In the last couple of decades, India in particular and global South in general has witnessed a massive growth of cities. In India, more than one third of her population lives in cities. However, urban development, growth and expansion are not merely about infrastructures and enlargement of cityscapes. Yet, scholars have often ignored the social dynamics of this urban growth in terms of practices and everyday life in spatially grounded manner. It is this spatial rootedness of the urban social life, which draws our attention to neighbourhoods. Urban transformations shape subjectivities and experiences of people who live there. This edited volume focuses on neighbourhoods, their particularities and role in shaping our understanding of the urban in India. The essays aim to locate Indian experiences in larger context of global South and seek to decenter the dominant Euro-American discourse of urban social life.Moving away from the confines of a discourse saturated by the concerns of the political economy or specific disciplinary trajectories of urban sociology this edited volume asks, how people perceive and experience their residential environments? In doing so, it attempts to engage with the socio-spatial dynamics of the urban space by anchoring upon the idea of neighbourhoods. Here, the everyday social practices, value regimes, housing, caste and gender, mass violence, religiosity and urban planning come together to enable us novel insights and fresh perspectives.In this backdrop, the essays in the volume offer to understand neighbourhoods as changing socio-spatial units in their specific regional settings. The essays in this book underline the way value regimes (religiosity and subjectivities) give neighbourhoods their social meanings and stereotypes. On the whole, the volume unpacks the manner in which discourses and knowledge practices i.e. planning, architecture and urban discourses of governance shape the understanding of neighbourhoods. The essays in this volume disclose the linkages and disjunctures between the social practices of neighbourhoods and the language, logic and experiences of dwelling, housing, urban planning and governance. In sum, it brings about an understanding of the particularities and heterogeneities of neighbourhoods and neighbourliness.

Neighbourhoods in Urban India: In Between Home and the City PDF

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