Sujata Patel - Indias Contemporary Urban Conundrum

This book lays out the different and complex dimensions of urbanisation in India. It brings together contributors with expertise in fields as varied as demography, geography, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, architecture, planning and land use, environmental sciences, creative writing, filmmaking and grassroots activism to reflect on and examine Indias urban experience. It discusses various dimensions of city lifehow to define the urban; the conditions generating work, living and (in)security; the nature of contemporary cities; the dilemmas of creating and executing urban policy, planning and governance; and the issues concerning ecology and environment. The volume also articulates and evaluates the way Indian urbanism promotes and organises aspirations and utopias of the people, whilst simultaneously endorsing disparities, depravities and conflicts.

The volume includes interventions that shape contemporary debates. Comprehensive, accessible and topical, it will be useful to scholars and researchers of urban studies, urban sociology, development studies, public policy, economics, political studies, gender studies, city studies, planning and governance. It will also interest practitioners, think tanks and NGOs working on urban issues.

Sujata Patel is National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India. Earlier, she taught sociology at the Universities of Hyderabad and Pune and SNDT Womens University. Her work is influenced by Marxism, feminism, spatial studies and post-structuralism, and covers areas such as modernity and social theory, history of sociology/social sciences, city-formation, social movements, gender construction, reservation, quota politics and caste and class formations in India. She is also an interlocutor of teaching and learning practices, and has written on the challenges that organise its reconstitution within classrooms and university structures. She is the author of over sixty peer-reviewed papers/book chapters and the Series Editor of Oxford India Studies in Contemporary Society and Routledges Cities and the Urban Imperative . From 2010 to 2015, she edited the Sage Studies in International Sociology and Current Sociology Monographs . She is also the author of The Making of Industrial Relations (1997), editor of The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions (2010) and Doing Sociology in India, Genealogies, Locations and Practices (2011) and is co-editor of five books: Bombay: Metaphor of Modern India (1995), Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture (1995), Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition (2003), Thinking Social Science in India (2002) and Urban Studies (2006). She has been associated in various capacities with the International Sociological Association and has been its first Vice-President for National Associations (20026). She was the President of Indian Sociological Society from January 2016 to December 2017.

Omita Goyal is presently Chief Editor of the IIC Quarterly , the Journal of the India International Centre, New Delhi, India. She started her career in the voluntary sector with the Indian Social Institute, New Delhi, and then moved into academic publishing where she has spent over 27 years. She worked at Sage Publications India Private Limited for 20 years, leaving as General Manager, and thereafter was a consultant for the World Bank, UNICEF, UNDP, Voluntary Health Association of India, Centre for Womens Development Studies, WHO, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, and TERI. In 2005, she was invited by Taylor and Francis Group to start a social science programme under the social science and humanities imprint, Routledge, as Publishing Director. She has a masters degree in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics.

Edited by
Sujata Patel and Omita Goyal

First published 2019
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ISBN: 978-1-138-32680-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-02399-6 (ebk)

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AMITA BHIDE is currently Professor and Dean, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). Bhides recent work at the School of Habitat Studies has been on urban governance reforms, and housing and land issues with a focus on small and medium towns. Her recent publications include The Regularising State and Comparing Informalities .

CHRISTIANE BROSIUS is Professor, Visual and Media Anthropology, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University. She has published widely on visual popular culture and politics in India, on social spatialisation in Delhi, and on the field of art production in India and Nepal. She is co-founder of www.tasveerghar.net. Currently, Brosius works on contemporary art events and activism in Delhi and Kathmandu, on questions of transcultural comparison and on urban disaster management in the context of the Nepal earthquake in 2015.