8 Metropolis and Small Towns

Amita Bhide

1. Introduction

The metropolis or megapolis and the small town represent two polar ends of the urban settlement spectrum in India and elsewhere in the developing world. For a very long time, urban thought in developing countries focused around the metros due to their predominance and the unprecedented scales of growth that were not experienced by the world so far. A concomitant of this preoccupation with metros was an overlooking of the small towns that represent a significant chunk of the urbanisation. Small towns, therefore, remain overall neglected in studies of urbanisation in developing countries and in India. They also remain neglected in public discourse, imagination and policy.

There has been a recent upsurge of interest in small towns and in understanding their distinct features in terms of social structure, politics, economic drivers, built environment and development trajectories. This quest is linked to moving away from the understanding of urbanisation as a singular mode and understanding its heterodoxies. India presents an ideal case to understand the differences, continuities and interfaces between these settlement spectrums. This is because its settlement trajectory is deep, diverse and currently poised at an interesting juncture where urbanisation is gaining increasing economic and political significance, and where the relative proportions of rural and the urban are more or less equal. This module presents these two urban agglomerations as part of an entire spectrum of settlements and introduces the differences, continuities and the evolution of concepts around these “size” linked phenomena. This examination of the polar ends of urban agglomerations is used as an anchor that offers interesting insights into the heterodox urbanisations experienced in the country and the debates and the key questions around these in the context of current transformations of economy, polity and society.

2. Metros and Metropolitanisation

The metropolis is a term that signifies an agglomeration of several towns and adjunct areas that are roughly conjoined in a functional environment. In the geography of settlements, a metropolis is a class by itself bringing in a high volume of consumption and large flows of people, goods, services and information (Ramchandran 1995). A megacity, ie, city with more than 10 million population is a special form of such geographical conjointness.

Megacities are a form of contemporary urbanisation. In 1980, there were just three megacities in the world. Currently, there are 24 and estimated to grow to about by 2025(UN 2006). According to the estimations of the United Nations (UN), a bulk of the megacity growth is expected to be in South Asia and Africa. Of the 24 existing megacities in the world, more than half are in Asia and Africa. Further, if one were to look at the fastest growing cities in the last 30 years, the top 20 would be in Asia and Africa. More than 10 are located in China and three in India (UN2006).

The Census of India defines a metropolis as a city/agglomeration with more than one million population. They are therefore also called million plus cities. There are 53 million plus cities in the country as per the Census 2011. Of these, Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai are considered to be the mega cities with more than 10 million population.

Metropolises epitomise central place theory that argues that a central place offers the advantage of agglomeration and scale (Fujita and Krugman 2004).They are economic power houses on account of their size. Agglomeration can amplify production as well as consumption, giving an advantage to both providers of public goods such as transportation, infrastructure and private service suppliers as these goods and services can be provided more cheaply with density. Agglomeration economics is, however, not the sole reason for metros to emerge in the contemporary era. The rise in population in the developing parts of the world, increased rural to urban migration, and the particular development trajectories that concentrate opportunities and resources in large cities are the main reasons for the rise of metropolises in developing countries and their expansion into megacities (Banerjee-Guha 2013).

On the other hand, the concentration of activity also creates new problems and issues. The sheer scale of these cities dominates over the settlement system and generates political eminence. For example, the requirements of water of a metropolis may generate much more attention than that of a small town and of villages. Metropolises thus concentrate activity, people and wealth and thereby become expressions of centralisation and inequality on a larger spatial canvas.

The developing country context lends a particular edge to the issue of metros, raising concerns about the ability of infrastructure to keep pace with increasing population, weakness of governance paradigms in coping with the complexities involved in large-sized agglomerations and vulnerability to environmental and other risks linked to the huge environmental and human footprint. These concern the ability and appropriateness of governance institutions and mechanisms to respond to issues with agility given the burdens caused by scale; the huge environmental footprints of the agglomeration and their impacts on the region and other developments and the vulnerability to issues of terror. Several scholars conclude that most megacities that have emerged in the developing world have passed the tipping point and have become overwhelmed, dangerous and ungovernable.

