2Associate Professor, Anant National University, Ahmedabad, Email: as292@cornell.edu
1Keynote Address presented on the theme ‘Urbanisation and Development’ at the 22nd Annual IASSI Conference held at Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad during 2-4 November 2023.
How do we assess the entanglements between the fields of urban studies, urban practice and India’s urban futures in the wake of 20 years of the “urban turn” in Indian social science and policy? Building on recent surveys of Indian urban scholarship, this essay argues that shaping sustainable and inclusive futures requires attention to the bases of knowledge production in urban India. Two gaps mediate this entanglement – the disjuncture between urban planning and policy and urban scholarship and the literature’s uneven empirical geographies and locations. Questions of method and positionality lie at the heart of discipline and interdisciplinarity in Indian urban studies. On the one hand, the effects of social identity – caste, class and gender – on urban outcomes can no longer be ghettoised. Instead, they are best understood as the axes along which scholarship and planning regimes orient themselves. Second, work on subaltern urbanisation has brought to light the vitality of smaller urban settlements. Yet, when it comes to the million-plus urban centres outside the top metropolises, there appears to be a “missing middle”- to use Lemanski and Tawa Lama-Rewal’s coinage - in the field’s knowledge base. More diverse urban studies can inform more efficacious urban planning practices and variegated urban imaginaries.
Urban studies, Urban planning, Research capacity, Urban knowledge production, Bibliographics
