SUBaltern URbanisation in INdia – SUBURBIN

The SUBURBIN project (Subaltern Urbanization in India) acknowledges an ongoing process of urban shift from rural to urban population, but questions both its scholarly representation and measurement. It seeks to counter a vision of urbanization as reduced to a process of agglomeration and a competition between global cities.

The hypothesis here is that there exists a diversity of trajectories of urbanization, which the project seeks to understand and describe in the context of India with a focus on its’ small towns. It aims at bringing these marginal small agglomerations, whether statutorily urban or not, to the forefront of the analysis of urbanization dynamics. To do so, the project focuses on human settlements ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 inhabitants and adopts a definition of ‘urban’ based on a uniform and physical definition resulting from the e-Geopolis program (ANR Methods and Corpus). The choice of India as the focus of study is justified for several reasons. One urban inhabitant out of ten in the world is an Indian, despite a restrictive definition of urban settlement. The dynamics of urbanization in India are more complex than what is often presented: beyond the ongoing growth of megacities, a double process of slowing residential migration and an increase in the number of small towns coexist. Caught between a nascent and a commanding urbanization, small town growth in India is in itself an interesting object of research since the situation varies from one state to another. Its sub-continental dimension enables us to test the hypothesis of a diversity of urbanization at work. This could call into question some of the results demonstrated by the New Economic Geography and further contribute to ongoing debates on the diversity of development models.

The principal research questions are: (i) What are the characteristics of these small towns or "grey spaces”, which are both recipients and motors of economic change? (ii) What are their contemporary economic dynamics? (iii) As agricultural activity declines in these areas, how does land get used and how is land ownership transferred? What are the growing non-agricultural uses of land: industry, services, residential development, SEZs? How are these changes spatially located? (iv) How is the distribution of public goods in emerging towns shaped? What are the main explanatory factors behind such existing distribution: power relationships between socio-economic agents, role of public policies, proximity of the city to large urban centres and/or modes of governance? In answering these questions, we will attempt to point out the difference and continuity between rural and the urban realities in a functional rather than an administrative manner. In these small towns, the objective is to understand the main dynamics at stake and their combinations: are they in a dependency relationship with large agglomerations; are they a locus of endogenous growth where specific forms of innovations can emerge or are they relegated spaces? To answer these questions, the project proposes to combine quantitative and qualitative analyses. The quantitative dimension will enrich a geo-localized and rich database comprised of cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants into which existing statistical data will be fed. The methodology used to analyze this is based on a dialogue between geographers and economists with a focus on the issues of small town growth, location, in relationship to other settlements, as well as differences in urban types and outcomes contribution to growth and location, distribution of the hierarchy of settlements as well as differences in outcomes and types across regions. The qualitative dimension is based on fieldwork observation, using detailed case studies regarding access and distribution of land, socio-spatial distribution of basic services, and economic activities.