Chapter 1. Introduction: Reclaiming small towns Marie-Hélène Zérah & Eric Denis.- Part I Placing Small Towns: Dynamics of Urbanisation and Systems of cities.- Chapter 2. Unacknowledged Urbanisation: The New Census Towns in India Kanhu C. Pradhan.- Chapter 3. The substantial share of small towns in India's system of cities Elfie Swerts.- Chapter 4. The Income Ranking of Indian States and their Pattern of Urbanisation Basudeb Chaudhuri, Boishompayan Chatterjee, Mainak Mazumdar, Safayet Karim.- Chapter 5. Urbanisation in a decade of near jobless growth S. Chandrasekhar.- Chapter 6. Comparison of Peripheral Metropolitisation in Haryana and Rajasthan, India Milap Punia, Rajnish Kumar, Laxman Singh and Sandeep Kaushik.- Chapter 7. On global and Multiple Linkages in the making of an Ordinary place: Parangipettai-Porto Novo Eric Denis and Zarin Ahmed.- Part II Land, Society, Belonging.- Chapter 8. The multilayered urbanisation of the South Canara territory Solomon Benjamin.- Chapter 9. Practices of Territory in Small and Medium Cities of South India Bhuvaneswari Raman.- Chapter 10. Territorial legends: Politics of indigeneity, migration and urban citizenship in Pasighat Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma.- Chapter 11. Wealth, Mobility, Accretive Citizenship and Belonging: Why Everyone Comes to Kullu, and How they Remain Diya Mehra.- Chapter 12. Hindu temples and development of localities in Tamil Nadu (South India) Pierre-Yves Trouillet.- Part III. Small towns between rural and urban administration: Public Policies, Governance and Urban Services.- Chapter 13. The Other Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission: what does it mean for small town India? Sama Khan.- Chapter 14. Shedding light on social and economic changes in small towns through the prism of local governance: A case study of Haryana Marie-Hélène Zérah.- Chapter 15. Purdah and Politics: Women’s Participation in Local Governance Aditi Surie and Marie-Hélène Zérah.- Chapter 16. New Urban Territories in West Bengal: Transition, Transformation and Governance Gopa Samanta.- Chapter 17. Does administrative status matter for small towns in India? Partha Mukhopadhyay.- Part IV Producing and Innovating in non-metropolitan contexts.- Chapter 18. Development on the urban fringe: the prosperity of Kartarpur, a small town-cluster in Punjab Rémi de Bercegol and Shankare Gowda.- Chapter 19. From Ox-Carts to Borewell rigs: Maintenance, Manufacture and Innovation in Tiruchengode Yann Philippe Tastevin.- Chapter 20. Globalisation, Productive Spaces and Small Town Transformation: The case of Machlipatnam and Pedana in Coastal Andra Pradesh N. Sridharan.- Chapter 21. Mapping small towns’ productive and employment configurations Elfie Swerts and Eric Denis.- Chapter 22. Commuting Workers and the Integration of the Rural-Urban Economy Ajay Sharma.- Chapter 23. Non-Timber Forest Products and Small Town Economies Manoj Nadkarni.
Marie-Hélène Zérah is Research Fellow, CESSMA, Institute of Research for Development, Paris and she is a Senior Researcher with the Institute of Research for Development (Paris) seconded to the Centre of Policy Research (New Delhi). From 2009 to 2013, she headed the urban dynamics research team at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi where she led the SUBURBIN research project with Eric Denis. Previous to this interest on small towns she has worked in the area of urban infrastructure, urban governance and urban democracy in Indian cities. She has published extensively on these topics in international journals and edited volumes and in her book on Water: Unreliable Supply in Delhi (2000, Manohar Publishers and 1999, Economica for its French version). She has co-edited a volume published by the UNESCO on the Right to the City in India (2011, with Dupont and Tawa Lama-Rewal). She is part of Geoforum’s editorial board and is Series Editor of the Springer collection: Exploring Urban Change in South Asia. She has also been involved in projects and consultancies for a number of organisations, including the European Union, the Water and Sanitation Programme and the Suez group.
Eric Denis, Senior Research Fellow from French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), he is currently based at the Géographie-cités Lab., Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne. He holds a Ph.D. in urban and economic geography from the University of Caen in France (1993) and a Habilitation from the Sorbonne (2014). After ten years posted in Cairo (Egypt), he has been, from 2009 to 2013 in charge of the social sciences department at the Institut Français de Pondichéry (India) where he led a research project on India's small cities and development beyond the metropolis (SUBURBIN, Subaltern Urbanisation in India www.suburbin.hypotheses.org) with Marie-Hélène Zérah. He is the author of about fifty papers and books on social geography and urban studies and the editor of several volumes, including Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East (2012, AUC Press, with Ababsa & Dupret), Villes et urbanisation des provinces égyptiennes (2007) and the Atlas of Cairo (2000). He has beeninvolved in several applied research programmes on urban questions, land access and security of tenure. He contributed to the e-Geopolis programme measuring world urbanisation, supported by the Agence Française de Développement and the World Bank.
This volume decentres the view of urbanisation in India from large agglomerations towards smaller urban settlements. It presents the outcomes of original research conducted over three years on subaltern processes of urbanization. The volume is organised in four sections. A first one deals with urbanisation dynamics and systems of cities with chapters on the new census towns, demographic and economic trajectories of cities and employment transformation. The interrelations of land transformation, social and cultural changes form the topic of the “land, society, belonging” section based on ethnographic work in various parts of India (Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu). A third section focuses on public policies, governance and urban services with a set of macro-analysis based papers and specific case studies. Understanding the nature of production and innovation in non-metropolitan contexts closes this volume. Finally, though focused on India, this research raises larger questions with regard to the study of urbanisation and development worldwide.