Urban India: Historical Processes and Contemporary Experience

About

Scholars, and governments, across Asia have begun to recognize the massive urbanization underway all over the region. At a recent symposium (Ann Arbor, October 2009) on urbanization in China organizers noted that in two decades more Chinese people would be found living in cities than in the countryside. Both China, and India, the two most populous countries in the world, have recognized urbanization as crucial to their economic development and have planned for unprecedented urban expansion. India expects to have 26 cities with population over 1 million by 2030, easily surpassing the ten US cities of that size. This projected spurt in urbanization and growth of cities, especially large metropolitan centers in India, comes in the wake of high rates of GDP growth in India, since the early1990s, and especially in the last decade. So, while urban population, as a proportion of total population, in India increased gradually, but significantly, from 10.87 percent in 1901 to 27.78 percent in 2001, it has since topped 30 percent of the total population in the last ten years, and is expected to grow faster in coming decades.

Urbanization in India is not, however, merely a question of sheer numbers. Urban India is being transformed by varied processes, not all of which are directly connected to the rapid increase in urban residents. More and more people pass through cities or reside in them temporarily. Others imagine them, yearn to remove to them, but never get there. And many changes to the cities come from the dramatic increases in wealth and disposable incomes of long-time residents become newly prosperous as industrial and occupational organization take new forms. As Indian cities take their place (or seek inclusion) in the ranks of world cities, planners and residents argue for their transformation in the image of idealized metropolises.

The Indian sub-continent is home to several historic cities. Some like Delhi have been the seat of various polities and empires for more than a thousand years. Others, like Chennai and Kolkata, are products of colonial rule that favored burgeoning cosmopolitan port cities that had once served to link European commerce to South Asian hinterlands across the Indian Ocean. Since 1950, independent India has built, in service of state-led economic development, several new cities in the heart of the country, notably steel cities like Bhilai and Rourkela, and other manufacturing centers like Bhopal and Baroda, or Jalandhar and Kanpur. Older cities, like Ahmedabad, Varanasi, Hyderabad, and Jaipur also grew, some as state capitals, others as home to new industries. It is important, therefore, to situate the study of contemporary urbanization in India in the modern historical processes of the growth of cities, even while recognizing what is distinctive and new about the contemporary experience.

This conference will assess new scholarly trends in urban studies, and focus on pressing urban problems requiring scholarly and practical engagement. We ask if contemporary urbanization is fundamentally different from the recent past (the last century), and what that shift implies for scholarship and planning.