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This research paper explores the significance of historic urban landscapes (HUL) in the context of Indian heritage management policies. It investigates the challenges faced in preserving and managing historic urban areas and provides recommendations to enhance the integration of HUL approaches within the existing policy framework. The study draws upon a comprehensive review of scholarly articles, reports, and policy documents related to heritage management in India. The findings emphasise the need for a holistic and inclusive approach that recognises the multifaceted nature of urban heritage and fosters sustainable development while preserving historical significance. The paper offers practical recommendations for policymakers and urban planners to incorporate HUL principles into Indian heritage management policies effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from a survey of public-sector urban planners in India. The survey attempts to gauge planners' opinions on the importance of planning values in everyday decisions and the degree to which these values are delivered in practice. In-depth interviews were used to validate the survey results and investigate themes further. The study presents a nuanced and contextualized analysis of the attitudes and mindsets of planners. It is expected that the study will initiate a discourse on planning values in India and encourage planners to confront the full implications of their decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coastal erosion is a growing problem worldwide and seriously threatens coastal infrastructure ecosystems and communities, particularly in areas where urban development has encroached on natural shorelines. Salty urbanism, an approach to urban design that incorporates natural features and works in harmony with coastal environments, offers a promising solution to this problem. This review explores strategies for coastal erosion reduction, particularly emphasizing community participation within the context of salty urbanism. By investigating the advantages of incorporating salty urbanism and community engagement in coastal management through a literature study, this paper explores a case study-Paradeep, a coastal city in India. The aim is to comprehend how salty urbanism principles have been assimilated into coastal erosion initiatives in Paradeep and to identify potential opportunities for further integration to maximize benefits. The results emphasize the importance of integrating salty urbanism and community participation into coastal erosion management strategies, especially in coastal areas where these principles are either lacking or only minimally incorporated, often without a clear recognition of the term "salty urbanism" itself. Utilizing a mixed-methods research approach, the study integrates primary data from case studies and interviews, along with inferences from literature studies to gain valuable insights from coastal community residents and stakeholders. The findings will provide a significant contribution to advancing strategies and initiatives that advocate for sustainable coastal development and management by suggesting ways to incorporate a community participation-based salty urbanism approach in similar contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the Lifestyle for Environment (LiFE) initiative, a pioneering approach initiated by India to propel sustainable urban development through targeted behavioural change. Positioned at the nexus of individual action and urban sustainability, LiFE underscores the potential of integrating lifestyle adjustments into the broader urban planning and policy-making framework. By examining the initiative's evolution from a grassroots movement to a key element of government policy, this paper highlights its innovative strategies aimed at promoting eco-friendly living and its significant impact on urban environments. Through case studies and an analysis of the initiative's alignment with global sustainability goals, we reveal how LiFE complements existing urban agendas by focusing on the micro-level actions of individuals and communities. This paper contributes to the discourse on sustainable urbanization by showcasing the critical role of behavioural change in achieving urban sustainability goals, thereby offering insights into the formulation of more holistic and effective urban policies. Significantly the paper articulates how LiFE's principles, through enhancing global policies and harnessing the power of technological advancements within the Smart Cities agenda, herald a new paradigm in urban sustainability efforts. • The LiFE initiative emphasizes individual behavioral changes over infrastructural reforms to promote urban sustainability. • The concept originated as a grassroots movement in India and has evolved into a significant element of governmental policy on environmental sustainability. • Case studies, such as the eco-village of Piplantri, demonstrate how individual and community actions can significantly contribute to sustainability goals. • LiFE strategically complements Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) and the New Urban Agenda by focusing on micro-level actions that bridge the gap between policy intentions and tangible outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal housing programs in rapidly urbanizing countries like India are targeting the expansion of low-income housing stocks. However, most of these large-scale low-income housing developments occur in the urban peripheries, and they are cut off from opportunities and essential urban infrastructure. They not only indicate policy failure but also exacerbate urban segregation in growing cities. Federal policies to tackle these problems in India are geared toward relatively small-scale mixed-income initiatives like inclusionary housing and public-private partnerships. Evaluating these efforts based on four cases in the city of Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh, this paper expands the literature on social-mix and mixed-income housing initiatives that is dominated by studies from the Global North. It identifies multi-pronged approaches to address (1) the failure of the current Indian federal policy involving small-scale mixed-income initiatives, and (2) the need to integrate housing initiatives with urban development at multiple levels, especially in the urban peripheries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the development of a public transport trip planner to help the urban traveller in planning and preparing for his commute using public transportation in the city. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach that handles realtime Global Positioning Systems (GPS) data from buses of the Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) in Chennai City (India) has been used to develop the planner. The GA has been shown to provide good solutions within the problem's computation time constraints. The developed trip planner has been implemented for static network data first and subsequently extended to use real-time data. The "walk mode" and Chennai Mass Rapid Transit System (MRTS) have also been included in the geospatial database to extend the route-planner's capabilities. The algorithm has subsequently been segmented to speed up the prediction process. In addition, a temporal cache has also been introduced during implementation, to handle multiple queries generated simultaneously. The results showed that there is promise for scalability and citywide implementation for the proposed real-time route-planner. The uncertainty and poor service quality perceived with public transport bus services in India could potentially be mitigated by further developments in the route-planner introduced in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the conceptualization of Urban Green Space (UGS) within