Introduction: Reclaiming small towns

Abstract

The introduction to this edited volume seeks to decenter and enlarge our conception of urbanisation, shifting the perspective from large agglomerations to smaller urban settlements in the specific case of India, and to discuss the main results produced by the collective research team that participated in the Subaltern Urbanization Research project. This chapter defines the notion of subaltern urbanisation and argues in favour of reclaiming research on small towns. The recent increase in interest in urban studies in the global south, and particularly in South Asia, around the dynamics of urban change mainly concerns the large agglomerations, which are perceived as the main sites of economic development and social and demographic changes. This research project and the resulting edited volume positions itself vis-à-vis a vision of planetary urbanisation reduced to metropolitanisation and competition between global cities. It aims at challenging the usual approach which tends to consider the urban world only through the prism of very large cities. It defends a methodology based on the articulation of scales and the need to develop a multidisciplinary dialogue between large-scale analysis of urbanisation and in-depth scrutiny of localised cases. The introduction presents the main results relating to the understanding of the expanding world of ordinary towns: their spatial distribution and their dynamics (demographic and economic) (part I), their socio-economic embeddedness, in particular the entrenched as well as fluid linkages between land, society and people (part II), the type of public policies and governance that characterise these small towns and their impact on the quality of life (part III) and the manner in which innovation, production and circulation of people actually shape their economic trajectories (part IV).