Ashima Sood

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Anant National University

New policy and legislative initiatives in India over the last decade, from the Special Economic Zones Act 2005 to subnational state-level counterparts, have encouraged processes of corporate urbanisation, by facilitating the development of ‘industrial townships’ largely by private actors. This emerging policy architecture places a range of municipa...

Focusing on the industrial area local authority (IALA), a governance regime widely applied in the south Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this paper examines pathways to illiberal governance within ostensibly liberal democratic contexts. The history of the IALA exemplifies the modes by which the movement towards representative governme...

How does data visibility affect vulnerable communities that face uncertainty over land tenure? Can data justice be realised in settings of acute resource injustice? These are the overarching questions that our case study interrogates by opening up the black box of the community in the volatile and fast-transforming peri-urban fringe of Hyderabad, I...

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...

The millennial turn saw a distinct efflorescence in scholarship on urban India. This essay introduces a Virtual Special Issue on urban studies in India that showcases a selection of articles from the journal’s archives. It traces the disciplinary, thematic and methodological shifts that have marked this millennial turn. On the one hand, the social...

Building upon the success of the first edition of Handbook on Local and Regional Development (Routledge 2011) a new editorial team seeks to advance the ideas of the first edition while reflecting on recent changes in the broader context of local and regional development and current advances of theory and practice. The global financial crash was fol...

How do we assess the entanglements between the fields of urban studies, urban practice and India's urban futures in the wake of 20 years of the "urban turn" in Indian social science and policy? Building on recent surveys of Indian urban scholarship, this essay argues that shaping sustainable and inclusive futures requires attention to the bases of...

Sadan Jha, Devnath Pathak, and Amiya Kumar Das (Eds), Neighbourhoods in Urban India: In Between Home and the City, Academic India, 2021, 336 pp., ₹969, ISBN 9390252636 (Hardcover).

Nearly 12 years after the publication of the first issue of the Review of Urban Affairs, the present issue offers an occasion for reflecting on the growth and direction of the scholarly agenda it set into motion. The selection of papers included here reveals a welcome turning towards questions of identity – caste, class, gender and more - and their...

City-building has been an enduring idiom of politics in India. Iconic capital cities such as Jaipur, Kolkata and Chandigarh, among others, have their origins in state initiatives, from precolonial times to the present. In contemporary India, the impetus behind new cities has been reworked by the prominence of private real estate actors. One compel...

This resource assesses the scale of rural to urban migration and its contribution to urban growth in India. It considers the major paradigms of rural to urban migration and highlights the salience of circular migration streams and forms of rural-urban circulation. Examining the connection between migration and the urban informal economy, it critica...

Social, cultural, economic and political transformations over the last 25 years or more have inspired a vast and burgeoning scholarship on Indian urbanization.

What defines a city’s borders? Are they determined by geography and landscape? Or by municipal limits? In the context of a company town like Jamshedpur, which represents the realization of a singular corporate vision, these questions find new resonances. How do we understand the contemporary city through the lens of the broader region it has engend...

The concept of “speculative urbanism” has over the space of only a few years informed a large and growing literature on the intersections of real estate capital flows and processes of urban planning and governance in cities of the Global South. Speculative urbanism can be said to embody urban governance as “investment strategy”; it represents the t...

How does data visibility affect vulnerable communities that face uncertainty over occupational rights? Or in other words, can data justice be realized in settings of acute resource injustice? These are the overarching questions that our case study interrogates by opening up the black box of the community in the volatile and fast-transforming contex...

If Gurgaon epitomizes the maladies of private sector-led urban development, could Jamshedpur provide their cure? Drawing inspiration from the case of Jamshedpur, commentators in recent years have increasingly posited the company town as a viable model for privatized provision of public goods and urban infrastructure. Moreover, over the last decade,...

In the years since liberalization, state power has been rescaled in India's polity and this is both a cause and consequence of greater inter-state competition for footloose capital. In this context, some state governments are designing special regulatory tools to attract and concentrate investments by easing ‘doing business’ for private investors a...

Starting with the concept and definition of spatial segregation in cities, this module provides an overview of the history and conceptual evolution of segregation in the United States context. It then provides an international perspective on approaches to understanding segregation. It then presents existing studies of patterns of residential segreg...

