tamasha of Maharahstra or jatra of Bengal and
Orissa, have found expressions in the city [Banerjee, 1989].
Popular culture in India is not restricted only to mass media and to the so called
traditional activities, such as festivals and other community celebrations. It also
involves the production, distribution (dabbawalas) and exchange of street food,
(bhelpuri, vada-pav and pav bhaji) the making and attiring of clothing and the creation
of living spaces, such as slums [Nandy 2001]. These are mediated by the way
citizenship is defined and appropriated [Nair, 2005] These may become at points of
time ways to stake alternate lifestyles and politics. At times these practices may also
become ways to create and affirm communal politics, as it happened in the case of
practicing maha aartis during the 1992 conflagration in Mumbai.
As a result of the liberalization policies adopted by the Indian state in the 1990s, a
new space of cultural economy has been organized to define anew cultural and lifestyles in cities of India. These places are also mediated through the diasporic
communities. One interesting example is Gurgaon, just outside Delhi. In Gurgaon as
in most metropolitan cities there are ‘designated’ spaces, sometimes gated, kept
exclusively oriented to consumerist culture. These are organized around spatial
structures such as malls, theme parks, tourist parks, multiplexes, celebrity events and
restaurants. Though these are public spaces these have soon been privatised to make it
restricted to the elite.
It is also possible to delineate certain distinctive cultural practices and forms that have
emerged within Indian cities that have given its populace an identity as a distinct
class, caste or ethnic group and also as citizens. For example, the Punjabi baroque
architecture (Bhatia, 1994) represents the aspirations of the displaced and now mobile
Punjabi migrants of Delhi, Dalit literature reflects the angst of being oppressed in a
modern city [Bhagwat 1995], the vishwakarma festival celebrates the identity of
eSS Working Paper/Urban Studies
October 2006
25
artisans, (Kumar in this volume) and while Bollywood films depict the nature of
urban culture that has grown in a city [Pendse 2002, see Mazumdar in this volume].
One of the major debates in urban sociology relates to the identity of the city. Does
the city produce a cosmopolitan culture and represent modernity? The history of
urbanism in India is nascent and it is difficult to generalise on this question. Some
cities in India such as Mumbai have represented and have been identified as a
cosmopolitan and global [Patel 2002], others have been seen as a villages grown into
cities and maintaining its original culture [Vidal et al, 2000] and yet others have
identified some cities as defining new metropolitan practices and cultures. (Nair,
2005). Many others are somewhere in between. Yet the city-space remains the node
where multiple identities and modernities emerge, are contested and refashioned in
context to the way citizenship has been defined and organised.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
In this introduction I have highlighted how the diversity that we see in urban life and
living is symptomatic of the nature of capitalism in India. Capitalist organisation has
not been able to incorporate and integrate individuals and communities into its fold
and stamp it with its rationalities. As a result of this unevenness, we see within the
‘urban’, many kinds of expressions of forms, institutions, and identities as actors both
individual and collective contest with each other to create and organise these in
context to the global, national, regional and local spatial dynamics.
The papers in this Reader engage with these positions from the vantage point of their
own perspectives and disciplinary questions. These papers are written by sociologists,
historians, geographers, economists, urban planners, cultural studies scholars and
litterateurs and exhibit the variety and complexity of the urban phenomenon in India.
The questions that they address do not necessary conflate with those that this
introduction suggests and yet, in myriad of ways they lead the reader to address these
in the way spelt out in this introduction. A dialogue with these questions is necessary
in framing the many answers that we need to debate and discuss, as we outline the
discipline of urban studies.
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