Abstract
This paper attempts to create a first comprehensive analysis of the integrated characteristics of contemporary Indian cities, using scaling and geographical analysis over a set of diverse indicators. We use data of urban agglomerations in India from the Census 2011 and from a few other sources to characterize patterns of urban population density, infrastructure, urban services, crime and technological innovation. Many of the results are in line with expectations from urban theory and with the behaviour of analogous quantities in other urban systems in both high and middle-income nations. India is a continental scale, fast developing urban system, and consequently there are also a number of interesting exceptions and surprises related to both particular quantities and strong regional patterns of variation. Specifically, these relate to the potential salience of gender and caste in driving sub-linear scaling of crime and to the geography of technological innovation. We characterize these patterns in detail for crime and invention, and connect them to the existing literature on their determinants in a specifically Indian context. The paucity of data at the urban level and the absence of official definitions for functional cities in India create a number of limitations and caveats to any present analysis. We discuss these shortcomings and spell out the challenge for a systematic statistical data collection relevant to cities and urban development in India.
Highlights
In 2007, for the first time in history, the world population became more urban than rural
Urban scaling analysis singles out the importance of population size in isolating a set of general agglomeration effects, characterizing economies of scale in infrastructure and urban services, and increasing returns to scale in socioeconomic interactions [11,14]
We structure our results in two parts—the first deals with the analysis of scaling effects in Indian cities, while the second pays closer attention to two quantities of great interest, namely crime and technological innovation measured via patent counts
Summary
In 2007, for the first time in history, the world population became more urban than rural. Urban scaling analysis singles out the importance of population size in isolating a set of general agglomeration effects, characterizing economies of scale in infrastructure and urban services, and increasing returns to scale in socioeconomic interactions [11,14] These effects are the tell-tale signals of cities, and have been observed quantitatively in urban systems from around the world, from the United States to European nations, and from China to South Africa and Brazil [11,12,15 – 18]. 1, for socioeconomic rates, b ≃ 5/6 , 1, for spatial density and several kinds of infrastructure, and b ≃ 1, for household quantities expressing typical individual needs (number of jobs, number of housing units, water consumed at home) These specific exponent values can be computed from urban scaling theory [14], which expresses classical models of urban economics and geography in modern terms, including socioeconomic networks and more realistic transportation costs [19,20,21]. We discuss how data for Indian cities must improve in the near future and point out priorities in light of our results and other general considerations from the emerging field of urban sciences
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