ATLAS OF URBANIZATION
INDIA, 2018

By using novel approaches in cartographic representation and spatial analysis, the book that would hold the following drawings reveals the territorial scale of urbanization in India and the spatially uneven ways in which the urban-agrarian field is evolving. 
The book’s central hypothesis is that the representation of the ‘urban’ has limited the imaginary of what the ‘City’ can be – indirectly influencing the way new and existing settlements are planned. The publication gradually uncovers this in three parts:
PART 1 - What is ‘Urban’? deconstructs how the statistical and cartographic representation of the ‘urban’ obscures the territorial realities within which the process of urbanization and migration takes place. The Census essentially creates a conceptual blind-spot by rendering thousands of settlements invisible to the urban development discourse.
PART 2 - Development Paradigms identifies how the administrative status of ‘urban’ or ‘rural’ opens up different avenues of institutional support. The urban-rural dichotomy prevents development schemes and governance structures from devising innovative approaches to infrastructure design and implementation that transitioning settlements need.
PART 3 - Planning Imaginaries critically re-examines how the ‘City’ has been historically imagined in the form of new capital cities, industrial towns, and satellite towns. It focuses on paradigmatic examples to underscore how normative urban planning is unable to accommodate the challenges from urban villages, informal settlements, peri-urban areas and regional realities

 
The final chapter is a speculative section that demonstrates how process- oriented and spatially-grounded indicators can reveal the scope and scale of the process of urbanization as framed by the preceding chapters. It builds upon the urban-agrarian conceptual framework to highlight the ecological dependencies at a territorial scale. PART 4 - Speculations on Urbanization offers a cursory glance at how a territorial approach to planning is needed to support local changes within transitioning regions. It also introduces ecological challenges that threaten the long-term resilience of India’s development trajectory but is entirely absent from the current discourse on urbanization..

Team: Rahul Mehrotra - Sourav Biswas - Nupoor Mohani - Claudia Tomateo