Serving UIC's Great Cities Commitment: Solutions for Today's Urban Challenges

Great Cities Institute is proud to announce the publication by Oxford University Press of Understanding India’s New Approach to Spatial Planning and Development: A Salient Shift?  GCI Senior Fellow, Sanjeev Vidyarthi is co-author along with Shishir Mathur and Sandeep Agrawal.

In the face of the many changes in India’s rapidly developing urban – and rural areas, it is a remarkable time for such a book on India’s spatial planning to be published. The range of diverse settlement patterns and recent regime shifts in its polity set the stage for this examination of the complex web of infrastructure finance and development and local planning practices. In this book, the authors study regional cities and rural settlements, taking us further into India and past the largest cities of Kolkata, Mumbai, and Delhi.

Underlying the empirical depictions of planning outcomes is the ongoing, but significant debate within India – tensions that reverberate across the world – between inclusive, democratic development principles vs market fundamentalism. Though at times, nuanced, the clash of values are shaping India’s “existing and emerging settlements.”  From their interdisciplinary and comprehensive research, Professor Vidyarthi and his co-authors, “skillfully draw out useful insights for scholars and practitioners alike.”

This important book:

• Breaks fresh ground by locating the ongoing shift in India’s approach to spatial planning in the overall trajectory of country’s post-independence urban development model anchored upon the Nehruvian ideal of centralized planning.
• Illustrates how the tensions between democratic and market oriented impulses are shaping India’s existing and emergent settlements in complex ways that are messy, uneven, and largely invisible while explaining how the country in trying to channelize its urbanization toward a more egalitarian and environmentally sustainable trajectory. In doing so, the volume offers lessons not only for scholars of India but the developing world more broadly.

Understanding India’s New Approach to Spatial Planning and Development: A Salient Shift? Is released at a time when many of us are paying close attention to the shifting struggles in the shaping of human settlements.

If you would like to hear more about this exciting new book, please join us for our first Cities across the Globe activity of the 2017-2018 academic year.  Sanjeev will speak about his book at noon on Wednesday, September 6, 2017 at Great Cities Institute. 

About the authors (From the Cover)

Sanjeev Vidyarthi is Associate Professor, Urban Planning and Policy and a senior fellow of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA.
Shishir Mathur is Associate Dean of Research in the College of Social Sciences and a professor in the Urban and Regional Planning Department at San Jose State University, California, USA.
Sandeep K. Agrawal is a Professor and inaugural Director of the Urban and Regional Planning Program at the University of Alberta, Canada.

At its 47^th annual meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 19-22, 2017, the Urban Affairs Association awarded Rachel Weber, Great Cities Institute Fellow and Professor of Urban Planning and Policy at UIC, the “Best Book” in the field of urban affairs/urban studies.  According to the association, “The purpose of the award is to encourage high-quality research on urban issues and reward cogent writing on urban affairs.”  Dr. Weber received the award for her book, From Boom to Bubble:  How Finance Built the New Chicago (University of Chicago Press), which “investigates the causes and effects of the dizzying building booms that occur when real estate development financial markets, and city planning all operate in overdrove to rapidly erect new structure and demolish older ones.”  Congratulations, Rachel!

The annual conference of UAA attracts urban studies scholars from across the U.S. and includes many international attendees as well.  Several researchers from UIC attended the conference.  GCI’s Timothy Imeokparia presented his analysis on “Bringing Rigor to Urban Planning Scholarship:  The Need for Conceptual Integration,” and Matt Wilson presented GCI’s work on “Economic Restructuring and Youth Employment: Implications for Effective Policy Prescriptions.”  Urban Planning and Policy Professors John Betancur and Janet Smith presented on neighborhood change and Public Administration Professors Michael Pagano and Jered Carr also spoke on panels.  GCI Director, Teresa Córdova, added to the list of UIC researchers in attendance.

The book exhibit was tremendous and a great way to learn about some of the most recent research on cities.  Several films were also showcased.

There were many interesting panels on an array of urban topics including transportation, infrastructure, housing, income inequality, urban design, neighborhood change, etc. An opening plenary included local officials and activists, including Minneapolis City Councilor (Alondra Cano).   A particular favorite of ours was a panel of European scholars on “Governing Urban Crises and Austerity:  Lessons from a Cross-National Study.”  Cities discussed included Dublin, Barcelona, Athens, Leicester and Montreal, Canada.

And speaking of Canada, next year’s conference of the Urban Affairs Association will be in Toronto, April 4-7, 2018.