India’s Emergent Urban Formations

This article reports on a research project on urbanizing India with a bearing on core theoretical and methodological debates in urban studies. These debates refer to the conceptualization and “measurement” of what is urban, the relationship between urbanization and economic development, and the possibilities of comparative urbanism. Our empirical focus is not on India’s major cities but on the rural–urban transition where geographically dispersed urban formations are taking shape. The analysis is based on detailed census and other government data in combination with observations from two extended periods of fieldwork in northeastern India. We outline evidence of substantial urban growth at the rural–urban transition, growth that has thus far largely gone unnoticed because of deficient measurement and limited conceptualizations of what constitutes the urban. We present our ideas and hypotheses on these emergent urban formations, along with a methodology that combines observations “from above” and “from below.” This research at the proverbial edges of the discipline, we argue, is highly relevant to the theoretical debates that are at its core.