Ecologies of urbanism in India metropolitan civility and sustainability (Hong Kong University Press, 2013)
Includes bibliographical references and index
This book seeks to understand how rapidly proliferating and resource-intensive urbanism affects everyday lived environments and the ecological processes that undergird them in Indian cities. Case studies on nature conservation in the city, urban housing and slum development, waste management, the history and practice of urban planning, and contestations over the quality of air, water, and sanitation in the major cities of Delhi and Mumbai, illuminate the urban ecology perspective at different points across the twentieth century. The book therefore explores how struggles over the environment and quality of life in urban centers are increasingly framed in terms of their future place in a landscape of global sustainability, and the future relationship between cities and their changing hinterlands. It brings both historical particularity and ethnographic nuance to the questions of urban ecology in Indian cities, offering novel insights into some of the most vital theoretical and practical debates on urbanism and sustainability
Foreword / by Helen F. Siu -- Preface and acknowledgments -- List of contributors -- 1. Introduction : ecologies of urbanism in India / Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan -- 2. Is there an "Indian" urbanism? / Janaki Nair -- 3. One air, two interventions : Delhi in the age of environment / Awadhendra sharan -- 4. The troubled passage from "village communities" to planned new town developments in mid-twentieth-century South Asia / William J. Glover -- 5. Flexible planning : the making of India's "millennium city" / Gurgaon Shubhra Gururani -- 6. From the frying pan to the floodplain : negotiating land, Water, and fire in Chennai's development / Karen Coelho and Nithya V. Raman -- 7. Value struggles : waste work and urban ecology in Delhi / Vinay Gidwani -- 8. Housing in the urban age : inequality and aspiration in Mumbai / Nikhil Anand and Anne Rademacher -- 9. Resettlement ecologies : environmental subjectivity and graduated citizenship in Mumbai / Sapana Doshi -- 10. Nuisance talk : middle-class discourses of a slum-free Delhi / D. Asher Ghertner -- Index