REVIEW OF URBAN AFFAIRS

Urban Concerns: An Introduction

Anant Maringanti, Amita Baviskar, Karen Coelho, Vinay Gidwani

This is the first issue of a new biannual, the Review of Urban Affairs. The RUA will contain articles that look at different aspects of urbanisation in the context of the growing importance of urban society in India and elsewhere in the world. The review will be guided by an external advisory group which will suggest themes, commission articles and have them reviewed/revised before publication.

Anant Maringanti (amaringanti@gmail.com) is an independent scholar specialising in human geography, based in Hyderabad. Amita Baviskar (amita.baviskar@gmail.com) is at the Institute of Economic Growth, New Delhi. Karen Coelho (karen.coelho@gmail.com) is at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. Vinay Gidwani (vgidwani@geog.umn.edu) is with the Department of Geography at the University of Minnesota. The Review of Urban Affairs editorial advisory group consists of Anant Maringanti and Vinay Gidwani, both geographers, Karen Coelho, an anthropologist, Amita Baviskar, a sociologist, and our colleague Ashima Sood. We gratefully acknowledge their help in developing the thematics of the RUA , identifying potential contributors, and reviewing contributions. We would also like to thank the scholars who generously gave their time to review and comment on these contributions before publication. EPW
Economic & Political Weekly EPW july 30, 2011 vol xlvI no 31

urn the pages of any glossy publication on the challenges of development that India faces in the 21st century and there is a high probability that you will encounter mindboggling projections. Indias gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to multiply by ve times by 2030. Indias projected urban population in that year, 600 million, will be double the current population of the United States (US). Seventy per cent of net new job creation will be in cities; 7,400 kilometres of metrorail and subways will need to be created to address public transportation requirements (McKinsey Global Institute 2010). These gures suggest the rising signicance of urban growth as well as the challenges it raises for infrastructure and welfare. Cities have been edging towards the centre of research and policy in India since the mid-1970s when, in the wake of largescale rural to urban migration, substantial amounts of overseas development aid began to ow into urban poverty alleviation programmes; new urban development authorities were created; and legislation regarding urban land ceiling and regulation was enacted in many state capitals (Rao 1979). More recently, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, a agship programme of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government launched in 2005 with a budget of over $20 billion to be spent over seven years, aims to overhaul the entire machinery of urban governance, infrastructure and basic services. This focus on cities indicates that urbanisation is today viewed by both Indian and international policymakers not merely as an important area for developmental intervention, but also as the locus of Indias growth strategy. Over the last decade, conicts over urban space in India have grown in intensity as a range of urban inhabitants struggle to assert their rights to the city. The urban is now the strategic site both for aggressive reforms and restructuring as well as social movements contesting the reforms agenda. These developments in India have a unique character but they are also of a piece with transformations across the world. During the 1990s, even as debates over the supposed death of the nation state reached a crescendo in the international social scientic literature, the city emerged as a strong contender for analytical focus (Holston and Appadurai 1996). Researching the globalising city presents a host of challenges, not the least of which is the non-availability of suitable data. In the long post-1945 engagement of the social sciences with the nation state, much of the economic and demographic data available for researchers has been oriented towards categories and units of analysis that are bound up with that concept. In sharp contrast, the hyperglobalist imaginaries of the early 1990s bespoke the end of geography, an imaginary that was subsequently

