Fractal Urbanism: City Size and Residential Segregation in India

Bharathi, Naveen; Malghan, Deepak; Mishra, Sumit; Rahman, Andaleeb

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3622982

Cited by 3 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…One study in particular has produced stark results. Using fine-grained, neighborhoodlevel data, Bharathi et al (2020) find that scale does not significantly affect segregation levels: mega-cities were just as segregated as the smallest village. What this suggests, they argue, is a pattern of "fractal urbanization," in which similar patterns of segregation repeat ad infinitum at a range of scales.…”

Section: From Circles To Fractalsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…As Bharathi et al (2020) note, such fractal patterns of caste-based segregation have already been explored in multiple ethnographic accounts, and these accounts give a sense, not just of the lived reality of such productions of space, but also of how the promises of modernization could have gone so awry. For instance, Lee's (2017) remarkable essay on the sense of smell and its role in ordering caste spaces applies a sensory attunement to Lefebvre's reading of spatial practices.…”

Section: From Circles To Fractalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This example suggests that, in addition to "soft city" considerations, there may also be components of the "hard city" that continue to inspire hope for a more egalitarian existence, including their central locations and their amenities. Even Bharathi et al (2020), in their generally pessimistic assessment of fractal urbanization, suggest that "cities in India have offered avenues for economic mobility not available in the country" and that the partial anonymity of the city has somewhat blurred caste distinctions due to the difficulty of "maintain[ing] caste taboos or regulat[ing] contact in public conveyances" (9). Rao, who edited and wrote the introduction to the English translation of More's memoirs, emphasizes the ways in which "Bombay city enabled heterodox, everyday practices of Dalit critique, including that of Marxism" (2020: 26), in the context of a cotton boom that created "new linkages between the rural hinterland and the city."…”

Section: Traversing Segmented Cities In Thought and Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space

Crowley

Ghertner

2022

Environ Plan D

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article discusses the ways that Lefebvrian thinking on urbanization has found a purchase in Indian urban and anti-caste scholarship, and conversely, how compelling new figures of the urban have emerged from Indian scholarship that productively enliven Lefebvrian categories, refusing any separation between the experimentalism of everyday life and the political economy of space. The article explores a sense of “itinerant urbanization” at two levels: at an empirical level, it describes the urban as a tentative condition of becoming that is always on the move and inter-mixed with its non-urban other. At a more theoretical level, itinerant urbanization is an acknowledgment of the tremendous generativity of Indian scholarship’s own itineracy, which produces a transversal relation with not only metropolitan urban theory, but also agrarian Marxism and rich scholarship on embedded geographies of caste. The article suggests that theorizations of the Indian urban—some expressly drawing on Lefebvre, but many not—offer spatial figures that work with but extend Lefebvrian dynamics of concentration and extension. It specifically draws from anti-caste thought to discuss circles, fractals and segmented planes as ways to capture emergent productions of space that avoid center/periphery binaries and to add explicitly postcolonial and anti-caste political commitments to urbanization debates.

show abstract

Section: From Circles To Fractalsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: From Circles To Fractalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Traversing Segmented Cities In Thought and Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space

Crowley

Ghertner

2022

Environ Plan D

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We used high-resolution demographic data at the census enumeration block level (or simply the ‘block’) to construct our macro- and micro-segregation metrics (Bharathi et al, 2021b). Our dataset contained 147 towns, 10,000 wards, and 0.33 million neighbourhoods, covering the universe of urban towns with at least 0.3 million residents.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The central feature is a clear analytic distinction between ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ sides of urban politics, corresponding to the bottom-up and top-down channels of public services respectively. Residential segregation in urban India operates at two levels – inter-ward ‘macro’ segregation, and intra-ward ‘micro’ segregation (Bharathi et al, 2021b), and intersects with the ‘scenes’ of multi-scalar governance regimes (Silver and Clark, 2016; Silver et al, 2010; Wu et al, 2019). The residents’ immediate neighbourhood is the most intimate scene, serving as the site for both intra-group and inter-group coordination.…”

Section: Multi-scalar Urban Politics and Segregationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Residential segregation and public services in urban India

Bharathi

Malghan

Mishra³

et al. 2022

Urban Studies

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Urban India is characterised by a high degree of intra-city spatial inequality in the availability of public services like piped water and sewerage. We unpack the political channels that link residential segregation with access to public services. ‘Micro-segregation’, or neighbourhood residential sorting within a ward (the elementary administrative and political unit in urban India), enables segregated neighbourhoods to better organise and petition public services. Political competition further amplifies these demands from segregated neighbourhoods. The state’s response to such demand is, however, modulated by both in-group favouritism and outgroup discrimination. States’ ability to indulge in such favouritism and discrimination is in turn contingent on how the caste composition of a ward is different from that of the city as a whole –‘macro-segregation’. We combine large-scale quantitative analysis using neighbourhood-level national census data for all towns in India with at least 0.3 million residents, and multi-year qualitative fieldwork in Bengaluru, a metropolis of over 10 million residents, to delineate the interactions between these demand-side and supply-side channels. While macro-segregation is negatively associated with piped water and sewerage, micro-segregation has a positive association.

show abstract

Saffron geographies of exclusion: The Disturbed Areas Act of Gujarat

Tejani

2022

Urban Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article elucidates the discursive, spatial and procedural mechanisms by which residential segregation and ghettoisation based on religion in Ahmedabad is reproduced and reinforced. It studies the application of the Disturbed Areas Act of Gujarat, a 1986 law ostensibly intended to curb spatial segregation based on religion by preventing the distress sale of property in ‘disturbed areas’ affected by sectarian violence. However, this law is being used for precisely opposite ends and as a tool of ‘ethnocratic urban planning’ to advance the Hindu right’s goal of separate and hierarchical nations based on religion and to actively ‘Hinduise’ urban space. Current practices of the law enable the state to police boundaries between Muslim areas and adjoining Hindu localities, sealing their porosity and preventing the formation of mixed areas by restricting property transfers. The article uses semi-structured interviews, mapping techniques, participant observation and official data as sources of evidence. It maps ‘disturbed areas’ in Ahmedabad for the first time and presents previously unpublished data on applications for property transfers between persons of different religions under the Act. The article argues that ethnocratic planning combines with a range of other vectors, such as targeted anti-Muslim violence, the hindrance of justice and reconciliation thereafter and the persistent vilification of minorities, to produce saffron geographies of exclusion in Ahmedabad. These saffron geographies of exclusion are grids of Hinduised spaces cleansed of Muslim presence that embody the ascendancy of the ideology of Hindutva over the city and simultaneously create Muslim ghettos.

show abstract

Fractal Urbanism: City Size and Residential Segregation in India

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space

Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space

Residential segregation and public services in urban India

Saffron geographies of exclusion: The Disturbed Areas Act of Gujarat

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About