Beyond Urban Displacement: Suburban Poverty and Eviction
Eviction is often seen as a city problem. We tend to think of the eviction crisis as playing out in urban neighborhoods, both in high-poverty places where eviction is a constant threat and in gentrifying neighborhoods where long-term residents may be at growing risk of being forced out. This overlooks what's going on outside of inner cities, leaving us blind to eviction patterns in suburban areas.
Some Reflections on State of the Cities: India
This essay is meant to sum up and bring the forum on the State of the Cities: India Report (SOCR) to a close. The previous essays have introduced the SOCR and complemented it with observations and perspectives of a distinguished panel of international experts, made initially at a webinar held under the auspices of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (University of Toronto) and subsequently scripted for the Urban Affairs Forum.
Urbanism and Citizenship Rights in India
Our understanding of Indian urbanization is as amorphous as the sprawling megacities, mofussil towns and quasi-urban rural settlements that constitute it. Characterised simultaneously as too fast and too slow, as ‘messy’ yet dynamic, ‘hidden’ yet self-evident, urbanization in India is assumed to be transformative yet found to be insufficiently so. What’s actually going on here?
From the State of the Cities to the Future of the Cities
One of the major contributions of the report is that it questions the meaning of “the urban” and demonstrates the complexity in the measures of urbanization. From large cities to urban peripheries to census towns, the different forms of spatiality have different logics of growth and present different answers to the central question: How urban is India?
Are Indian Cities Urban?
The question I pose here, while inspired by Prof. Mathur’s provocation, is, however, slightly different. What I wish to ask is whether Indian cities are truly urban. What do I mean by that? I mean that urbanization is usually associated with social emancipation and political agency and economic progress. It is for these qualities that the process of urban transformation is imbricated with not just growth, but development, the reason why it is so desired and also the reason why it is resisted. How do Indian cities fare on these metrics?
Urban Governance and Municipal Finance in India
The study emphasizes two points of interest in this connection. First, as in most countries, most attention has been paid to big metropolitan urban areas on one hand and poor rural areas on the other hand. However, as this study shows, a large and increasing share of urban development in India has been in smaller cities and in areas classified as rural. Second, there are huge differences between states and also, though this is not as emphasized, within states.
How Is India Urban?
This brief commentary raises two questions and offers one critical comment. Both questions relate to the notion that India’s urbanization is markedly slow; in comparison to most other countries, but also in view of India’s substantial economic growth of recent decades. This notion is, and has been, contested, in part on the basis of claims that the Indian census underestimates urban growth but even then, according to most accounts, urban growth is at best modest.
State of the Cities: India Report
Urbanization – irrespective of how it may be defined, interpreted, or perceived, has acquired a “space” for itself in India’s development trajectory. Consisting of 7,933 cities and towns of different population sizes and a population of 377.1 million persons (2011 census) – comparable to that of China for that year – India has the second largest system in the world. At current urban population growth rates, India’s urban population, according to the United Nations, will reach a high of 857 million by the year 2050 AD!
An Introduction to the Forum on the State of the Cities: India Report (SOCR)
The forum starts here with an introduction of the webinar event by Bharat Punjabi, followed by an overview of the SOCR by the lead author of the report, Om Prakash Mathur. The following essays by Jan Nijman, Richard Bird, Partha Mukhopadhyay, Yue Zhang, and Shahana Chattaraj provide reflections on the SOCR and India’s urbanization from an interdisciplinary perspective. The forum concludes with Om Prakash Mathur’s response to some of the questions raised by the panelists. In publishing this forum, we hope to invite more scholarly debates on global urbanization, especially the drastic urban transformation in the Global South.
Neighborhood Economic Change in an Era of Metropolitan Divergence
Why do some neighborhoods change rapidly in race and class composition, while others do not? Despite a growing consensus among scholars that neighborhood sociodemographics shape residents’ life chances and societal inequities, the key drivers of neighborhood change – especially gentrification – remain hotly contested. Most research examines salient neighborhood characteristics rather than metropolitan area characteristics, precluding a complete picture of neighborhood change from emerging.