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popularised in Thomas Friedmans 2005 bestseller, The World Is Flat. Cities were central to this imaginary as the locus of inter national nance and trade, new information technologies, globalised media, lifestyles and aesthetics. Now, a long few years later, with the world reeling from a series of concatenating economic and political crises and ecological calamities, commentators are far more circumspect. In the wake of scandals over real estate, forcible land acquisition and brutal slum evictions, the persistence of urban unemployment and low wages, abysmal living conditions and unprecedented pollution, it is apparent that the triumphal narrative of cities as global centres of prosperity is far removed from ground realities. Still, it is undeniable that the fast-paced transformations of the past two decades have radically altered the world and Asia in particular. Thus Indian cities today are battlegrounds, where the often conicting expectations and aspirations of the poor and the rich, the globally connected and the locally bound, clash every day, sometimes violently. Ideologies, utopias, and afliations of all stripes from neo-liberalism to Maoism, identity politics and environmentalism, Gandhian socialism to Hindu nationalism, and bizarre combinations thereof! nd space in this urban cauldron. Indeed, a case could be made that cities are the new frontier of concrete and ideological struggle in India, whether around access to drinking water and electricity, shelter, air and groundwater pollution, parks and public spaces, legal rulings and municipal ordinances, consumerism and corporate retailing, public transportation, trafc congestion, public health, urban sprawl, inux of migrants, the urban ecological footprint on rural hinterlands, or the surge of viral diseases such as dengue or Avian inuenza. Against this dizzying backdrop, institutions such as the National Institute of Urban Affairs and the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), in close consultation with faculty at elite institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), have claimed the mantle of producing the most authoritative, ofcial knowledge about Indian cities. For example, the NCAERs 1996 Asian Development Bank (ADB)-funded study on Indias infrastructure requirements devotes an entire volume to urban infrastructure. Much of this knowledge is oriented towards providing inputs for developing new urban management regimes, often from a public nance perspective. Yet it goes without saying that there is much more to cities than management and nance models can capture. There are cities within cities, invisible or simply inconvenient to the ofcial gaze. Cities are places of creativity and ferment, where hopes are lit and doused, where new political energies, communities, networks, and identities are born, where livelihoods and careers are built and squandered, and where naked violence intertwines daily with quotidian struggles for survival, and longings for emancipation. Contemporary urban research in India reects this diversity, vitality, and contradictions of life in cities. The distinctive characteristics of Indian cities jurisdictional boundaries that are subject to intense political struggles, the interpenetration of the rural and the urban (what urban researchers in East Asia and the Pacic Rim countries call desa kota and Indian sociologists used to refer to as the rurban), the commingling of

the institutional legacies of successive political regimes, the infolding of need and accumulation economies (Sanyal 2007), and the informality of state planning institutions as well as market structures are only some of the themes that scholars and activists have explored. It does not seem far-fetched to say that the emerging scope, fecundity, empirical depth, and theoretical nesse of contemporary scholarship on Indian cities are nothing short of remarkable, and has come a long distance from the early 1970s when A R Desai and his colleagues rst attempted to crystallise an urban sociological research agenda (Desai and Pillai 1970). While this recent eforescence is encouraging, barring the rare edited volume such as Urban Studies (Patel and Deb 2006), there have been few attempts to provide coherent state-of-the-art accounts of emerging issues and agendas, whether for academics or policymakers or simply the informed lay reader. The need to provide frequent update on the state of contemporary urban research in India can hardly be overstated. It is precisely to ll this gap that the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) is launching the Review of Urban Affairs (also the RUA), a biannual collection of articles on cities and urbanisation in India. The RUA will showcase the latest research and thinking on Indian cities. As a rule, it will strive to feature articles that attend, in lively prose and cogent style, to the historical and geographic specicities of Indias urban experience. EPW hopes this initiative will help nurture a new generation of urban scholars while beneting from the experience of senior scholars. Towards that end, the RUA will publish a mix of perspective and opinion articles alongside research articles. The RUA will be published twice a year, alternating between themed and unthemed collections showcasing contemporary research on Indian cities. Among forthcoming themed reviews are ones on the urban commons, the politics of urban infrastructure, urban ecologies, gender and the city, cities and transnational connectivities. The rst RUA unthemed collection is here. We hope that the readers will nd it useful. We welcome suggestions and contri butions from researchers.
References
Desai, A R and D S Pillai (1970): Slums and Urbanisation (Bombay: Popular Prakashan). Holston, James and Arjun Appadurai (1996): Cities and Citizenship, Public Culture, 8 (2): 187-204. McKinsey Global Institute (2010): Indias Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth, McKinsey & Company, India. Patel, Sujata and Kushal Deb (2006): Urban Studies (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Rao, M S A (1979): Sociology in the 1980s, Economic & Political Weekly, 14(44): 1810-15. Sanyal, K (2007): Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality, and Post-Colonial Capitalism (New Delhi: Routledge).

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