Environment and Urbanization Asia Indian Cities Book Review: Annapurna Shaw (original) (raw)
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BOOK REVIEW Annapurna Shaw . Indian Cities (Oxford University Press), 2012.
The cities in India have entered a period of growth, reflecting the country's general population increase and rising employment in secondary and tertiary activities. Today India probably ranks fifth among the nations of the world in number of urban inhabitants. With around 7000 towns in its census records India is facing an upheaval of unplanned urbanization and distorted urbanism.
The concept of urban and the phenomenon of urbanization are somewhat new to the human populations. In fact compared to the entire history of human evolution, it has only been fairly recently that people have begun to live in relatively dense urban agglomerations. Nonetheless, the speed at which societies have become urbanized is striking, and the extent to which the societies of today are urbanized and the size of present day agglomerates is unprecedented. Kingsley in his book notes that before 1850, no society could be described as being fundamentally urban in nature (kingsley, 1959). Today, all industrial nations, and many of the less developed countries, could be described as being urban societies. Moreover, the world is overall becoming more and more urban as time goes by as those living in less developed societies move toward the urban living patterns that have been common in some advanced societies for some time. Despite this rapid transformation of societies from primarily rural to primarily urban, and the importance of this evolution for the study of human population, the notion of urban remains fleeting, changing from time to time, differing across political boundaries, and being modified depending upon the purpose that the definition of the urban world serves. At times, the urban population are defined in terms of administrative boundaries, at times in terms of functional boundaries, and at times they are defines in terms of ecological factors such as density and population size. Although many of today’s social problems involves living in very large urban agglomerates, these divergences in defining the notion of urban has made It difficult to conduct comparative studies on urban population across time and across borders. In a sense, then, the difficulties encountered in defining urban create barriers to completely understand the phenomenon and finding solutions to a host of social problems that involve the urban population.
The Urban Form of Indian Cities and Outline of Indian Urbanization: A Multidisciplinary Approach
Urban form is the study of human immigration and the process of their creation and revolution. The objective of the study is to figure out the economic structure and complexion of metropolitan cities of India by analyzing the arrangement pattern of its constituent parts and the progression of its development. Study begins with the analysis of substantial populace at diverse scales in addition to patterns of migration, property use, density, possession and livelihood in Indian cities. The study tries to explore the roots of divergence in urban form through assessment with socioeconomic growth indicators and ancient forms in many Indian cities. The study is expected to discover the various challenges in urban form and urbanization growth of Indian cities.
Development as Urban Imaginary: Post-colonial Planning and Heteroglossic Cities of India
Contemporary India's tryst with development continues to revolve around cities, and the latter remain the locus of India's development narrative. But instead of seeing the city as already constituted or as a backdrop for economic activities, the present article proposes to implicate the city as a producer and product of social relations as well as a site of resistance and conformity. While doing so, it moves away from conventional modernist paradigms of imagining the city as the highest rung of development geography or the Marxist/subaltern studies formula of reading the city as a space of unredeemable inequality leading to the insurgency of the marginalised. What is proposed here is that the idea of city is emergent which expresses itself neither through its official representations nor through the radicalism of dissent but through multiple unstructured articulations of everyday life as well as the contingency of power and resistance. This is corroborated by drawing upon the experience of Thyagaraya Nagar (T. Nagar) which provides a representative Indian urban experience and where social and political relations spill out of institutional planning templates.
Urbanization and urbanism: In the context of environment and culture of India
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Urbanization is a process while urbanism is the attitudes of people. India is moving towards more and more urbanization but is it moving towards more and more urbanism? India, with a rich cultural heritage and unique resource potentiality, is passing through a transition phase where the ultimate goal is to achieve urbanism, i.e., a particular way of life. Demographic changes leading to the increase in number of million cities is responsible for significant changes in socio-cultural setup of the country. All such changes affect on the environment, both- rural and urban. The paper shows how continuous urbanization has changed the cultural values and the regional environment of the country.
Urbanisation in India: Some Critical Issues
India is expected to undergo a sharp degree of change in the extent of urbanisation. Current surveys put the urban population of the country at around 32%, and history the world over has shown that a 30% urban population is a threshold beyond which the rate of urbanisation increases drastically. Several projections, including some from the government, expect India's urban population to cross the 50% milestone before 2060. In absolute numbers, this means the country will have about 400 million new urban citizens over the next forty-odd years. The future of India depends on how urbanisation is handled, and this troubling given that there is no widespread imagination of the city: the authenticity of culture is located in the village, the city is seen purely as a technical entity, and structures of local urban governance are extremely weak. The paper seeks to summarise some of the critical issues that India must face.