Residential Segregation in an Urbanizing India

This Penn CASI seminar will show how residential caste-segregation is independent of city size, using the first ever large-scale evidence of neighborhood-resolution data from 1,235 of the largest cities in contemporary India. Bharathi will discuss one of the central conundrums in Indian urbanism — the persistence of caste segregation across the country, and across cities of varying sizes. This finding punctures a hole in one of the central normative promises of India’s urbanization: the gradual withering of traditional caste-based segregation. This seminar will provide further fine-grained evidence on the ghettoization of the most spatially marginalized groups in urban India: Muslims and Dalits.

About the Speaker:

Naveen Bharathi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CASI as of July 2020. His research interests lie at the intersection of political sociology and political economy of identity in India. Specifically, his research explores the relationship between ethnic diversity and development, most broadly conceived. He has written about issues ranging from the relationship between ethnic diversity and public goods provisioning to spatial segregation in contemporary urban India. His research has been covered in numerous media publications and journals. Prior to his career in research, Naveen worked as an architect and planner in many distinguished architectural and planning firms in India. He was a Raghunathan Family Fellow (2019-20) at Harvard University where he continues to be a Fellow.

This event is cosponsored by Penn IUR.