Metropolitanisation or the cumulating of processes that encourage centralisation of economic activity and demography is essentially a product of post-independence period in India. In 1901, there was only million plus city, ie, Kolkata in India. It was joined by Mumbai in 1911. Their number increased to five in 1951. The years after independence show an acceleration of this trend with the number of million plus cities rising to 12 in 1981, 23 in 1991, and 35 in 2001 and now 53 in 2011; 160.7 million persons or 42.6% of the urban population reside in these metros as per the census. They are thus the dominant facet of Indian urbanisation. The metros have over the different censuses registered constant growth, and thus, their own size and number has expanded. A recent trend is, however, that the largest metros such as Mumbai, Kolkata seem to register a decline in the rate of growth. This is seen by researchers to be an indication that their populations are stabilising (Bhagat 2011).

According to Ramchandran (1995), metropolitanisation is essentially a product of the centralisation of administrative, economic and political forces in the country. What this means is that large cities have played an important role in integrating the various states in the country through economic opportunities. They have enabled mobility beyond language-based state boundaries. Metropolitanisation is also linked to the intense interaction between cities and the integration of the national economy and urban centres into an interdependent system. The growth dynamics of metros are linked to interregional, national and often global circuits of capital. Their economies are more diverse, they lend themselves to the emergence of more specialised activities. Metros are economic powerhouses (Sivaramakrishnan 2013: 88) estimates that in 2007-08, each of the six large metros in the country, ie, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi and Ahmedabad added to the gross domestic product (GDP) between Rs 20,000 crore and Rs 1,14,000 crore. Further, together they contribute 10% of the GDP of the country.

3. Common Themes in Understanding Metro-centric Urbanisation

As the primary site for urbanisation in India, there has been a considerable amount of research on and in metros. The thinking on metros itself has undergone significant shifts through various phases. We now trace some of these themes and shifts.

Phase I: Problematic Urbanisation in Developing Countries (1950-1970s)

(a)   Over-urbanisation and Urban Primacy: Indian metropolitanisation has emerged as a form of runaway growth that cities did not anticipate and were not prepared for. The typical issues thus associated with Indian metros include ineffective planning, large-scale informal developments, large informal economies, and a situation where services and infrastructure keep chasing settlements, instead of the other way around. These and other issues have received significant attention from researchers, and given rise to concepts such as over-urbanisation (urbanisation that is not in consonance with level of economic transition), urban primacy (a phenomenon where urban growth is spatially concentrated in one or very few cities, thereby resulting in a distorted settlement pattern). This conceptual paradigm that drew significantly from the western experience of urbanisation considered metropolitan growth in developing countries like India equivalent to urbanisation, problematised it and the various concomitant issues. The solutions given were to move towards a more balanced spatial pattern through concentrated efforts for rural development, rural industrialisation, and creating disincentives for further concentration of growth of cities.

(b)    What is the Optimal Settlement Size?: There is an overwhelming evidence in the literature that shows that cities cannot be allowed to grow indefinitely. Regimes that spur growth need to be restrained. The debates around settlement size revolve around three themes (a) limits to the economic benefits of agglomeration; (b) carrying capacity of cities; and (c) the ability to manage or govern cities efficiently. Such literature comes from planners (Wirth1938), sociologists (Merton1961), and ecologists and environmentalists (Rees 1992). The arguments are several: very large cities spawn crime and dysfunctionalities and produce ungovernable societies; they have very heavy environmental footprints; their size makes them unwieldy to manage. From this point of view, metros are big, bad cities which are becoming worse by the day.

(c)   Dependent Urbanisation: Several scholars (Safa 1974, for example) from the global South argued that the nature of urbanisation being experienced by developing countries was dependent on the developed world. Thus, features such as primacy, overurbanisation, and the huge numbers in informal work were actually linked to the processes of production and exchange among these countries. The unfairness of these structural conditions created dependencies as opposed to an “autonomous” process of urbanisation linked to indigenous evolution of economic, social and political systems of the kind the global North had experienced.

Phase II: Reconsideration of Role of Urbanisation (1990s-Present)

(a)    Unevenness is Inevitable: In 2009, the World Development Report (World Bank 2009) signalled a new approach towards understanding metros and the related issues of development. This approach entitled “New Economic Geography”(Fujita and Krugman 2004) argued that development is necessarily uneven. Certain spaces are more conducive to growth. The uneven gains of such development can be evened out through a process of migration. This thesis suggests that growth of large cities and metros is to be accepted as inevitable; policymakers and countries need to be prepared to deal with the same.

(b)Agglomeration is Positive and Cities are Engines of Growth: Since the turn of the millennium, the mainstream discourse has shifted to regard urbanisation as positive and metros as representing the engines of economic growth for the country. The new development mantra, based on the postulates of new economic geography and converted by the World Bank into policy prescriptions, is “enhance infrastructural investment in cities to enable them to be competitive and attract foreign investment”(World Bank 2009).

