Urbanisation unbound: Indian urbansiation though the lens of real estate and housing
- Urban India
- 39(2), Jul-Dec, 2019: p.9-20
Indian urbanisation has changed its trajectory significantly in the last twenty years or so. Fledgling attempts to accomplish an agrarian transition towards industry-led urbanisation have given way to urbanisation-led development. The shift from state control over land and housing markets to significant private sector expansion is not only dramatic but has led to a situation where ‘urban’ has become synonymous with real estate-led urbanisation. This paper traces these dramatic developments of the last twenty years and attempts to decipher what these developments mean in a country whose empirical urban reality is defined as much by slums and informal housing as by more formal housing. What are the dimensions of this development? What forms does it take? What do they mean for whom? Urbanisation in India was itself conventionally understood as ‘urbanisation elsewhere’ – a deviant experience dominated by poverty, informality and dependence upon the ‘central’ sites and processes of development located in the North. Its housing deficiencies were thus understood through a lens of limited resources. Contemporarily, the centre-periphery debate acquires a new edge and complexity as the ‘centre’ shifts South-ward and the ‘periphery’ gets interconnected with ‘centering’ processes. It is evident that there is a very real shift in the geopolitics of the world with a tilt towards emerging economies like India. However, does this shift mean a transformation of the empirical realities of slums and informalities and poverty? What is the meaning of the shifting discourse of plentitude for the notions of North, South and elsewhere? The real estate and housing sector is particularly useful in understanding these complexities due to the scale of its growth and its connections with multi-scalar processes. - Reproduced
Indian urbanisation, Real estate, Information, Housing