Urbanization from Within

My forthcoming book builds a theory of urban transition from 21st-century India. Urbanization is usually narrated as a tale of migration – mass migration from rural areas to swelling cities. But the proliferation and growth of cities in the 21st century will not only result from this classic force of urbanization. There is another kind of urbanization unfolding: the transformation of agrarian villages into urban towns through internal population growth, a bootstrapped non-farm economy, and interwoven processes of social change—a phenomenon I term urbanization from within. In this process, urbanization is still linked to rural-urban mobility, but rather than the migrant’s destination, it is the migrant’s origin that is urbanizing, fueled by the circular flow of people and the skills, resources, and expectations they carry and transmit to their hometowns. I root this work in a study of India, but I argue that it is related to a set of global forces shaping 21st-century urban transitions in and beyond India.