Ashima Sood
Currently Associate Professor at Anant National University, Ashima Sood studies urban policy and governance in the Indian context. Sood’s research lies at the intersection of institutional economics and urban and development studies. It combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine privatized forms of urban governance and informal public spaces in India. Sood's research has received recognition, fellowships and grants from international and national funders such as the Azim Premji University Foundation, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, the Centre de Science Humaines and the India Foundation for the Arts, among others. Her work has been published in scholarly outlets such as Urban Studies, Cities, Territory, Politics and Governance, alongside many others. She studied at the Delhi School of Economics, the University of California-Davis and Cornell University and was Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow at the Oxford Department of International Development over April-July 2022. In Winter 2023, Sood was Visiting Professor at the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University.
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (7)
Uploads
Papers by Ashima Sood
regulatory reform. With the cycle rickshaw sector as a case study, it argues that the punitive regulatory framework governing the sector embodies the dualist or even parasitic models that inform policy on informal services more broadly. Assessing the larger viability and
contribution of informal sector activities requires more attention to local and sector-specific micro-processes.
regulatory reform. With the cycle rickshaw sector as a case study, it argues that the punitive regulatory framework governing the sector embodies the dualist or even parasitic models that inform policy on informal services more broadly. Assessing the larger viability and
contribution of informal sector activities requires more attention to local and sector-specific micro-processes.
special issue, we invoke the concept of the periphery to attend to diverse and heterogeneous forms of extended urbanization that are taking shape in India. Instead of considering the periphery as a spatially fixed zone, hinged to the geographies of metropolitan centers, for instance, we mobilize the notion of the periphery as a conceptual and territorial threshold that allows us to explore the urbanisms unfolding across the country. For us, the periphery, or the peri-urban as it is often referred to, may be located on the edges of metropolitan cities and entangled with their regimes of
labor, capital, and governance, or it may be further afield, in smaller towns and settlements and enmeshed with agrarian and rural rhythms and dynamics that propel such peripheral urbanization. Irrespective of their location, amid intense competition for land and other resources, peripheries have not only become key sites of contestation, social exclusion, and speculation but they have also come to embody hope
and aspirations for diverse social groups. They are attractive to investors seeking to capture gains from rapidly rising land value, to migrants who come from rural areas to live and work in the peripheries, as well as to upwardly mobile city-dwellers who have placed their bets on materializing their middle-class dreams and aspirations in these urbanizing frontiers. Located materially and symbolically at the intersection of multiple modalities of rural, urban, and agrarian; of desire and displacement; of loss
and possibilities, the peripheries fully embody and give expression to Doreen Massey’s (2005) conception of space as “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity” (p. 9).
In contemporary India, the impetus behind new cities has been reworked by the prominence of private real estate actors. One compelling and emblematic image of millennial urban transformation is the high-rise gated community. Promising high-quality infrastructure and ‘amenities’, aspirational lifestyles and sanitised vistas of work and leisure, these housing developments signal a decisive break from older ways of living in the Indian city. This discontinuity is also apparent in the geographic location of these enclaves, which are largely a feature of the peri-urban and ‘greenfield’ frontier areas—the Gurgaons and Greater Noidas, Navi Mumbais, Rajarhats, Whitefields and Cyberabads, Lavasas and Sri Citys.
Shaped by real-estate dynamics and policy-promoted growth agendas, especially around high-end services sector, greenfield urban development has brought with it economic and structural change. India’s Greenfield Urban Future explores this ‘urban frontier’ and the constellations of public–private interests underpinning it through ten essays by urban scholars who have remained deeply involved in their respective field sites while engaging in debates within global urban studies. The themes are wide-ranging and varied: from struggles over land acquisition and real-estate dynamics to emerging forms of governance and place-making in these sites of township development.
Spanning diverse geographies across the country, from metropolitan hubs to industrial corridors, this collection offers a multifaceted understanding of greenfield urban development in India.