Examining the Dynamics Between Formal and Informal Institutions in Progressive City Planning
Urban public space serves a myriad of social, economic, civic, and environmental functions that ultimately play an important role in improving our quality of life. Uses range from protest and engagement with the state to the manifestation of cultural expressions, and from commercial and livelihood ends to exercise and recreation. Despite its benefits, the conservation and creation of public space can be a challenge in cities with growing populations, little land for expansion due to geographical or administrative boundaries, and tight land markets.
Jurisdictional Size and Residential Development
Our article in Urban Affairs Review examines data for thousands of U.S. census tracts to assess whether the population size of local jurisdictions matters for the magnitude of change in multifamily housing units. Multifamily housing is an especially policy-relevant topic, as recent years have seen escalating concern over high housing costs, stunted socioeconomic mobility, and lengthy commute times, especially in the nation’s most job-rich metro areas.
When Agency Challenges Structure
Running for political office is a demanding and complicated affair. Aspirants must navigate convoluted social and political structures in order to decide if they wish and feasibly can launch their candidacies. Further, they have an endless number of choices to make relating to the management of their campaigns: which issues to champion, which groups and segments of society to appeal to, how to shape the narrative about the issues confronting their electoral jurisdictions, and how to portray themselves as the right person to resolve those challenges, among many others.
Progressive Urbanism in Small Towns
Progressive politics is increasingly thought of in terms of cities. They were nodes of resistance to Trumpism in the USA and are centers of a new municipalist movement. In response, there has been growing interest in developing progressive urban policy agendas drawing on examples across a range of cities. But what is it about the urban that drives progressive political projects? And might there be differences between larger and smaller urban areas?
Zane L. Miller Book Development Award
Temple University Press and the editors of the Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy series are pleased to announce the Zane L. Miller Book Development Award, named in honor of our late founding series editor.
The End of the Right to the City
Social and material conditions in cities around the world are deeply unjust. Increasing material inequalities, social exclusion, hierarchy and domination face urban inhabitants in many settings. In response to these realities, the ‘right to the city’ (RTTC) has become a concept that is widely used by those who seek to build more just and inclusive cities. The RTTC frames the goals of urban advocacy groups around the world, the policy objectives of international organizations, and even makes an appearance in a piece of national legislation in Brazil.
Staying Afloat
or many coastal communities, there is no escaping the realities of sea level rise (SLR) because they already experience visible disruptions from it, ranging from nuisance flooding to enhanced storm surge. However, bigger problems lie down the road. Critical Infrastructure that provides water supply, wastewater treatment, control of stormwater runoff, and transportation are recognized as vulnerable to SLR and intensification of existing flooding hazards .
You Won't be My Neighbor
The 1926 Supreme Court decision Euclid v. Ambler upheld the right of cities to use their police powers to regulate how and where development would occur within their borders. In his opinion, Justice Sutherland famously described the apartment house as, “often a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district.”
Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in Philadelphia and their Potential as Regional Actors
Business improvement districts (BIDs) are special service and assessment districts that typically cover territories as large as the downtown of a central city or as small as the commercial corridor of an outlying neighborhood. These organizations typically collect mandatory fees – assessments – from property owners within their areas to fund projects and provide services such as cleaning streets, providing security, installing streetscape improvements, and marketing the area.
Race, Activism, and Localism in the Metropolis
Generations of research by political scientists and historians paint a consistent – and deeply disturbing – picture of the American metropolis. From different directions, their work depicts a political patchwork designed to facilitate resource hoarding and enforce segregation by race and income. Long entrenched local government powers over land use have made racial and spatial inequality the defining feature of the American metropolis. Special districts, the most numerous boundary-spanning organizations, help the patchwork metropolis function but they are not known for challenging the economic and racial inequalities it protects (Savitch and Adhikari 2017).