Abstract
ABSTRACT This article is part of a larger research project on new urban geographies in India. Between the population censuses of 2001 and 2011, India witnessed a record increase of 2,532 new Census Towns, small settlements that meet the country's criteria to be considered ‘urban’. This steep increase is intricately linked with decreases in agricultural jobs, but we know very little about the spatiality of these urban geographies, alternative local employment, or the nature of the local economies of Census Towns. Based on a tailored geodatabase, our Main Map visualizes the geography of these heretofore uncharted Census Towns in the state of West Bengal. We then draw on reconnaissance fieldwork to zoom in on a cluster of Census Towns in central Bengal where we find evidence of urban growth that appears linked to road infrastructure, what we described in earlier conceptual work as “emergent highway urbanization”. The Main Map and reconnaissance fieldwork contribute to a better, albeit early-stage, understanding of the rapidly changing spatiality of contemporary urbanization in this region.
Highlights
This article contributes to a better understanding of the rapidly changing spatiality of contemporary urbanization in India, with a geographical emphasis on the state of West Bengal, East India
In this article we examine the spatiality of these urban geographies through our Main Map, explore economic change that occurs in a cluster of Census Towns called Sujapur in Maldah district, and present our geodatabase on these geographies
We extended our geodatabase by including all existing large, medium and small cities (Government of India, 2017a)
Summary
This article contributes to a better understanding of the rapidly changing spatiality of contemporary urbanization in India, with a geographical emphasis on the state of West Bengal, East India. It is part of a larger research project aimed at investigating new urban geographies that emerge far away from India’s major cities, in areas that used to be predominantly rural. A growing body of evidence shows that large cities since the 1990s have become increasingly “exclusionary”, preventing opportunities for rural households to migrate to these places and settle there on a permanent basis (Kundu, 2014; Kundu & Saraswati, 2012). Writing about East India, Datta (2016) found that permanent rural-to-urban migration, in which the entire household moves from the countryside to the city, is relatively restrained
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