This shift in discourse has meant that a lion’s share of national investment as well one through foreign sources is being taken up by metros. These cities are also the key site for reforms aimed at creation of market-friendly ethos and efficiency of governance. The contemporary transformations in metros revolve around themes such as inter-city competition across the country and the world, “world-class” city ambitions, infrastructure development as a magnet for attracting investment and reforming governance to ensure friendliness to capital. The pace of these transformations seems to be quite rapid and spread across multiple realms. In the economy, it involves a shift from manufacturing to services, and formal to informal jobs. In geography, it implies restructuring of space towards clean and beautiful cities, and throwing the poor to periphery; for the society, it includes rising consumption and aspirations of middle class, rising inequality, and declining interaction across social groups. Politics has seen the rise of parastatals, decline of labour and mass movements, and the emergence of public-private partnerships, and so on (Banerjee-Guha 2009).

    The rapidity of these transformations is underlined by several studies which show that reforms are a slow and uncertain process; and several reforms are not actualised in metros due to legacies of political economies that are embedded in feudal structures (Chattaraj 2012) or due to the uncertainties of circuits of capital itself. Further, parallel to the circuits of globalisation, crime, culture, consumption and social life in metros are becoming more organised and characterised by greater control and risk aversion.

4. Small Town: A Metrocentric Lens

As opposed to metros where the population thresholds have been specified, there is noclear understanding of what is a small town. Popularly called by a variety of terms such as mofussil and kasbas, small towns house about 30% of the urban population. They have not received significant attention as the post-colonial period was characterised by the runaway growth of the metros.

It is only in the last couple of censuses that small towns, and especially, census towns have begun to engage the interest of researchers. The 2011 Census indicated that compared to 1363 census towns in 2001, the country now has 3893 census towns. Thus, more than 2532 new census towns were added to the country in last 10 years. After the current census, the growth of small towns has assumed a special interest because they represent one-third of the new urban growth, ie, equivalent to the growth of population in metros and 65% of the growth in urban areas since 2001 (Pradhan 2013).While the metros absorb a bulk of the population growth, the small towns represent the vast majority of the country’s urban scenario.

For a long time, it was thought that small towns are in the shadows of large metros; there were no distinct drivers for their growth (Rondinelli 1983). These macro views of small towns yield a picture that is consistent with the propositions of New Economic Geography (a set of theories that seek to explain agglomeration in contemporary context). According to this model, localities are not “free floating islands” and their growth is linked to the spill-over effects of the metro economy. Small towns, thus, have less diverse economies; services play a critical role with manufacturing largely being small scale. Governance and services are quite poor (Kundu et al 1999), poverty is widespread (Himanshu 2008) with few opportunities for mobility and little impetus for change.

On the social dimension too, there are few prospects of change. Several studies show that the small towns are characterised by a strong hold of caste, class and gender. Harriss-White (2003) comments that the masters of the countryside also rule the town. Institutions are more controlled and highly politicised. In a fairly compact society, where there is significant familiarity among inhabitants, caste continues to be a dominant principle of organising life. Patriarchy is a strong force. The local state itself is like an intermediary state, representing a coalition of interests that run through formal systems as well. Organised civil society is rare; oppositional voices are few.

5. Small Towns as Subaltern Urbanism?

Subalternism is a quest, a search for ideas and practices that have the potential to challenge the dominant system and move beyond the counter critique to a possibility of alternatives. It often invokes bottom up, rooted practices in a globally connected world to contest the finance-oriented, North-dominated global order.

Currently, a group of researchers (Denis et al 2013) have proposed small towns as themselves representing a subaltern development. These authors use the term “subaltern urbanisation” to refer to the process of settlement agglomeration that may or may not be recognised as urban and is not (a) dependent on the traditional important town or (b) a planned city. Thus, the authors are seeking to conceptualise urbanisation beyond processes of agglomeration defined by the new economic geography and also beyond places that are linked to direct state intervention.

This focuses attention on the multiple drivers of urbanisation in India and the role of historical factors and local markets. As opposed to the “romantic” version of small towns as the “other” of the big, bad city, and therefore, interested in the “unchanging” character of the small town, this contemporary version of subaltern urbanism embraces the transformations in the small town that may be unruly, outside the frame of the large actors such as state and large capital. This paradigm views these small towns as, instead, shaping their own destiny in a globalising world (Denis et al 2013).This is thus an alternate urbanisation story that is   distinct from the story of Indian urbanisation as dependent on top-down, global processes. It focuses on the level of a settlement system, subaltern in its conception. This current upsurge of interest in small towns brings to fore several questions that continue to be debated in social sciences. This section introduces some of these debates.

