What and how can we learn from the ambitious urban development of post-Independence India and the socioeconomic processes it unleashes? The presentation will take as its starting point the recent publication of an edited volume, India’s Greenfield Urban Future (Orient Blackswan 2023). After briefly outlining the book’s core topic and contents, which showcase the work of fourteen contributors, the editors Ashima Sood and Loraine Kennedy then elaborate on the directions taken by their respective ‘greenfield’ urban research in recent years. Kennedy has focused on the metropolitan frontier, investigating various dimensions of urban transformation, both the drivers and their social-spatial impacts at different scales. Her current research in Chennai explores infrastructural and institutional fragmentation from the perspective of village panchayats on the urban frontier and the governance implications. Case material from the IT Corridor illustrates highly localized examples of uneven development, alongside contrasting patterns of engagement on the part of local communities. Sood draws from fieldwork in two eastern Indian industrial towns to examine the methodological challenges of researching greenfield urban-industrial development. Specialized forms of local governance and the forms of information governance they establish in these sites shape research access through the availability not only of secondary and documentary data but also engagements on the field. Paying attention to the risks and rewards for local actors brings to the fore the limits and promise of action research in knowledge production on the urban greenfield in India.
Speakers:
Loraine Kennedy is a CNRS research director based at the Center for South Asian and Himalayan Studies at the EHESS in Paris. Her research is situated at the intersection of political economy and urban studies. She is currently coordinating the ‘Urbanizing Chennai’ project with G. Venkatasubramanian at the French Institute of Pondicherry.
Ashima Sood is currently Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Urbanism and Cultural Economics at Anant National University, Ahmedabad. With funding from the Azim Premji University Foundation and Urban Studies Foundation, she has studied the politics of informality in a comparative case study framework across sites of urban and industrial development.
This is the hundred and sixty-four (164) in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi and Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on issues relating to the development of the city and try to address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society and politics. For further information, please contact: Stéphanie Tawa Lama of CSH at tawalama@ehess.fr, Mukta Naik at mukta@cprindia.org or Marie-Hélène Zerah at marie-helene.zerah@ird.fr
Loraine Kennedy is a CNRS research director based at the Center for South Asian and Himalayan Studies at the EHESS in Paris. Her research is situated at the intersection of political economy and urban studies. She is currently coordinating the ‘Urbanizing Chennai’ project with G. Venkatasubramanian at the French Institute of Pondicherry.
Ashima Sood is currently Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Urbanism and Cultural Economics at Anant National University, Ahmedabad. With funding from the Azim Premji University Foundation and Urban Studies Foundation, she has studied the politics of informality in a comparative case study framework across sites of urban and industrial development.