India's urban planning process. In doing so, the context of the Smart Cities Mission (SCM), which is a flagship programme for urban transformation in the country, is chosen. We identified four key elements of UGS planning in the literature – quantity, accessibility, multifunctionality, and connectivity. Using this as a framework for analysis, we reviewed the national SCM guidelines and plans of four cities – Gwalior, Bhagalpur, Chandigarh, and Udaipur – in depth. We find that multifunctionality does not feature in the planning of UGS, and the notable absence of a connected, strategic vision suggests the need for strategic-level planning and assessment that goes beyond the project level in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the modern commercial political-economic system is influencing rural to urban migration in ad-dition to urban morphology. Slum settlements are one of the major results of rapid and often unregulated rural to urban migration. Slum settlements create a major problem for developing cities. The slum settlements do not fit the leadership’s vision for a modern city, one that can be marketed to outside businesses and organizations for investment. As a result they are often seen as a nuisance by the leadership and targeted for destruction, especially when the land of the slum is valuable. The process of slum removal is therefore a political process.This is especially relevant in India, where slums are growing at an almost unimaginable rate. The Delhi Development Agency views slums as the type of settlement that negatively impacts their vision of creating a “world class city.” In the Kathputli colony, a slum settlement in Delhi, development has been occurring for almost 50 years as the region is a vibrant mix of local production and circus performers. In recent years, as Delhi develops outward, the Delhi Development Agency has looked to redevelop Kathputli. This redevelopment is being presented as an improvement for the residents of the slum, but in interviews with the residents, they are skeptical of the end result. The goal of this paper is to employ Kathputli as a case study to view the life cycle of a typical slum community, using Wolfel, Richmond and Grazaitis’ (2017) framework of urban development to demonstrate how the complexity of slum development, slum dynamics and slum destruction. As more people continue to migrate to a city, understanding the dynamics of slum communities becomes more essential if one is to successfully operate in a large urban area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an earnest effort to develop a coherent theoretical migration model by embedding the dynamics of urban economics, ignored by the celebrated migration models such as Harris–Todaro model of migration. The principal motivation behind the composition is the eruption of the COVID‐19 global pandemics, which has forced migrant labours (the engine of a globalized economic system) to shift from the urban areas to their origin. This migration crisis has put a serious challenge for the revitalization of the city economy in the post lockdown period. Further, this raises the question can the city provides the migrants better opportunities and benefits to get them to return? In contrast to standard migration models that attempted to limit the migration into the cities, our new theoretical perspective highlights the importance of agglomeration economies, urban informal sector and the development of core urban infrastructure to catalyse agglomeration externalities in the process of urban development and accommodating rural–urban migrants. The presentation of urban political economy into the theoretical account of migration leads to the importance of policies to augment agglomeration economies. These include the provision of infrastructure and affordable housing and mitigate congestion diseconomies in the form of sprawl, slums, poverty, traffic bottlenecks and so forth. Stopping migration or wage subsidy to the urban producer is not only unrealistic but also a myopic solution. On the contrary, cities should be prepared with planning, financing and governance mechanism to create the infrastructure needed by employment‐generating activities, catalysing agglomeration‐led and knowledge‐powered growth. In the end, our model suggests any approach to deal with urbanization issues in India must bring into account the critical part played by migrants‐urban poor and address their needs while benefitting rural areas. The migrants‐urban poor do not need charity. They need to be recognised as partners in the wealth creation process of cities and deserve 'right to the city' on their merit. While markets have failed them in the past, governments have also not catered to their needs. The urban planning and governance processes which failed to recognise the 'location' and 'access' of the poor urban migrants need to be reformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research on climate change adaptation in cities highlights the role of local governments in facilitating adaptation actions, but rarely assesses whether (and if so, how) local communities organise around emerging climate priorities to affect political change. This paper explores changing state–society relationships through the reconstitution of community collectives and advocacy organisations for advancing climate change adaptation in the Indian city of Indore. The paper shows that communities are indeed recognising the need for adaptation but are, at the same time, integrating adaptation actions with existing strategies for advocating development rights. Communities are also rebuilding alliances between municipal and local institutions for public service and infrastructure provision, which point to the centrality of community politics in urban climate adaptation processes. However, such mobilisations are often dependent on existing political networks and a legacy of advocacy around poverty alleviation needs, which sideline more transformative agendas around inclusiveness, equity, and resilient urban futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable management of urban regions in coastal areas has become vital particularly in developing countries. Uncontrolled urban sprawl has the potential to be detrimental to coastal regions, irreversibly damaging vulnerable and valuable natural landscapes. This paper analyzes spatiotemporal trends in urban development of four municipalities in Goa, India. Landscape metrics were conducted based on urban land use classification. In the last decade, Goa has experienced rapid urbanization, which has been closely linked to their paralleled expansion in the tourism industry corresponding to the largest sector of the state's economy. Tourism development and policy in Goa largely focus on coastal regions, leading to a decline in tourist activity further inland. This has accelerated urban development and put pressure on the coastal landscapes. Current planning policies implemented by the state suggests that proper attention is given to mitigation of anthropogenic activity, however the dynamics of the urban sprawl continue to be uncontrolled and sporadic. Thus, sustainable development is crucial to the continued welfare of the state, and particularly within the reach of economic drivers such as tourism in Goa. The methods and techniques adopted in this paper, combine spatial metrics along with urban footprints, to obtain a complex understanding of the impacts urban development has on potentially vulnerable coastal stretches. The increase of urban areas has been predominantly found along the existing historical urban areas of Goa and the implementation of landscape metrics has allowed to shape an objective vision of the consequences of Goa's urbanization processes along its vulnerable coastal stretches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to the lack of urban planning and its public health implications in developing countries. Slum communities face the dual challenges of chronically poor residential environments and the acute effects of a pandemic and the preventive measures that follow. In this paper, I assess the effectiveness and implications of social distancing, frequent handwashing, and lockdown in the context of slums in Indian cities, where overcrowding, lack of access to water and sanitation, and dependence on daily wages for sustenance and livelihood are common. Using data from multiple sources, I demonstrate that not only will these measures be hard to achieve in slums in the short term due to specific characteristics of these habitats, but they will bring new challenges in the long term due to disproportionate impacts on the urban poor. Lessons learned from this pandemic will require us to rethink public health responses and urban planning practices that could better prepare our cities for future pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We analyze route efficiency trade-offs emerging from combining pickups and deliveries in an urban distribution system. • We extend continuum approximation-based route length estimations by proposing adjustment factors for integrated pickup and delivery operations. • Local route efficiency can improve by up to 30%, while being highly sensitive to vehicle capacity and precedence constraints. • We apply our method to a real-world case study to inform the strategic design and operational planning of an urban distribution system. In this paper, we analyze the route efficiency trade-offs that emerge from combining first-mile pickup and last-mile delivery operations in an urban distribution system. We build on the extant literature on continuum approximation of optimal route distances and propose adjustment factors that account for the effects of integrated pickup and delivery operations. By means of comprehensive numerical experiments and regression analysis, we further propose a set of closed-form adjustment factors that improve existing continuum approximation-based route length estimations. These adjustment factors incorporate some non-trivial route efficiency trade-offs emerging from first-mile and last-mile integration that cannot easily be captured through continuum approximation. The proposed extensions are particularly relevant for the optimal strategic design and operational planning of large-scale, high-density last-mile distribution systems that are gaining in importance in light of e-commerce and omni-channel retailing. Our analyses suggest that the efficiency gains emerging from integrating first-mile pickup and last-mile delivery operations can be as high as 30%. However, the effective efficiency gains are sensitive to vehicle capacity constraints and other factors complicating the optimal stop sequence in integrated routes. We apply our proposed method to a real-world case study informed by operational data from one of India's largest e-commerce platforms for the city of Bengaluru. We find that by properly integrating its first-mile and last-mile operations, the company could reduce its urban traffic and emissions impact by up to 16%, while increasing the asset utilization and reducing the cost of operations of its vehicle fleet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the hallmarks of urban planning in recent decades has been focused on slum upgrading through improvements in service delivery, better housing and employment policies. This paper explores community participation as an instrument in providing affordable housing for urban poor in India and abroad. Community Participation (CP) creates an appreciation of how people can present their claims in front of development agencies. There is an increasing recognition that the urban development policy framework be inclusive of the people residing in the slums and informal settlements. It is argued in the available literature that community participation and active involvement of the beneficiaries is critical to the success of a programme as people's participation advances their interests, needs, and aspirations in the development discourse. Collaborative initiatives give rise to an enabling approach through which we can achieve a more effective mobilization of community resources and skills to complement public resource allocations. We can increase well-being of deprived section of society by shifting from a needs-based approach to asset based community development. This paper focuses on conceptual framework of community participation along with successful examples of participatory models adopted by the Indian Institute of Human Settlement and Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Government of India to accomplish the target of Housing for All. The discussion will be limited to Community Participation in Slum Improvement Schemes. Various paradigms of Slum Improvement will be briefly discussed. The scope of participatory approach will be evaluated with respect to ladder of participation as established by Sherry Arnstein and Marisa B. Guaraldo Choguill. The paper also makes recommendations within administrative boundaries of institutional framework of local body and provide valuable lessons that can be applied to the implementation of the new urban Sustainable Development Goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying current and future informal regions within cities remains a crucial issue for policymakers and governments in developing countries. The delineation process of identifying such regions in cities requires a lot of resources. While there are various studies that identify informal settlements based on satellite image classification, relying on both supervised or unsupervised machine learning approaches, these models either require multiple input data to function or need further development with regards to precision. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for identifying and informal settlements using street intersection data. With such minimal input data, we attempt to provide planners and policy-makers with a pragmatic tool that can aid in identifying informal zones in cities. The algorithm of the model is based on spatial statistics and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The proposed model relies on defining informal settlements based on two ubiquitous characteristics of informal settlements. We applied the model in five major cities in Egypt and India that have spatial structures in which informality is present. These cities are Greater Cairo, Alexandria, Hurghada and Minya in Egypt, and Mumbai in India. The predictSLUMS model shows high validity and accuracy for identifying and predicting informality within the same city the model was trained on or in different ones of a similar context. To enable this model to be used as a pragmatic tool for future prediction or further research concerning informal settlements and slums, we have made the python code for the pre-trained ANN models of the five studied cities. • A modelling framework is developed for predicting informal settlements. • The model only requires street intersection data as input, making it broadly applicable. • The model is applied to five cities; Greater Cairo, Alexandria, Hurghada and Minya in Egypt, and Mumbai in India. • By training the model using data from one city, the model can predict informal settlements in another city. • Using ground truth data of planning status for validation, the model achieves accuracy of between 82.1 and 97.6%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract From 2007 onwards, Indian policy planning follows the broad vision of achieving inclusive growth. All sectors of national development align their policy objectives towards this overall vision. Urban policy is one such crucial policy sector oversees by the Ministry of urban development. This paper analyses the urban policy and investigates its impact in achieving inclusive urban growth in India. The traditional methodology of analysing urban policy by utility or output has its own limitations. It only considers summary variables of policy (utility or benefits) but not the situational variation on ground. Further, it cannot quantify the precise time of the change in opportunities or ability occurred over time. So it cannot inform the moment when a policy achieves its objectives. The research employs human capability instead of utility to overcome the present limitations. The analysis methodology is adapted from Professor Amartya Sen's capability approach. Capability approach emphasises a shift in policy analysis from direct assistance to expansion of opportunities and eliminate circumstantial imperfection in governance. The approach aims towards empowering urban citizen, and advancement towards the direction of more self-reliance society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using city-level census data this paper examines the trends, patterns and determinants of metro city growth in India and finds that the post-economic reforms period has heralded a rapid pace of metropolitan development, causing a dispersed pattern of metropolitan growth in the last two decades. The empirical results show that metro cities located along a riverbank and situated in the northern, eastern and southern regions of India; cities with better quality public services and those which are state capitals are revealed to grow faster than others. A proximity to a large city also spurs on nearby urban centres to become larger, highlighting agglomeration effects. In contrast, initial city size has a negative impact on metro growth, reflecting some conditional convergence in population growth across cities. It is also found that the older cities have not grown at a rapid pace, with many of them flagging remarkably low demographic growth, suggesting a process of population drift towards the periphery from the core city areas, thereby leading to an ‘agglomerated trend’ of metropolitan development in India. Finally, we argue that diverting investment and development projects towards regressive regions as well as to secondary cities for strengthening their infrastructure and economic bases may herald sustainable and balanced metropolitan development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread notion that the city is secular and that therefore society’s future is secular is in need of serious reconsideration. This paper argues that religion does not melt away but rather morphs into modern forms of aspiration, speculation, and contention. Religion is therefore crucial to social inquiry into the nature of the urban. The paper argues that in Asia the Christian modern is close to the secular modern with fragments of rational planning and calculation in constant interplay with fragments of the magic of speculative modernity. Both communism and market capitalism are ideological cousins of Christian millenarianism. In a comparison of India, China, and Singapore it argues that the Christian form of modernity has been much better able to penetrate and coalesce with Sinic civilizational traditions than with Indic civilizational traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper questions the effects of the financialisation of Indian real estate markets with a focus on the Bangalore city-region. Research on Southern cities has concluded that globally connected but locally embedded real estate developers contribute to anchoring transnational investment. Yet, the acknowledged dearth of studies on the real estate industry in post-liberalisation India limits our understanding of the ongoing empowerment of local urban actors, including developers. Adopting a cultural political economy perspective, the paper analyses how developers leverage finance capital to achieve greater economic and political agency and thus contribute to the material, symbolic and political transformations of cities. It first demonstrates that finance capital has sustained Bangalore-based developers' growth strategies throughout Southern India. Subsequently, developers shape the materialities of metropolises via a piecemeal juxtaposition of medium-sized developments. Although this may occasionally meet government strategies for modernising their cities, it more often than not constitutes an understudied obstacle to States' mega-projects that are outdone by developers' ability to work through the intricacies of local land markets and bureaucracies. Furthermore, having become dominant city-builders, developers are in a situation to circulate representations concerning what the desirable city should be. Such narratives aim at inserting local real estate markets into globalising financial commodity chains while also legitimating developers' own role. Consequently, developers attempt to promote -- with some success -- prescriptions in favour of State reforms and the adoption of pro-urban growth policies. The ongoing financialisation of urban production thus participates in the selfempowerment of developers in India's cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper dwells on the complex representation of the Indian slums in Katherine Boo's 2012 novel Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Leaving behind the conventional oversentimentalised and over-optimistic literary and cinematographic depictions, the writer places her text on the boundary between fiction and journalism, discussing poverty, inequality, hope and despair in one of the most surprising cities of the globalised world, from a new perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban development is an overall marvel yet the rate of urbanization is quick in creating nation like India. It is chiefly determined by sloppy development, expanded movement and quickly expanding populace. In this unique situation, land use/ land cover change are viewed as one of the focal parts in current techniques for overseeing normal assets and observing ecological changes. In India, urban development has brought genuine misfortunes of agrarian land and water bodies. Urban development is in charge of an assortment of urban ecological issues like diminished air quality, expanded overflow and ensuing flooding, expanded nearby temperature, decay of water quality, and so on. India had various quickly developing urban areas. Jaipur urban areas in Rajasthan state are extending quickly with differing development rates and patterns. In this specific situation, geospatial innovations and remote detecting technique give basic devices which can be connected in the investigation of land utilize change recognition. This paper is an endeavor to survey the land utilize change identification by utilizing GIS in Jaipur urban built-up area from 1989 to 2013. Change identification examination demonstrates that developed territory has been expanded from 10 sq. km in 1989 to 225 sq. km in 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jaipur is the tenth largest metropolitan region in India, grown to be a popular tourist destination and a centre of business, commerce, and education. It has been the central focus of the state governments' visioning strategies by virtue of it being an urban heritage and the capital of state of Rajasthan, hence the efforts have been made to develop it into the ‘world-class’ city. After the inclusion of Jaipur City in the Smart City Program, the city is expected to undergo massive urban restructuring. This paper presents an outline of the history and planning of Jaipur, followed by an exploration of emerging urban and infrastructural challenges with a focus on management and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an analysis of key dynamics of sociospatial change in Indian cities to offer a sympathetic critique of recent efforts to extend gentrification theory into the Global South. Despite the postcolonial overtures of this new, Southern gentrification literature, the paper argues that the global search for gentrification risks following a diffusionist logic that either presumes a Euro-American template, or else so sheers gentrification of its analytical specificity that it loses both its explanatory power and its political potency. The paper shows that gentrification theory operates on four implicit presumptions, which fail to characterize the primary dynamics of urban change in India. These include: (1) the presumption that lower-class displacement is driven by a reinvestment of capital into disinvested spaces; (2) a property centrism; (3) an agnosticism on the question of extraeconomic force; and (4) the presumption that land from which lower classes are displaced finds a 'higher and better use'. A priori commitment to the gentrification analytic thus overlooks key features of urban change in contexts, like India, with property, planning, and legal systems different from the postindustrial geographies from which gentrification theory developed. The paper suggests that 'urban revolution', 'enclosures', and 'accumulation by dispossession', while equally abstract terms, more clearly allow for the comparative analysis of displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000 in New Delhi, urban decentralization has mainly come in the form of the highly visible Bhagidari or partnership scheme, inviting city residents to participate in a "process of dialogue and the discovery of jointsolutions."1 This paper critically examines this program between 2000 and 2012, through the experiences of primarily middle-class neighbourhood organizations called Resident Welfare Associations, or RWAs that were included in the scheme. The paper argues that rather than constitutional decentralization, Bhagidari as an initiative must be read in terms of a larger shift to entrepreneurial governance. Bhagidari's success has been in delegating management to RWAs, at little cost to city government, while seemingly opening up a "participatory" space for middle-class urban residents in civic affairs. However, for RWAs the article argues that Bhagidari's impact has come to represent an attempt at harnessing and managing the new middle-class aspiration to engage with urban government for administrative and political ends. In this context, Bhagidari has also been seen as an important means of cultivating middle-class consent and a constituency through courting RWAs for an ambitious chief executive. Over time, this has become a common strategy for building political and civic visibility for a range of actors, one reason why the number of RWAs has proliferated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large section of the population around the globe is migrating towards urban settlements. Nations are working toward smart city projects to provide a better wellbeing for the inhabitants. Cyber-physical systems are at the core of the smart city setups. They are used in almost every system component within a smart city ecosystem. This paper attempts to discuss the key components and issues involved in transforming conventional cities into smart cities with a special focus on cyber-physical systems in the Indian context. The paper primarily focuses on the infrastructural facilities and technical knowhow to smartly convert classical cities that were built haphazardly due to overpopulation and ill planning into smart cities. It further discusses cyber-physical systems as a core component of smart city setups, highlighting the related security issues. The opportunities for businesses, governments, inhabitants, and other stakeholders in a smart city ecosystem in the Indian context are also discussed. Finally, it highlights the issues and challenges concerning technical, financial, and other social and infrastructural bottlenecks in the way of realizing smart city concepts along with future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Chandigarh, India, has received considerable interest since its design and construction in the early 1950s, mainly due to Le Corbusier's involvement in the scheme. More recent work has begun to critically examine the planning of the city and its components and to challenge the misconception of Le Corbusier as the sole author. This paper is concerned with the first portion of the city to be constructed, Sector-22, designed by the British architect Jane Drew, along with housing designs by her husband-collaborator Maxwell Fry (Pierre Jeanneret's equally important work is beyond the scope of this paper). It considers the influences behind their planning and the housing-type design, with particular focus on the notions of ‘neighbourhood planning’. The paper argues that Fry's work with Thomas Adams from the 1920s is of particular importance to the Sector-22 layout, which was further informed by Drew's studies published immediately after the Second World War. Finally, their housing plans are considered, along with the contributions of their Indian colleagues – an important group who have largely been ignored in previous academic studies of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper utilizes a critical governmentality approach to theorize the processes through which urban elites become stakeholders in the 'world-class city'. Through a case study of public consultations for urban development plans in Chennai, India, the paper explores the technologies that produce urban actors who 'participate' in urban governance. Key to these technologies is a discourse of participation that privileges and normalizes citizens as urban stakeholders. The paper contributes to current explorations into the technologies of inclusion that are central to an emerging civic governmentality in South Asia. In Chennai this civic governmentality engages various segments of civil society in processes of urban governance through the mechanism of public consultation. It is through these public consultations that elites come to exert influence over urban plans and consolidate a vision and desire for the world-class city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities around the world have marked differences in spatial form and structure. To some extent this can be attributed to cultural differences. However, the impact spatial form has on the interactions within and between residents of different neighbourhoods is unclear. This paper calls on empirical evidence collected in the Walled City of Ahmedabad, India, home to Hindu and Muslim residents in distinct neighbourhoods for centuries. Employing Space Syntax method, this paper reveals significant differences in how public spaces are spatially laid out by these two communities. Muslim neighbourhoods have a spatial structure typical of a naturally evolved settlement, where the most integrated spaces are clustered centrally. In contrast, Hindu neighbourhoods have an ‘inside-out’ pattern, with the most integrated spaces located at the neighbourhood edge. The cultural significance of these distinct forms is discussed alongside the relationship between the neighbourhoods and the rest of the city. These findings on spatial structure could have an important role in Ahmedabad’s urban planning . A better understanding of how public space relates to lifestyle and culture could contribute to improved community relations. It could also contribute to dealing successfully with communal conflict, economic development, social sustainability as part of Ahmedabad’s future urban planning strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successive Indian governments have attempted to tackle the formidable task of creating a clean India, with varied results. With the country's rapidly growing middle class eager to participate in a sanitised global consumer capitalism, many Indians are becoming frustrated with the ‘unruly’ nature of their urban landscape, its dirty streets and public spaces. This is particularly discernible amongst India's middle-class youth, who seem impatient with the state's apparent inability to manage waste and disorder, and it is clear that several civil society campaigns designed to promote a clean India explicitly target Indian youth. In this paper, I explore what the ideological premise of cleansing initiatives reveals about the aspirations, needs and anxieties of India's youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If informality has been conventionally understood as a territorial formation or as a labour categorisation, this paper offers an alternative conceptualisation that conceives informality and formality as forms of practice. The paper examines how different relations of informal and formal practice enable urban planning, development and politics, and explores the changing relationship between informality and formality over time. To illustrate the political potential of conceiving informality and formality as practices, it highlights the fall-out from a particular urban crisis: the 2005 Mumbai monsoon floods. In the final section, the paper offers three conceptual frames for charting the changing relations of informal and formal practices: speculation, composition, and bricolage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In scholarly and popular texts, Mumbai is invoked as an iconic example of the problem of urban informal settlements in the twenty-first century. While such representations oscillate between tropes of accommodation and marginalization, they often obfuscate the compromised and historical successes of settler politics in the city. In this paper, the authors use an international urbanization conference as a starting point for exploring Mumbai settlers' housing practices. They examine the processes through which emergent forms of inclusion have been conceptually unhinged from longstanding struggles against inequality. By examining the complex interplay of housing politics, social mobilization, and municipal policy in Mumbai, the paper argues for more careful attention to new regimes of governing that accompany aspirations for 'inclusion' in the cities of the urban age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I focus on the ideas and efforts of Patrick Geddes, which are well known but not often discussed, by which he attempted to elevate the status of Indian sweepers and sewage collectors into gardeners by transforming sewage into fertilizer for gardens. Geddes transmitted his vision by means of religious performances, and through these efforts he attempted to produce change in Indian society in the register of human evolution. In this paper I take seriously the triangulation of waste, gardens, and performance as a reasoned means by which Geddes attempted to aid evolution. I suggest that by 'evolution' Geddes had in mind less an abstract process and more a state of awareness of one's capacities for self-transformation and relationship with one's environment. Furthermore, this awareness would largely be inculcated by taking into consideration the environment from the plant's point of view. In other words, expanding one's consciousness to be able to sense plant presence would not so much ready one for evolution as it would indicate that one had already evolved. This was town planning toward evolution. To make my arguments, I draw on Geddes's 1918 town planning reports for the Princely State of Indore, India, and draw out his intellectual engagements with William James, Henri Bergson, and Jagadis Chandra Bose implicit in these reports and elsewhere in his writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses trends in evolution of the urban spatial structure (or urban form) of the city of Ahmedabad, with two key objectives in mind: to generate a quantitative understanding of the evolution of the spatial structure and use such a quantitative understanding to inform the formulation of alternative planning policies for the future. Time-series population data from the Census of India over three decades have been used, which are usually available in most developing countries. In the case of Ahmedabad, the city exhibits a gradual tendency of dispersal, although compared with some other mid-sized metropolitan areas of the world, it is relatively compact. A discussion on the application of the spatial structure analysis to the formulation of alternative planning policies is included. Such analyses for similar cities in India and the developing world in general could be carried out to produce a useful catalogue of cities. However, this is not the objective of the paper, but in due course such literature could be built up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major part of India’s architectural heritage is to be found in its towns. This paper will, after an historical survey, look at the various agencies that over the last two decades have been concerned with urban heritage, to examine their agenda, and the pressures they face. ‘Heritage cities’ is a term which appears not only in documents of the Archaeological Survey of India and of the Indian National Trust but also, more recently, in statements made by the Ministry of Urban Development, the Government of Delhi in the context of the Commonwealth Games, and the Ministry of Tourism. The paper will discuss ‘preservation’ of facades/interiors of individual buildings, or of precincts, the use/reuse of historic areas/buildings, and the references to history, through commemoration, naming/renaming, erasing. It argues that conservation should be part of a holistic and humane town-planning policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The violence in Gujarat in 2002 presented a paradoxical phenomenon, namely, a spectacle of violence ostensibly enacted by non-state forces that was covertly and overtly sanctioned by the state. Violence was both spatially localized and physically concentrated on Muslims. Apologists invoked a history of communal conflict and specifically of Muslim provocation, explaining the pogrom of 2002 as having ample precedent and justifiable cause. This paper addresses Ahmedabad's urbanity as an enabling locus for such violence, and draws on historical and ethnographic research to argue that spatial and perceptual practices in the city have combined to ghettoize Muslims, and produce forms of knowledge complicit with structural and episodic violence against them. Such practices (and their discursive uptake) are enabled by political conjunctures that give structurally embedded processes form and visibility. This paper explores the issue of political violence and Muslim vulnerability in Gujarat under the explanatory rubric of the 'Special Political Zone,' an informal analogue to a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the latter being a site exempt from prevailing regulations, purportedly to enhance economic growth. The political ability to endow specific sites with exceptional legal status for economic outcomes implies the 'Special Political Zone,' a site where select laws of the land are voided to ensure specific political outcomes, for example the staging of violence to dramatize the restructuring of the relationship between majority and minority. This paper offers a limited examination of this hypothesis taking Ahmedabad as a privileged site where much of the violence in Gujarat in 2002 was concentrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, most urban planning techniques and practices at the municipal level and below approach issues of urban environment from the perspective of certain dominant paradigms. Such paradigms are based on two primary theoretical frameworks of ecological modernization and neoliberal planning. The paper showcases how the urban environmental reality in the context of Southern (developing) countries and at a local scale necessitates revisiting the theoretical frameworks. Ecological modernization, which relies on technocentricism and instrumental rationality, calls for innovation to solve environmental problems. Neoliberalism argues for a decentralized power structure and enhanced role of the actual stakeholders in development, particularly the market. It holds that economic growth takes care of livelihood issues, and hence also the environment. Planning strategies that evolve out of these paradigms are theoretically congruent with the aims of sustainable urban development. This paper discusses evidence from Kolkata, India, and contrastingly shows that cities can continue to have pockets of declining environmental conditions and deplorable living conditions while having 'liberally-enabled economic growth', 'instrumental environmental management', and a 'decentralized planning milieu'. Evidence from Kolkata highlights reasons for the mismatch between the urban transformation pattern and planning practices. This paper identifies reasons behind this paradox and argues that such planning approaches having their origin in industrialized economies can be critical impediments to achieving sustainability in the South. This paper suggests applying a composite rationale in planning, the PRETAB planning process model, that addresses the main concerns raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation of heritage sites in South Asia should be guided by a new post-colonial paradigm of thinking about cultural landscape. This paper proposes an urban design approach drawing upon Kevin Lynch's concepts regarding representation of time in place and visual perception of urban form such that cultural heritage landscapes are experienced not as artefacts but as places. Using Champaner-Pavagadh in Gujarat, India as a case study, the paper shows that urban design interventions can provide a framework for thoughtful and imaginative site reading and interpretation. The interventions use a different medium of expression than reproducing historical precedent—the attempt is not to mimic the past but to evoke it through a visual and spatial vocabulary of design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an ongoing intervention in sanitation in informal settlements in Mumbai, India. The Slum Sanitation Programme (SSP) is premised upon 'partnership', 'participation', and 'cost recovery' in the delivery of large toilet blocks as a practical solution to the stark lack and inadequacy of sanitation, and offers an opportunity to interrogate a growing consensus on sanitation provision among mainstream development agencies. In the paper, I argue for a more flexible approach to policy infrastructure, technical infrastructure, and cost recovery in urban sanitation interventions. I also consider whether the SSP, as the largest city project of its nature in Indian history, marks a shift in the relationship between the state and the 'slum' in Mumbai. I suggest that, despite constituting a change from ad hoc sanitation provision to a more sustained and universal policy, informal settlements in the SSP remain populations outside the sphere of citizenship and notions of the clean, ordered modern city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the contested nature of diasporas and their complex involvement in dynamics of international development by focusing on the recent construction of luxury condominiums on the fringes of the Indian metropolis of Kolkata. These new housing projects are built and marketed with a self-consciously global aesthetic and are actively promoted to both overseas Indian communities and local elites as spaces in which one can take up an explicitly "international" identity. This paper argues that these discourses and developments regarding life-space and lifestyle are part of a broader project intended to help Kolkata regain its glory as a "world city." Furthermore, it is suggested that the deployment of the heavily mythologized figure of the global Indian is a crucial element for mobilizing key actors and constituting material transformations in the postcolonial city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a political economic approach to understanding climate change adaptation and development planning in an urban context. Based on field research conducted in Surat, India, across a period of two years, I illustrate how climate adaptation is rooted in preexisting and contextually specific urban political relationships that can be traced through the city's developmental history. Through assessing Surat's experience with recent industrialization, episodes of natural disasters, to more recent engagement with the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network, I highlight how adaptation planning, as well as how adaptation is integrated into urban development planning, occurs through processes of prioritizing adaptation against development needs and implementing options that are cocreated among public and civic actors. This case empirically shows how adaptation is mainstreamed into urban development planning, illustrates the trade-offs associated with how different urban actors plan and implement adaptation in the context of rapid industrialization, and assesses how internationally funded adaptation programs are operationalized in the context of local social and political realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 municipal functions, infrastructures and services in the domain of the (private) township, paralleling processes of urban gating and enclave growth worldwide. This paper analyses the relevant policies and laws to examine the role of the state in facilitating the growth of such urban clubs in India and fostering privatised provision of public goods. With few evaluations of the scope and impacts of such urban development in India, the case of Jamshedpur, an early prototype of corporate urbanisation, highlights how such sites may encourage patterns of unplanned and under-provisioned growth around the core. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Indian cities seem particularly prone to investigation through narrative both for the abundance of material about the origins and the development of urban centres from ancient to medieval times--which often contrasts with the relative scarceness of purely 'historical' data--and for the tendency to elaborate modern and contemporary "a posteriori narrative- myths" (Aravot 1995) through popular media such as cinema and television. Using methodological tools provided by research on narratives and analysing two case studies with reference to the cities of Ayodhyā and Bengaluru, the present paper investigates the processes and the dynamics by which narrations on cities are made to evolve. It builds on the conceptual frame provided by recent narratological scholarship, with a specific reference to the "increasing recognition of the ubiquity of narrative within any culture, in discursive practices as diverse as theology, historiography, economics, legal practice, political speech-making, everyday conversation and philosophy" (Rigney 1992: 263-264, italics in the original). Focusing on the 'constructive' aspect of narrative, seen as a discourse that intrinsically involves the active (and determinant) participation of the narrator, it argues that this perspective of analysis allows the researcher to interpret urban narratives eminently in political terms, or within relations of power--which also legitimizes the use of narrative materials for historical research. In broader terms, it contends that narration can give back structured information about the values and the practices which characterize a given society, and which are selectively communicated by the narrator(s); and that, in turn, this quality of 'restoring' structured information may shed more light on the inherent nature of narration itself and lead to further theorization both on its creative dynamics and its created artefacts. Practice of exploration of narration in a context of open communication with other disciplines may undoubtedly