6. Debates around Small Town Urbanisation

Defining the Urban as a Binary of Rural

Satterthwaite and Tacoli (2003) through an examination of definitions of urban areas in several parts of the world point out that defining the rural and urban as binaries ignores the overlaps between the two as well as the scales of settlements that are intermediate and have features of both. This particularly applies to the case of small towns as they incorporate features of rural areas as well as those of larger urban areas. Such features include the nature of economies, state of housing, linkages of multiple kinds, culture and aspirations. They, therefore, argue for a more attention to rural-urban interactions and promotion of policies that could create more intermediate level settlements rather than the extreme divide between metros and villages.

The critical dimension of this debate for India is that villages have often come to be characterised by the “lack of” basic resources, while urban areas have resources by default. An attention to intermediacy and intermediate level settlements can redress this “negative” difference between the binary of rural and urban. Further, it points attention to the exchanges and transactions around water, food, labour, recreation, and thus, encourages better mutuality rather than one-way extraction and predation by the larger cities.

Multiple Drivers of Urbanisation

A large number of census towns are located in the vicinity of metros. However, as Pradhan (2013) shows, even among the new census towns in the proximity of metros, only 13% of the population of new census towns is in the vicinity of million plus cities. In fact, 45% of the new growth of census towns is in the vicinity of towns with population from 1, 00, 000-5, 00,000, while 15% of the new growth is in the vicinity of towns with population from 5,00,000-10,00000. This means that metropolitanisation is not an adequate explanation for all the demographic change in India. It also indicates that there are multiple factors that drive the growth of small towns. Further, many of these factors are explained in reference to states.

Some states like Maharashtra, Delhi, West Bengal, show the presence of urban primacy(Raman et al 2015). Their urban structure is top heavy with the presence of megacities at the top of the hierarchy and with urban development occurring along metropolitan corridors. The National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi, the Mumbai-Pune-Nasik triangle, the Kolkata-Jamshedpur corridor are a few examples of such megacity regions in which small towns are embedded within the dynamics of the metro. For example, while NOIDA, Gurgaon may have certain distinct development trajectories, their main driving force is Delhi. Similarly, towns like Ambernath, Kalyan, Bhayendar are highly influenced by the development dynamics of Mumbai.

In contrast, states like Punjab, Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan (Raman et al 2015) show a pattern that is much more diffuse. Gupta (1995) who studied the growth of small and medium towns in Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Haryana observes that one of the prime drivers for growth is intrastate migration. In Haryana, small town growth overlaps with agricultural development; in Bihar, it reflects the encroachment of human settlements over agriculture, while in Madhya Pradesh,the socioeconomic factors show a weak correlation with urbanisation.

Empirical studies within states do not suggest consistent findings. For example, Durba (2012) demonstrates the growth of outsourcing industries, especially sari embroidery along the NH117 from Kolkata to its rural West, and thus, the emergence of towns in the periphery of Kolkata. However, Chandrashekhar and Sharma (2014) suggest that most metropolitan sub-regions retain the bulk of the employment. There are others like Ghani et al (2012), who suggest that, industrial growth is moving towards the rural districts. Similarly, studies of towns in Tamil Nadu suggest that several small towns in the state such as Tirupur, Bhavani, Tiruchengode are experiencing rapid growth (Neve 2003). A study by TISS-Prayas in 2011 demonstrates that small towns in Maharashtra have multiple drivers of growth. These include towns like Sangli and Akola, which are important regional trade or agricultural centres, religious towns, and towns that have more mixed economies linked to administrative status and small-scale industrialisation like Ratnagiri. There are others like Bhiwandi which are in the vicinity of metros like Mumbai, but whose economies can be seen as a mix of endogenous trajectories thanks to cheap labour and power availability, and connectivity, as well as and those linked to shifts in the political economy of Mumbai. The latter include changes in industrial location policy, increase in real estate and labour prices in city that made composite textile mills unviable. Small towns thus have varied growth drivers,  sometimes linked to the immediate regions around them, at other times to direct linkages at national or even international level. However, the diversity of their economies tends to be low.

Transforming Small Towns in a Global Era

The overall neglect that surrounded the study of small towns and the perceived demographic patterns together contributed to the view that, while metros were constantly expanding and changing, small towns were stagnating and unchanging.

Several recent studies point to the fairly rapid transitions in both metros and small towns in various realms. Transformations in small towns are linked to changes in agricultural marketing and trade structures (Krishnamurthy and Kapur 2014), more gradual changes in accumulation patterns and growing transport and communication connectivity (Chari 2004). Prasad (2006) documents the changes in political economy of road construction in a small town in Kerala when the World Bank entered with global tendering and contracts that sought to bypass the local contractors of Ezhava caste who emerged in the colonial period. In spite of contestations from local capital; multinational capital could sweep aside these claims.

These transformations have produced new disconnects in some cases. Thus, Coelho and Vijayabaskar (2014) describes the various disconnects in infrastructure and modes of living in a town connected to global economy like Ambur in Tamil Nadu where the town still seems to be caught in poverty, indecent working conditions and poor infrastructure while creating islands of global lifestyle in outskirts of the town.

Several authors point out the continued importance of household and community relations in the economic practices in small towns (Neve 2003, Harriss-White 2003). In Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, for example, the backward class Gounder community mobilised to enter textiles and gradually emerged as a dominant actor in the economy of the town (Chari2004). In a similar vein, Raman (2014) points out the role of ‘internal’ processes and actors in the transformation of Tiruchengode in Tamil Nadu. These internal processes revolve around caste and other networks.

In Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh (Prasad-2012) urban politics revolves around inidgeneity – who is local and who is not. These changes are better explained by the endogenous growth theory which suggests that long-run economic growth is linked to forces internal to an economic system, particularly those that are linked to opportunities and incentives for technology and innovation (Aghion and Howitt 2005).

       These changes are, however, highly circumscribed. Caste is an important aggregator and enables linkages with finance and other forms of accumulation; however, it has also been observed that in industrial towns, the notion of community can embrace the entire town thereby stretching the boundary of caste (De Neve 2003).Thus in Tirupur, whose economy revolves around making Tshirts and other garments’ the industry and the population of the town can be seen in terms of a particular caste and the networks that it has been able to generate. Harriss-White (2003) points out that individual’s and community’s social location in traditional hierarchies continues to determine their ability to enter a particular economic sector and to accumulate.

The rise of the middle class has been particularly conspicuous in small towns where malls have started registering a presence and mobiles have widened the sphere of connectivity. Small towns are increasingly becoming critical to marketing strategists who see the potential of a huge emergent market (Robinson 2013).In the cultural realm too, small towns and the changes happening therein have captured the interest of film-makers who see them as located between tradition and change, aspiration and frustration. The recent spate of films such as Queen,Manu weds Tanu, are illustrative of the same.

Contesting the Urban Age Thesis

There were less than 3% urban inhabitants on earth about 300 years ago. In 1995, more than half the world’s population became urban, while it is estimated by the UN that 600 million have been added to this number post-1995. The UN further estimates that estimates that 1-5 million would be added to the urban population would be added every ten days till 2030(UN 2006). These and other foreboding statistics are being deployed with regularity across multiple domains to produce a meta-narrative of an “urban age.” Brenner and Schimd (2013:4) point out that the idea of the “urban age” has become the de rigeur frame of reference for everyone concerned, with the importance of cities to be the point of engagement in research, investment, policy and so on.

Attention to small towns points to the number and spread of settlements though various parts of the country. The findings of the recent census indicate that India is poised at a very crucial juncture. Its settlement structure is deep, complex and split almost equally between rural and urban and a range of urban. The “urban age” in India thus appears to be more of a “statistical  artefact” and very “chaotic” (Brenner and Schimd 2014:10-11) at its core. This raises new questions. Does the current Census of India indicate balanced urbanisation, or is it an indication of the conservative definitional norms used to define the urban? Is the current settlement balance linked to or in spite of policy? At this juncture, how do we proceed ahead? Will we recognise the importance of several intermediate level settlements and pay attention to them as future urban centres or will we be preoccupied with metros?

7. In Brief

Metros and small towns represent two ends of the urban settlement spectrum; however, research has been highly biased towards the metro, thereby making it the “dominant” discourse. An attention to small towns begins to suggest not only several new elements of settlement geography, but also the multiplicity of trajectories of urbanisation, and what it means for the residents of these geographies and how they shape their fortunes – a more granular, chaotic, globally connected process with several variants. It thus contests the unified inevitability of “urbanisation” that is being proposed as the final destination by proponents of urban age.

For Further Reading

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