22 – The Cutting Edge – Peripheries as Living Laboratories for South Asia’s Urban Future

Empirical research on urban peripheries in South Asia is challenging city-centric perspectives in urban(ization) and globalization theories. These spaces – also often labelled as ‘peri-urban’ – are witnessing dynamic socio-spatial transformations that generate multiple conflicts over territory and resources and give rise to complex institutional configurations. As such, they require methodological creativity and novel conceptualizations. This panel engages with the urban periphery as a critical entry point to explore processes around infrastructure, resource struggles, public finance and governance. It builds on scholarship grounded in the experience of the Global South with concepts like peripheral urbanization (Caldeira 2017), frontier urbanism (Gururani & Dasgupta 2018; Sood 2021), subaltern urbanization (Denis & Zérah 2017), hinterland (Arabindoo 2020) or peri-urban(isation) (Singh & Narain 2022; Follmann 2022). We welcome papers that explore the following topics: • Infrastructures/infrastructuring: How are peri-urban infrastructures produced? Can the study of heterogenous infrastructure configurations (Lawhon et al. 2018) enrich our understandings of peri-urban infrastructure? • Governance: What new arrangements are emerging in urban peripheries in South Asia and what do they reveal about the re-ordering of societal norms in relation to urbanization? What are the implications for inequalities and distributional justice? How does state rescaling shape governance? • Resource struggles: How can the study of the changing role of the ‘commons’ help us to interrogate struggles over peri-urban resources? How do the struggles playing out in specific South Asian cases over land and water resources shape practices and future possibilities? • Finances: What do public finances reveal about local engagement with urbanization processes? How can the lens of finance allow us to better apprehend uneven peripheral development?

Convenors

Alexander Follmann
- Kennedy Loraine -