Urban studies in India across the millennial turn: Histories and futures

Abstract

The millennial turn saw a distinct efflorescence in scholarship on urban India. This essay introduces a Virtual Special Issue on urban studies in India that showcases a selection of articles from the journal’s archives. It traces the disciplinary, thematic and methodological shifts that have marked this millennial turn. On the one hand, the social science of the urban has had a statist bent, reacting to the policy focus on cities as growth engines in the post-liberalisation era. On the other hand, critical urban studies has brought attention to the unregulated, deregulated, unplanned and unintended city produced by dynamic processes of informality acting overtly or covertly against the state’s neoliberal agendas. This introductory essay aims to examine the ways this interplay has unfolded both in the pages of this journal and elsewhere. It locates the Virtual Special Issue selection within a broader review of the state of scholarship in Indian urban studies and marks out areas for productive interventions in the future study of Indian cities.