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

October 3, 2025
8:30 am
UGX61
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

Presentations

Losing a Place in the City at the Urban Frontier? Peripheralisation as Disconnection in Indian Low-Income Housing Projects
Williams Glyn - KEG, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Coelho Karen - School of Social Sciences, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
What will happen to our commons? Contesting discourses and the future of the wetlands in peri-urban Guwahati, India
Vij Sumit - Sociology of Development & Change, Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands
Nijland Hilde - Sociology of Development & Change, Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands
Reengineering a Watery Landscape: Value Struggles in a Greenfield City Project
Upadhya Carol - National Institute of Advanced Studies, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India
Villages of a City: An ethnohistorical account of a peri-urban precinct in Bangalore, India
Raghunathan Ranjana - School of Liberal Arts and Design Studies, Vidyashilp University, Bangalore, India
Spatial-temporal trajectories in the peri-urban region of Chennai, India: a spatial methodology
Pfeffer Karin - Department of Regional Planning and Geo-Information Management, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
Pareek Tanuj - Department of Regional Planning and Geo-Information Management, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
Kohli Divyani - Department of Regional Planning and Geo-Information Management, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
Follmann Alexander - Institute of Geography, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Sub-metropolitan patterns of local governance in relation to specific urban development trajectories in Chennai, India
Kennedy Loraine - CNRS, EHESS, Aubervilliers, France
Reimagining the promise of infrastructure from below: A proposed research agenda
Esposito Adele - Géographie-Cités - CNRS, Géographie-Cités - CNRS, Paris, France
Denis Eric - Géographie-Cités - CNRS, Géographie-Cités - CNRS, Paris, France
Sami Neha - Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, India
Co-Creating Peri-Urban Lake Futures: A Scenario-Based Approach to Developing Socio-Ecological Indicators
Anand Akshay - Faculty of Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
Pfeffer Karin - Faculty of Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands