Search

This paper explores how uncertainty has become a central constitutive feature under the ongoing attempts at rapid extension of highway corridors across India. Contrary to the terra nullius assumption that India's highway programmes operate under, the pathways to accumulation they seek to open present a palimpsest of pre‐existing claims, occupancies and forms of dwelling that come into conflict with the attempts to extend urban space. The paper specifically follows the prolonged uncertainty surrounding a regional highway corridor between the cities of Delhi and Gurgaon, the Dwarka Expressway, which underwent multiple legal contestations over evictions and land disputes. In doing so, it analyses how managing uncertainty in the production of highway corridors becomes profitable for the state, powerful corporate actors and middle‐class homebuyer‐investors, presenting a form of value that can be commodified and exchanged. However, on the other hand, owing to its double‐edged nature, uncertainty also becomes productive for the urban majority in laying claims to urban space. As rapid extended urbanisation increasingly disrupts the lifeworlds of marginal communities, this paper calls for embracing the politics and practices of uncertainty in the continued efforts to push ex‐centric urban analysis beyond the narrow focus on state processes and commodification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wetlands have historically been considered hindrances to development, with 'reclamation' considered the appropriate management practice. This is no different in India, where most cities are built on wetlands. This study examines the case of fast urbanising Kozhikode City on the south‐west coast of India by overlaying political and developmental interventions of the city with its ecological realities. While pre‐colonial settlements in the region were predominantly along the coast leaving the marshy inland areas, the need for resource mobilisation by colonial forces led to the development of Conolly Canal through the wetlands. The spoil bank of the canal spawned the development of roads cutting across the wetlands, a process continuing to this day, with consequent ribbon development. Wetland loss due to reduction in depth, core area loss, fragmentation and salinity intrusion have gone hand in hand with the city's rapid urbanisation. While the looming threat of climate change is forcing Kozhikode's planners to revive the canal, wetlands that sustain the canal (and the city) are buried too far beneath the piecemeal undertakings that have shaped the city. This paper reconstructs the environmental history of the city, the canal and the wetlands from the establishment of the city to the present, spanning a period of 500 years. Determinants of urban growth including canal construction, transport network development in line with the spoil banks and rapid urbanisation processes are chronicled to understand the interconnectedness between ecology, urban sprawl and the rationality of disaster preparedness. In this context, the future development proposals for the region are examined especially with the wetlands as the backdrop. We employ mixed methodologies to track this history including satellite imagery, geographic information systems (GIS), archives and interviews with senior citizens. This framework can be applied to other cities to understand the metabolic relationship of urban growth with ecology and its changing history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study utilizes data for the period 2006–2015 to estimate the determinants of road fatality rates in the Indian states. We employ baseline regression, where the total traffic fatalities, total traffic injuries, rural road fatalities, and urban road fatalities are the functions of human errors in driving, weather conditions, and some control variables. This paper is exclusively focussed upon different sets of human‐driven factors in influencing the road fatality across the Indian states. Our empirical results show that reckless driving, defective motor conditions, bad weather, and reckless driving by bus, truck, and car drivers are found to cause road accidents. We further find that the increase in motorization rates and rash driving are the primary causes behind the road fatalities, and bad weather play a major role in causing road fatalities and injuries in urban areas. However, road fatalities are increasing; still, cases of under reporting, lack of proper road safety regulation, improper investigation procedures, increasing vehicle usages, and higher urbanization have made the matters quite worse in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper investigates the impact of infrastructure on the urban population concentration of large cities (population > 0.1 million) in India. It also assesses the status of large cities according to the availability of infrastructure and the quality of public services using data from the 2001 and 2011 Census periods. The results of Borda ranking show that cities (e.g. Shimla, Mysore, Kochi, Tumkur, Mangalore, and Thiruvananthapuram) provide greater infrastructure. Ordinary least squares regression based on factor scores estimated from principal component factor analysis show that although overall climatic condition encourages population agglomeration, spatial interaction and infrastructure have a negative impact on it. Therefore, our analysis suggests that improvement of infrastructure may not increase population agglomeration (measured by size, density, and growth rate of city population) in large cities, but will substantially improve the potential contribution of the cities to national economic growth in India by improving the ease of living and facilitating business activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are characterized by sociospatial differentiation. Intra-urban inequality is found in cities across the world. Cities in the 'peripheral south' have been neglected in spite of their significant role in theoretical formulations and generalizations. The present paper attempts to argue that sociospatial differentiation is an inherent characteristic of cities, although the spatial form of inequality may vary depending on the specific culture and physical geography of the area. In the remote city of Aizawl in the eastern Himalayan region of India, multi-storey buildings are cohabitated by higher and lower income classes - the former were found at the top floors and the latter at the bottom floors. The vertical arrangement of income classes within a single building is seen as an adjustment strategy of the increasingly urbanized 'tribal' society in the hilly terrain of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]