The field of global urban studies has witnessed a “peripheral” turn since the 1990s, first led by the Los Angeles School of urban geographers, with a more diverse group of urban scholars who study the global South following. Challenging the city-centric view, as exemplified by the Chicago School’s concentric model of urban growth, these scholars train their lens on urban peripheries, such as suburbs, small towns, and the sprawling hinterlands outside metropolitan regions. This essay discusses what can be gained from shifting the analytical lens from the city center to the periphery, and from Western cities to cities in the global South. Drawing upon the new scholarship on urban peripheries in India, it also identifies three major avenues for further investigation—the comparative method, center-periphery relations, and ways of life.
{"title":"The Peripheral Turn in Global Urban Studies: Theory, Evidence, Sites","authors":"Xuefei Ren","doi":"10.4000/SAMAJ.7413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/SAMAJ.7413","url":null,"abstract":"The field of global urban studies has witnessed a “peripheral” turn since the 1990s, first led by the Los Angeles School of urban geographers, with a more diverse group of urban scholars who study the global South following. Challenging the city-centric view, as exemplified by the Chicago School’s concentric model of urban growth, these scholars train their lens on urban peripheries, such as suburbs, small towns, and the sprawling hinterlands outside metropolitan regions. This essay discusses what can be gained from shifting the analytical lens from the city center to the periphery, and from Western cities to cities in the global South. Drawing upon the new scholarship on urban peripheries in India, it also identifies three major avenues for further investigation—the comparative method, center-periphery relations, and ways of life.","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43489971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What is urban about the peri-urban? This paper explores the speculative frontier of volatile real estate investments and exceptional and transitional forms of local government that characterize this peri-urban terrain. By definition lying outside the municipal norm of the metropolitan core, the peri-urban frontier that is outlined in this analysis through a novel database of large-scale investments in residential and commercial capacity across India represents an arena where the statutory definition of the urban, i.e., elected municipal governance, is politically contested. Drawing on case studies of Greater Hyderabad and Noida in the Delhi National Capital Region, this paper traces the divergent modalities of peri-urban government. In Greater Hyderabad, the trajectory leads to institutional fragmentation. In Noida, it results in the concentration of powers in non-representative agencies. In either scenario, I argue that the speculative frontier remains hostile to claim-making by poor groups through the channels of occupancy, even as it empowers propertied classes.
{"title":"The Speculative Frontier: Real Estate, Governance and Occupancy on the Metropolitan Periphery","authors":"A. Sood","doi":"10.4000/SAMAJ.7204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/SAMAJ.7204","url":null,"abstract":"What is urban about the peri-urban? This paper explores the speculative frontier of volatile real estate investments and exceptional and transitional forms of local government that characterize this peri-urban terrain. By definition lying outside the municipal norm of the metropolitan core, the peri-urban frontier that is outlined in this analysis through a novel database of large-scale investments in residential and commercial capacity across India represents an arena where the statutory definition of the urban, i.e., elected municipal governance, is politically contested. Drawing on case studies of Greater Hyderabad and Noida in the Delhi National Capital Region, this paper traces the divergent modalities of peri-urban government. In Greater Hyderabad, the trajectory leads to institutional fragmentation. In Noida, it results in the concentration of powers in non-representative agencies. In either scenario, I argue that the speculative frontier remains hostile to claim-making by poor groups through the channels of occupancy, even as it empowers propertied classes.","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47663112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Building on recent literature that explores how the social logics of older agrarian formations are refracted in processes of urbanization, the paper foregrounds the significance of caste in rapidly changing peri-urban spaces. Drawing on extended fieldwork in several villages on the outskirts of Bengaluru, it shows how the twin scaffoldings of agrarian society—caste and land—are reconfigured as the values of land change in this zone of transition. Caste identity not only structures who can participate in, or prosper from, the transformation of agrarian land into urban real estate—it is also refashioned and deployed in new ways, especially through the politics of land. This study demonstrates why caste should be understood as a social structure of accumulation, whose specific modes of operation are defined by regionally rooted histories of development and memories of oppression and struggle.
{"title":"Caste at the City’s Edge: Land Struggles in Peri-urban Bengaluru","authors":"C. Upadhya, S. Rathod","doi":"10.4000/SAMAJ.7134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/SAMAJ.7134","url":null,"abstract":"Building on recent literature that explores how the social logics of older agrarian formations are refracted in processes of urbanization, the paper foregrounds the significance of caste in rapidly changing peri-urban spaces. Drawing on extended fieldwork in several villages on the outskirts of Bengaluru, it shows how the twin scaffoldings of agrarian society—caste and land—are reconfigured as the values of land change in this zone of transition. Caste identity not only structures who can participate in, or prosper from, the transformation of agrarian land into urban real estate—it is also refashioned and deployed in new ways, especially through the politics of land. This study demonstrates why caste should be understood as a social structure of accumulation, whose specific modes of operation are defined by regionally rooted histories of development and memories of oppression and struggle.","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44950538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The paper proposes a reading of the urban periphery from a labor-centered perspective, according to which its relational geography is indexed to the mobility of marginalized migrant workers and labor processes. Specifically, it attempts to rethink the urban periphery from the vantage point of peri-urban brick kilns and brick kiln workers. The paper draws parallels between the displacement of brick kilns to the peri-urban and the precarious migration of brick kiln workers by highlighting the tenuous tie between brick kiln workers and the urban space embedded in both. The paper first outlines the historical process of the outward displacement of brick kilns from Delhi to peri-urban villages in Haryana as a result of various pieces of legislation, judicial rulings and planning discourses. It then turns to contemporary forms of circulation between the kilns and the core city. Drawing from fieldwork data generated out of kiln workers’ life histories, it explores the various factors conditioning mobility and the reasons why workers circulate between the brick kilns and different urban occupations at different moments in their lives. The paper argues that exclusionary urbanization processes, in tandem with migrants’ life cycle choices, produce migrant workers as peripheral subjects while they contribute to the production of the urban periphery.
