On Inclusion and Inequality in Cities of Tomorrow

Geographies of urbanization have shifted dramatically in the 21st century. According to the United Nations, over 90 percent of all urban growth worldwide is taking place in cities of Asia and Africa. Over a third of this growth (35 percent) is occurring in just three countries: India, China, and Nigeria.

While urban research has historically centered on the larger cities of Europe and North America, the dramatic growth of cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America today demands both scholarly and policy attention. The practices of planning, work, and housing in cities of the Global South unsettle normative expectations of how cities are governed in the contemporary moment. In this short essay, I illustrate this point by focusing on urbanization in India.

Urban scholar Mike Davis has argued that urbanism in cities of the Global South “both recapitulates and confounds the precedents of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe and North America” (2004: 8). Today, Indian cities are growing both because of natural population growth (within cities) and because of urban migration (IIHS 2011). This in some way recapitulates urbanization of European and American cities in the 19th and 20th century.

Yet, in India, dramatic urban growth is taking place absent an adequate supply of formal sector work and housing. As a result, while new residents of India’s rapidly growing cities are able to live and work in cities, they do so by accessing informal markets, with few legal protections. Informal arrangements are not arrangements beyond the state, urban scholar Ananya Roy has shown. Instead, informality is a “mode of metropolitan urbanization,” produced through and by the administration of municipal government (Roy 2007).

Today, “informal” urban processes are a key means through which precarious populations are being produced and accommodated in rapidly growing cities of the Global South. As I have detailed elsewhere in a paper with Anne Rademacher, this is an ambivalent process that upends the promise of cities as aspirational spaces of social and economic mobility. Today, cities of the Global South (such as Mumbai or Jakarta or Johannesburg) are restless and intensive sites of urbanization, where both dramatic political inclusion and proliferating economic inequalities are coproduced in everyday life.

Nikhil Anand is Associate Professor of Anthropology and a Member of the Graduate Group in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research project, Urban Sea, is rethinking coastal cities in an era of climate change.

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