Indian Cities

From ancient metropolises like Pueblo Bonito and Tenochtitlán to the twenty-first century Oceti Sakowin encampment of NoDAPL water protectors, Native people have built and lived in cities—a fact little noted in either urban or Indigenous histories. By foregrounding Indigenous peoples as city makers and city dwellers, as agents and subjects of urbanization, the essays in this volume simultaneously highlight the impact of Indigenous people on urban places and the effects of urbanism on Indigenous people and politics. The authors—Native and non-Native, anthropologists and geographers as well as historians—use the term “Indian cities” to represent collective urban spaces established and regulated by a range of institutions, organizations, churches, and businesses. These urban institutions have strengthened tribal and intertribal identities, creating new forms of shared experience and giving rise to new practices of Indigeneity. Some of the essays in this volume explore Native participation in everyday economic activities, whether in the commerce of colonial Charleston or in the early development of New Orleans. Others show how Native Americans became entwined in the symbolism associated with Niagara Falls and Washington, D.C., with dramatically different consequences for Native and non-Native perspectives. Still others describe the roles local Indigenous community groups have played in building urban Native American communities, from Dallas to Winnipeg. All the contributions to this volume show how, from colonial times to the present day, Indigenous people have shaped and been shaped by urban spaces. Collectively they demonstrate that urban history and Indigenous history are incomplete without each other.

With more than 150 million people, Muslims are the largest Indian minority but are facing a significant decline in socio-economic as well as political terms - not to say anything about the communal waves of violence that have affected them over the last 25 years. In India's cities, these developments find contrasted expressions. While Muslims are everywhere lagging behind, local syncretic cultures have proved to be resilient in the South and in the East (Bangalore, Calicut, Cuttack). In the Hindi belt and in the North, Muslims have met a different fate, especially in riot-prone areas (Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur, Aligarh) and in the former capitals of Muslim states (Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Lucknow). These developments have resulted in the formation of Muslim ghettos and Muslim slums in places like Ahmedabad and Mumbai. But (self-)segregation also played a role in the making of Muslim enclaves, like in Delhi and Aligarh, where traditional elites and the new Muslim middle class searched for physical as well as cultural protection through their regrouping. This book supplements an ethnographic approach of Muslims in 11 Indian cities with a quantitative methodology in order to give a first hand account of an untold story.

Urban India has been in transition for centuries but, perhaps, never more so than since the last decade of the twentieth century when the national economy was opened wide to international trade and competition. Indian Cities in Transition seeks to understand the nature of change that Indian cities are undergoing from a multidisciplinary perspective. There are seventeen essays in the volume encompassing the work of urban planners, geographers, demographers, social anthropologists, economists and political scientists. They examine the processes of demographic, environmental, economic, political and social change and their impact on Indian cities. Based on different aspects of change, the articles are categorised under five sub-themes: globalisation and urban restructuring; environmental impacts of liberalisation; economic dimensions of the post-1990s reforms; political economy of change in the planning and management of Indian cities; and, liberalisation and its micro-level impacts.

This book critically examines Sustainable Development Goals and cities in developing countries with special reference to climate change, inclusion, diversity, and citizen rights in India. It discusses global issues of sustainability and climate change in the context of rapid urbanisation and focuses on the role of equitable and just processes of urban development aimed at protecting social diversity, redeeming natural environments and, pursuing economic growth geared towards improving the quality of life. The volume looks at the nature of opportunities and future challenges presented to cities and codifies ways to transcend these. It explores key themes such as mitigation of risks from heat island effects, devastating floods, and extreme weather events like droughts; improvement of air quality; compact development; reduction in urban sprawl and protection of agriculturally productive lands for long-term food security; growth of small and medium towns; protection of rural landscapes; access to basic services like water sanitation, primary education, and housing; protection of forest and green spaces for the conservation of biodiversity; renewable energy sources; enhancement of mobility through efficient public transit systems like metro systems or suburban rail; effective and equitable governance for the vulnerable; balanced regional development; inclusive human development; securing the right to the city; and climate risk and resilience. Based on new research and data presented by global experts on climate change and sustainability, this book advances multiple discourses of sustainable urbanisation by connecting social challenges such as democracy, equity, diversity, and inclusion to create an enabling environment for a better future for cities in the developing world. Lucid and topical, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of urban studies, urban planning, development studies, sociology, public policy and administration, political sociology, city studies, geography, architecture, and economics and also to professionals and NGOs.

Redefining Smart & Sustainable Cities, although has been conceived much earlier and has been continually refined over and over, the recent announcement of 100 Smart Cities by the Hon'ble Prime Minister of India, Mr Narendra Modi, and the spate of events thereafter, has made the release of the book rather accelerated. It unfolds for its readers the thus-far little-known story about smart cities that have existed since centuries and what the existing cities can learn from them. The author has taken interesting habitat traits and important data points right from prehistoric times to the modern day. Parallels have been drawn from various parts of the globe cutting across time - right from the Stone Age to the modern Digital Age. The authors have critically analyzed and shown that since the problems had the same set of root causes the solutions can also lie among some of the thriving and sustainable modern-day smart cities of the world. In fact, through careful extrapolation of habitat aspects the author has shown that many of the sustainable smart cities today have undergone similar deterioration for at least some time before these cities were restored and made truly smart. Each chapter weaves into it text and explanations written in a direct and simple manner and is interspersed with interesting pictures, drawings, infographics, and facts and figures directly relevant to the topic under discussion. This makes the book a very engaging and interesting read.

This volume features the research of international scholars, whose work addresses the representative history of small cities and urban networking in various parts of the Indian Ocean world in an era of change, allowing them the opportunity to compare approaches, methods, and s...