During the last three decades, as population growth and migration have put intolerable and increasing pressure on India’s major cities, peri-urban development and satellite towns have emerged to relieve the pressure points and to become the drivers of social development in changed socio-ecological conditions. The real issue is related with the scale, both with respect to the absolute number of people living and the absolute decadal increase of urban population. This absolute increase in urban population in India has to be contextualized with respect to increasing inequality in economic, social and cultural opportunities between the rural and urban areas and changing socio-ecological realities of existing towns and their peripheries. Massive infrastructure projects, special economic zones, industrial clusters, real estate and housing projects have made urban areas attractive for the migrants to look for opportunities for survival due to increasing urban rural differentials. However these transformations are not uniform across space and tend to get clustered around a few cities where the economies of scale and agglomeration are relatively favourable leading to massive migration and concentration of population in few such areas like the provincial capitals, other intermediate cities and large agglomerations like the National Capital Region of Delhi. Many of the satellite towns have merged with the main cities and acts as one functional unit, leading thereby to conflicts and contestations.
In this context, I want to explore the tensions, opportunities and contradictions emerging in these places particularly in relation to the different actors, agencies and tiers of government involved, new urban dwellers and established rural farming communities, environmental and infrastructure hazards (for example flood risk, building safety, and air pollution), personal security, patterns of integration and segregation, citizenship and exclusion in the local communities.
Mots clés : Spatial Transformation|Human Security |Delhi|Peri-urban
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