This module examines critically the city-nature dichotomy. It aims to provide an overview of the major conceptual frameworks that have been applied to understand linkages between the city and the environment. It traces the antecedents of the ideas underlying paradigms such as urban political ecology. Not least, it seeks to analyse the political eco...

This module aims to situate the significance, and the contemporary growth trajectories of the megacities of Bangalore and Hyderabad against their historic contexts. It grounds the major paradigms that have emerged to explain urban growth in Bangalore, such as occupancy urbanism and speculative urbanism, and traces the major thematics of the literat...

This module presents the economic theorizations and empirical foundations underlying city-centric growth strategies. It attempts to delineate the impacts of the increasing application of such growth strategies under the sway of neoliberal policy regimes. It traces the impact of city-centric growth strategies on urban governance processes and offers...

This essay aims to help readers develop an understanding of select urban planning paradigms in the Anglophone world, trace the influences and dominant frameworks guiding urban planning in contemporary India, and critically evaluate the contributions of planning paradigms to the present condition of Indian cities.

This module aims to provide an overview of the genesis and evolution of the informal sector. It considers alternative definitions and perspectives on the informal economy to grasp its size and dimensions. It attempts to understand the processes underlying informalisation, and place them in a broader historical context. Finally it traces the spatial...

The concept of " speculative urbanism " has over the space of only a few years informed a large and growing literature on the intersections of real estate capital flows and processes of urban planning and governance in cities of the global South. Speculative urbanism can be said to embody urban governance as " investment strategy " ; it represents...

If Gurgaon epitomizes the maladies of private sector-led urban development, could Jamshedpur provide their cure? Drawing inspiration from the case of Jamshedpur, commentators in recent years have increasingly posited the company town as a viable model for privatized provision of public goods and urban infrastructure. Moreover, over the last decade,...

Relationship-based contract enforcement is commonly thought to limit market expansion. In contrast, this paper illustrates how relationship-based contract governance accommodates new entrants into market exchange using a case study of the cycle-rickshaw rental market in a city in central India. Migrants face a higher penalty for default that introd...

This essay highlights alternative theorisations of informality, including Marxian notions of accumulation and need, and occupancy urbanisms. It also explores the applicability of ideas of splintering urbanism in explaining informality. Finally it examines ideas of informality as an idiom of planning and planned Illegalities in India.

Prepared for the "Urban Transformations" curriculum of the Sociology subject in EPG-Pathshala, this module highlights the link between transport and land use in Indian cities. It contextualizes issues of motorisation against data on trips undertaken. The module examines the political economy of transit policy, in the context of public transport opt...

Greenfield urban development can be seen as an enduring idiom of politics in India, with s tateinitiative from precolonial times to the present day responsible forest ablishi ng iconic capitalcities such as Jaipur, Kolkata, or Chandigarh. However, a renewed interest in building new cities, variously labelled "smart," "green" or "integrated," is now...

Greenfield urban development can be seen as an enduring idiom of politics in India, with state initiative from precolonial times to the present day responsible for establishing iconic capital cities such as Jaipur, Kolkata, or Chandigarh. However, a renewed interest in building new cities, variously labelled "smart," "green" or "integrated," is now...

Increasing numbers of rural workers in India engage in commuting as well as temporary and seasonal forms of migration to cities. Yet, the implications of such large-scale temporary worker movements for urban governance have received little attention. Drawing on a field study of the cycle rickshaw rental market in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, this chapte...

Are informal services greener than their formal or organised counterparts? Beyond their employment potential, non-motorised transport, street vending and waste sorting or rag picking use fewer resources and energy; they also tend to reuse and recycle materials. These possible benefits have been little recognised and rarely calculated. In India, sup...

A February 2010 judgment of the Delhi High Court called into question several assumptions underlying policy thinking on the cycle rickshaw sector. Examining these assumptions in the light of new research and advocacy efforts, this article considers the prospect of policy and regulatory reform. With the cycle rickshaw sector as a case study, it argu...

A large theoretical and empirical literature suggests that the salience of network-based ties in contract enforcement under relation-based governance systems limits market expansion. This paper illustrates the incorporation of new agents into market exchange under conditions of informal contract governance using a case study of the cycle-rickshaw r...