{"title":"The Making of Urban Peripheries and Peripheral Labor: Brick Kilns and Circular Migration in and beyond Greater Delhi","authors":"Pratik Mishra","doi":"10.4000/SAMAJ.7276","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/SAMAJ.7276","url":null,"abstract":"The paper proposes a reading of the urban periphery from a labor-centered perspective, according to which its relational geography is indexed to the mobility of marginalized migrant workers and labor processes. Specifically, it attempts to rethink the urban periphery from the vantage point of peri-urban brick kilns and brick kiln workers. The paper draws parallels between the displacement of brick kilns to the peri-urban and the precarious migration of brick kiln workers by highlighting the tenuous tie between brick kiln workers and the urban space embedded in both. The paper first outlines the historical process of the outward displacement of brick kilns from Delhi to peri-urban villages in Haryana as a result of various pieces of legislation, judicial rulings and planning discourses. It then turns to contemporary forms of circulation between the kilns and the core city. Drawing from fieldwork data generated out of kiln workers’ life histories, it explores the various factors conditioning mobility and the reasons why workers circulate between the brick kilns and different urban occupations at different moments in their lives. The paper argues that exclusionary urbanization processes, in tandem with migrants’ life cycle choices, produce migrant workers as peripheral subjects while they contribute to the production of the urban periphery.","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45835275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Introduction In her pathbreaking essay on modes of production of urban space in the global South, anthropologist Teresa Caldeira (2017) deploys the concept of “peripheral urbanization” to conjure “a problem-space that allows us to investigate logics of the production of the urban that differ from those of the North Atlantic … as a means of exploring processes of both socio-spatial formation and theory-making” (p. 4). Along similar lines, in this special issue, we invoke the concept of the per...
{"title":"The Co-production of Space, Politics and Subjectivities in India’s Urban Peripheries","authors":"S. Gururani, Loraine Kennedy","doi":"10.4000/SAMAJ.7365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/SAMAJ.7365","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction In her pathbreaking essay on modes of production of urban space in the global South, anthropologist Teresa Caldeira (2017) deploys the concept of “peripheral urbanization” to conjure “a problem-space that allows us to investigate logics of the production of the urban that differ from those of the North Atlantic … as a means of exploring processes of both socio-spatial formation and theory-making” (p. 4). Along similar lines, in this special issue, we invoke the concept of the per...","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42957194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Conventionally, the city has been the dominant conceptual basis for understanding urban processes. The rural, on the other hand, is assumed to be external to the city, which is supposedly subsumed by the global forces of capitalist urbanization. Such a conceptualization underestimates the complex ways in which the rural, with its distinct agrarian dynamics of land, labor and capital, is significant in understanding the processes of urbanization that are anchored in geographies beyond the city. Using the framework of “agrarian urbanism” (Gururani 2019), this paper focuses on a small town, Patran, located in the Patiala district of Punjab and argues that contemporary processes of urbanization are deeply entrenched in the rural and its agrarian dynamics of land and caste. By focusing on agrarian changes that were driven by colonial policies of land rights and ownership, and state-led agrarian development strategies in post-independent India, this paper argues that instead of assimilating the rural, urbanization in predominantly agricultural contexts both mirrors and differs from the old forms of agrarian relations and leads to the coproduction of the rural, albeit in new ways.
{"title":"Seeing the Urban from the Agrarian: Emerging Forms of Agrarian Urbanization in India","authors":"Ankita Rathi","doi":"10.4000/SAMAJ.7306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/SAMAJ.7306","url":null,"abstract":"Conventionally, the city has been the dominant conceptual basis for understanding urban processes. The rural, on the other hand, is assumed to be external to the city, which is supposedly subsumed by the global forces of capitalist urbanization. Such a conceptualization underestimates the complex ways in which the rural, with its distinct agrarian dynamics of land, labor and capital, is significant in understanding the processes of urbanization that are anchored in geographies beyond the city. Using the framework of “agrarian urbanism” (Gururani 2019), this paper focuses on a small town, Patran, located in the Patiala district of Punjab and argues that contemporary processes of urbanization are deeply entrenched in the rural and its agrarian dynamics of land and caste. By focusing on agrarian changes that were driven by colonial policies of land rights and ownership, and state-led agrarian development strategies in post-independent India, this paper argues that instead of assimilating the rural, urbanization in predominantly agricultural contexts both mirrors and differs from the old forms of agrarian relations and leads to the coproduction of the rural, albeit in new ways.","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41276910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Satyendra More. The Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R.B. More","authors":"Sumeet Mhaskar, Prabodhan Pol","doi":"10.4000/samaj.7111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.7111","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42532408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sylvia Vatuk. Marriage and its Discontents: Women, Islam, and the Law in India","authors":"Parul Bhandari","doi":"10.4000/samaj.7028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.7028","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43709141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Harald Tambs-Lyche. Transactions and Hierarchy: Elements for a Theory of Caste","authors":"Raphael Rousseleau","doi":"10.4000/samaj.7041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.7041","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43928662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“What is new is the comprehensive nature of the political assault on academic institutions”—An Interview with Niraja Gopal Jayal","authors":"Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, N. G. Jayal","doi":"10.4000/samaj.6842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6842","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43620452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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