While the study of urbanization has been more focused on metropolitan cities, small towns have been a part of urbanization debates for several decades, and continue to remain so. Earlier scholars looked at small towns as growth centres in a regional context. The recent scholarship focuses on a geographically dispersed urban transformation unleashed by the new demographic and economic realities of a globalised era.

The presentation describes how the idea of small towns has changed over the past four decades. Earlier small towns were often perceived to be far from the metropolis with little growth potential, or in a state of stagnancy. Now they are seen as vibrant hubs of trade and industrial production providing employment and a wide range of goods and services to their local population. The urban policy perspective has also changed from supporting the growth of small towns merely as a means of checking migration to improving infrastructure and governance to boost the urban transformation within small towns.

This presentation is based on a longitudinal study being conducted at CPR. The aim of the study is to understand the changing growth dynamics and regional inter-dependence of Dhampur within the context of the current theoretical and policy debates on the role of small towns in employment generation, poverty reduction, and rural-regional transformation in India.

Dr. Pushpa Pathak is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. She has extensive experience of working in the field of Urban Development in India and in other developing and post-conflict countries. She has held senior positions at premier institutions like the National Institute of Urban Affairs, World Bank Water and Sanitation Program – South Asia, UN-HABITAT Afghanistan, and School of Planning and Architecture. As a Senior Urban Advisor, she was engaged in post-conflict urban reconstruction and development in Afghanistan. Dr. Pathak’s broad area of professional interest is promotion of inclusive and sustainable urban development. She has published in reputed journals and in edited volumes. Dr. Pathak has a Master’s Degree in Geography from Kanpur University, and Ph. D. degree in Regional Development from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She did her postgraduate research at Banaras Hindu University, Cambridge University, UK and has been a Ford Fellow at the Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.