facilitate this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how mainstreaming of urban climate change resilience – a crucial consideration in an increasingly urbanised world – is occurring at both the city and national scale, using the case of an internationally-funded resilience-building initiative in India. Surat city's newly-established Climate Change Trust illustrates the importance of an institutionalised mechanism for coordinating and sustaining climate initiatives. Concurrently, climate resilience is being mainstreamed into the national urban development agenda, through a network of Indian institutions. These two nascent mechanisms offer avenues for local city-level experiences to inform national directives, driving and sustaining the urban climate adaptation agenda across India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Slums pose a significant challenge for urban planning and policy as they provide shelter to a third of urban residents. UN-Habitat reports that, in 2001, approximately 924 million people lived in slums or informal settlements across the world (UN-Habitat, 2003). However, varying definitions of what constitutes a slum result in different slum population estimates. Most definitions treat a slum as a community of several households, rarely recognizing that housing conditions differ for each individual household within the area. Moreover, definitions of slums usually take a dichotomous approach whereby a place is either a slum or not. Little attempt is made to go beyond this slum/non-slum dichotomy. This paper moves beyond the traditional ways of defining a slum by proposing a new household level enumeration of slums and developing Slum Severity Index (SSI), which measures the level of deprivation on a continuous scale based on the UN-Habitat's slum definition. We apply this new approach of analyzing slums to a household survey dataset to estimate the total number of slum households in Mumbai and Kolkata, two megacities in India. To contrast our approach, we compare these estimates with the Census of India's. The comparison highlights stark differences in the two estimates and the slum/non-slum household classifications. The estimates by the Census are considerably smaller than those based on the UN-Habitat definition in both cities. By applying the SSI, we also demonstrate intra-urban variability in housing conditions within our study cities. The analysis highlights differences in slum profiles measured in terms of both housing deprivation levels and housing deprivation types in both cities. The main objective of this study is to demonstrate the usefulness of the household level analysis of slums in drawing implications for designing and implementing slum policies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Climate change is a 'wicked' problem. No central authority manages climate change, and those creating the problem are also trying to solve it. Climate change brings uncertainty in ways that cities have not tackled previously. There is a need to explore new governance forms able to deal with change and to enable transformations. In this paper we explore seven local climate innovations to better understand the enabling conditions underpinning success and the governance barriers that are encountered. We connect the more formal and emergent climate governance 'innovations' through adaptation and mitigation experiments in Mumbai, India. Case studies indicate an emerging development model. Effective climate governance has to be an inevitable part of new development in the South. While climate externality exists in all development planning and implementation, smaller community-level efforts indicate how opportunities are offered within existing systems to integrate with larger institutional climate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the rise of urban space as locus of intervention, and planning as modality of state power in South Asia from the late nineteenth century to the early post-colonial period. I view these developments through the re-making of Hyderabad, a major metropolis and capital of a sovereign non-colonial state until 1948. The regime's autonomous status made the city a venue for political experimentations informed by varied global and regional circuits. A particular develomentalist idiom fusing an older ideology of ethical patrimonialism and emerging technocratic legitimising rhetorics underwrote planning work in Hyderabad. Tracing urban expansion, housing and infrastructural development, and state-led economic planning schemes, I suggest Hyderabad exemplifies the emergence of a crucial and enduring new form of power in South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years cities around the world have undergone mass slum clearances for redevelopment. This study of Mumbai offers an alternative interpretation of urban capital accumulation by investigating the differentiated political subjectivities of displaced slum residents. I argue that Mumbai's redevelopment entails not uniform class-based dispossessions but a process of accumulation by differentiated displacement whereby uneven displacement politics are central to the social production of land markets. Two ethnographic cases reveal that groups negotiate redevelopment in contradictory ways, supporting or contesting projects in varying moments. Redevelopmental subjectivities are influenced at key conjunctures by market-oriented resettlement, ideologies of belonging, desires for improved housing, and participation in non-governmental groups. This articulated assemblage of power-laden practices reflects and reworks class, gender, and ethno-religious relations, profoundly shaping evictees' experience and political engagement. The paper concludes that focusing on differentiated subjectivities may usefully guide both analysis and social justice practice aimed at countering dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the 20th Century, noticeable development in telecommunications and the ascendance of information industries led urban planners, analysts and the politicians to proclaim the end of cities and rise of suburbs. It was an obvious prediction that cities would become obsolete as the centres of economic activities-with large scale relocation of office spaces and industries to less congested and comparatively low-rent/cost areas than central cities to the suburbs. Such urban activities while entering the city region or the continuum transform it into a land of forking paths, from utopia to nightmares. Perhaps the only solution to this is adopting the deep ecology scenario that people should live and work locally, consume less space and share resources with their neighbours. The objective of this paper remains into the complete journey from the emergence of the city to the rise and expansion of the same into the peripheries and suggests the post modern views regarding the concept of urban village and how or whether it fits to the growing economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper revisits the City Profile for Delhi, the first article ever published in Cities in 1983 (Datta, 1983). Thirty years later and following the centennial anniversary year of Delhi’s establishment as the capital of India in 2012, this article makes a wide-ranging survey of Delhi in the administrative, socio-economic and environmental arenas. By tracing the history of urban planning in the city to the present and examining the issues facing Delhi, we then critically examine its institutional arrangements with respect to the outcomes of recent developments that have occurred in the city. These aspects are then evaluated in the context of the future development of the city; a city which still faces numerous local challenges but also houses the government of an emerging superpower that will play an increasing role both regionally and globally. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]