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Introduction: Reclaiming Small Towns

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Subaltern Urbanisation in India

Part of the book series: Exploring Urban Change in South Asia ((EUCS))

Abstract

The introduction to this edited volume seeks to decenter and enlarge our conception of urbanisation, shifting the perspective from large agglomerations to smaller urban settlements in the specific case of India, and to discuss the main results produced by the collective research team that participated in the Subaltern Urbanization Research project. This chapter defines the notion of subaltern urbanisation and argues in favour of reclaiming research on small towns. The recent increase in interest in urban studies in the global south, and particularly in South Asia, around the dynamics of urban change mainly concerns the large agglomerations, which are perceived as the main sites of economic development and social and demographic changes. This research project and the resulting edited volume positions itself vis-à-vis a vision of planetary urbanisation reduced to metropolitanisation and competition between global cities. It aims at challenging the usual approach which tends to consider the urban world only through the prism of very large cities. It defends a methodology based on the articulation of scales and the need to develop a multidisciplinary dialogue between large-scale analysis of urbanisation and in-depth scrutiny of localised cases. The introduction presents the main results relating to the understanding of the expanding world of ordinary towns: their spatial distribution and their dynamics (demographic and economic) (part I), their socio-economic embeddedness, in particular the entrenched as well as fluid linkages between land, society and people (part II), the type of public policies and governance that characterise these small towns and their impact on the quality of life (part III) and the manner in which innovation, production and circulation of people actually shape their economic trajectories (part IV).

We are grateful to all the researchers who were part of the SUBURBIN team. They embarked with us on a long collective journey that enabled us to write this introductory piece. We would also like to thank Loraine Kennedy and Barbara Harriss-White for their reading of an earlier draft of this introduction and the anonymous reviewer who provided some insightful comments on the overall manuscript. We are also grateful for the careful editing of the manuscript by Renuka George. Over the course of this project we organised a series of workshops, one of them jointly with the urban studies team at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences that contributed to opening up debates on this work. Finally, this research project received the unwavering support from the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (New Delhi) and the French Institute of Pondicherry where we were deputed during the course of this research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For more details, refer to the literature review in Raman et al. (2015).

  2. 2.

    The canonical hierarchical urban model supposes a pyramidal distribution of power and competences mirroring the city-size distribution; it leaves limited capabilities and agency to small towns that are considered, rather, as dependent on the redistribution of banal activities from larger cities. Large cities concentrate the most innovative enterprises.

  3. 3.

    For a detailed discussion, refer to the literature review of this project, pp. 29–34 in Raman et al. (2015).

  4. 4.

    For a detailed discussion on this debate, refer to the literature review of this project, pp. 29–34, in Raman et al. (2015, pp. 85–89).

  5. 5.

    See the project website: www.suburbin.hypotheses.org.

  6. 6.

    The project was coordinated by the French Institute of Pondicherry and the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities in New Delhi and involved the following partners: The Centre for Policy Research (New Delhi); the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi); the School of Planning and Architecture (New Delhi); the Department of Geography of Burdwan University (West Bengal); the School of Social Sciences (Indian Institute of Technology of Madras); and the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research in Mumbai.

  7. 7.

    Here, small towns are all agglomerations of between 10,000 and 100,000 inhabitants in 2011.

  8. 8.

    For instance, the area under the Bangalore Municipal Corporation almost doubled between 2001 and 2011.

  9. 9.

    Mandi towns have played a historical role in the shaping of the system of cities (see Haynes 1999) and a large number of small towns can still be considered “mandi towns”. This, for instance, is the case of Hodal, studied here but from a governance point of view. Krishnamurthy (2012) has recently studied the role of Haldia as a mandi town. The case of Gopalpur in West Bengal studied by Mukhopadhyay and Zérah (2015) is the story of a small Census town whose growth is linked to agro-processing activities.

  10. 10.

    See also Zérah (2013) on the entrepreneurialism in the villages of the NCR and the automobile corridor.

  11. 11.

    McDuie Ra’s work on Imphal (2016), a larger city, also highlights the role of secondary education and health institutions as drivers for growth.

  12. 12.

    For a detailed analysis of linkages between connectivity and regional integration, see the case of Bhopal (Gupta 2012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CESSMA, Institute of Research for Development, Paris, France

    Marie-Hélène Zérah

  2. Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India

    Marie-Hélène Zérah

  3. Géographie-cités, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)—University Paris 1—Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France

    Eric Denis

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  1. Marie-Hélène Zérah
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  2. Eric Denis
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Correspondence to Marie-Hélène Zérah .

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  1. Géographie-cités Lab, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) Géographie-cités Lab, Paris, Paris, France

    Eric Denis

  2. Centre for Social Sciences Studies on Africa, America and Asia (CESSMA, Paris), French Institute of Research for Sustainable Development (IRD), Paris, France., Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India

    Marie-Hélène Zérah

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Zérah, MH., Denis, E. (2017). Introduction: Reclaiming Small Towns. In: Denis, E., Zérah, MH. (eds) Subaltern Urbanisation in India. Exploring Urban Change in South Asia. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3616-0_1

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