Shamindra Nat Roy (CPR, New Delhi) will present elements of his work in spatial analysis on the links between mobility, (re-)location of activities and linkage between town and countryside, using data on movements and socio-economic information, with Samuel Benkimoun (Géographie-cités) at a seminar that will take place on
Monday 26th June
à 13:00
Condorcet campus
South research building, room 1.122
This seminar will provide an opportunity to take stock of geolocated data at the local level and develop the production and availability of datasets in India.
Summary
This proposed work is based upon the emerging pattern of subaltern urbanization in India. India’s urban hierarchy has witnessed significant convergence across the city size-groups in recent years, and more than one-third of urban growth is fuelled by transformation of livelihoods from agricultural to non-farm activities, autonomous to the growth of large metropolises. While the built-form of such dispersed urbanization varies across regions, mainly two kinds pictures emerge: (i) a shadow effect foisted by the large cities where dispersal of economic activities to the peripheries have fostered urban growth across the municipal boundaries, and (ii) a completely bottom-up, in-situ growth isolated from the large city networks, but more based on local place-based or infrastructural economies like highways.
These patterns indeed show that this kind of urbanization is dispersed but not marginal—on account of their share in urban growth and their role as the driver of economic transformation in rural India. An exploratory analysis of the economic geography of these places show significant vernacular economic agency of these settlements–with a high share of manufacturing activities, distributed across a diversity of firms. However, there are few attempts to study this kind of urbanization from the perspective of rural-urban linkage, because there is no reliable data available to quantify this.
We propose to use the facebook movement data for this purpose, in order to define the spatial extent of rural-urban linkage, in the frame of movement around some large cities in India. While these movements are integral part of this urban system, where boundaries across airtight definitions of rural and urban are getting blurred and spatial relationships are getting more dynamic over time, we believe that framing the question of subaltern urbanization and the associated economic processes through the lens of movement data will allow opening new questions that goes beyond the rural-urban dichotomy, and focuses more on the functional distribution of these places. We also propose a triangulation with the socio-economic data on nature of firms and patterns of commuting to get a more nuanced view of this.
Shamindra Nath Roy is an Associate Fellow at CPR. He is a mixed-method researcher and his interest lies in examining inequalities through spatial lens. He has worked on rural-urban transformations, nature of governance in urban sprawls, internal migration dynamics in India, determinants of female workforce participation in India’s cities and socio-spatial inequalities in basic services at the sub-city level. He has a keen interest in deploying spatial concepts like proximity, contiguity or interaction in analyzing non-spatial data, and working across datasets from various sources in the urban context.
Shamindra has an M.Phil and Ph.D in Regional Development with specialization in geography from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
