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Urbanization beyond the metropolis: three papers on urbanization patterns and their planning implications in the contemporary global south

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Urbanization Beyond the Metropolis
Three Papers on Urbanization Patterns and their Planning Implications
in the Contemporary Global South
by
Gregory F. Randolph

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(URBAN PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT)

May 2023

Copyright 2023 Gregory F. Randolph
ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Tables ..............................................................................................................................................iii
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................................ iv
Abstract........................................................................................................................................................ v
Chapter 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1
Chapter 2. Urbanization Beyond the Metropolis: Planning for a Large Number of Small Places
in the Global South .................................................................................................................................... 9
Chapter 3. Does urbanization depend on in-migration? Demography, mobility, and India’s
urban transition ........................................................................................................................................ 36
Chapter 4. Planning the ‘ruralopolis’ in India: Circular migration, survival entrepreneurship,
and the subversive non-farm economy ................................................................................................ 66
Chapter 5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 94
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 98

iii

List of Tables
Table 1. Variables, Definitions, Sources for Urbanization and Migration Analysis ....................... 49
Table 2. Consistent Districts of Rapid Urbanization ........................................................................... 57
Table 3. Migration in Districts of Rapid Urbanization ....................................................................... 58
Table 4. Non-farm businesses in Mansurchak ..................................................................................... 86

iv

List of Figures
Figure 1: Distribution of total population by settlement type, world and income groups, 2015 . 21
Figure 2: Share of total population in towns and urban centers (by size classes), 2015................. 22
Figure 3: Distribution of urban center population by size classes and regions, 1975-2015
(unchanging cohorts based on 2015 population) ................................................................................. 24
Figure 4: Distribution of urban center population, China & India, 1975-2015 (unchanging
cohorts based on 2015 population) ........................................................................................................ 24
Figure 5: Number of urban centers by size category, 1975-2015 ....................................................... 26
Figure 6. Net Migration, Structural Transformation, and Densification across Consistent
Districts ...................................................................................................................................................... 54
Figure 7: The Urban Morphology of Begusarai District ..................................................................... 79

v

Abstract
Most contemporary urbanization is unfolding in the Global South, motivating a “Southern
turn” in urban studies. The increasing focus on cities and urbanization processes in Global
South countries—broadly defined as low- and middle-income countries—has ignited a spirited
debate among scholars regarding generalizability in urban social science and the historical
specificity of urbanization in the South. In three distinct papers, this dissertation engages these
theoretical questions through an approach focused on the bottom of the urban hierarchy. At
three different scales—global, national and local—the three papers ask what we can learn about
contemporary urbanization in the Global South by focusing on non-metropolitan places: towns,
small cities, and urbanizing villages. Collectively, they advance the following contributions: (1)
contrary to prevalent claims in existing scholarship, urban populations in the Global South are
more concentrated in towns and small cities than are urban populations in the Global North; (2)
in India, much of the urbanization occurring at the bottom of the urban hierarchy is the result of
natural population growth rather than in-migration motivated by industrialization; and (3) both
the distribution of urban population in small and urbanizing settlements and the demographic
and economic context of these settlements hold significant implications for where and what
type of planning capacity is required to shape the global urban transition. The evidence points
to historically specific trajectories of urbanization in the South, while also demonstrating that
fundamental and global forces, such as demographic transition and technological change, shape
urbanization across time and space.
1

Chapter 1. Introduction

The “Southern turn” in urban studies
Over the past two decades, urban studies has embarked on a “Southern turn,” (Rao,
2006), as urban scholars in planning, geography, sociology, anthropology, and economics have
increasingly directed their attention to cities and urbanization processes in the Global South.
This new direction has been motivated by a demographic fact: most of the urbanization
underway in the world today is occurring outside Europe and North America. Across
disciplines, there is also a sense that historical and geographic factors may conspire to shape
cities and urbanization processes in ways that diverge from the experiences of the Global
North—both presently and during its urban transitions, which unfolded mostly in the 19
th
and
early 20
th
centuries. For example, in urban economics, Chauvin et al. (2017: 17) raise concerns
with “a knowledge mismatch, for urban economists have predominantly focused on the cities of
the wealthy West” (17). In urban planning, (Watson, 2009) argues that the “techno-managerial”
approach to planning in the North is not appropriate in settings where most people live in
conditions of informality. If this is the case, then emerging patterns of urbanization in the
Global South merit close examination for two reasons: (1) they may present novel urban policy
and planning challenges, and (2) they may offer new theoretical insights into how and why
humans are evolving into an increasingly urban species.
Despite broad support among scholars for the empirical project required by a “Southern
turn,” a spirited debate has emerged regarding the underlying assumptions of that project. On
the one hand, one strand of scholarship presumes that urbanization is a global historical process
2

and that the goal of urban social science is to develop and refine theories that elucidate its
mechanisms across time and space (Fox, 2012; Scott & Storper, 2015). Along these lines, many
view urbanization in the Global South as adding to the evidentiary base on which a global
knowledge of cities can be constructed (Randolph & Storper, 2022). On the other hand, another
set of scholars, inspired by postcolonial and postmodern theory, view the study of the urban
South as an opportunity to “blast open theoretical geographies” (Roy, 2005), to adopt new,
alternative epistemologies for studying urbanism, and to resist attempts to generalize across
time and space (Robinson & Roy, 2016; Roy, 2016; Sheppard et al., 2013).
This debate has several shortcomings. With some exceptions (Bhan, 2019), scholarship
arguing for a Southern urban theory has struggled to move beyond iconoclasm—lacking clarity
on what exactly its new urban epistemologies are, what new knowledge they produce, and how
this knowledge might be mobilized to shape urban governance or quality of life for residents of
Global South cities (Mabin, 2014). Meanwhile, scholars who seek a general, global urban theory
sometimes advance research agendas formulated in the North—e.g. investigating spatial
equilibrium in Global South urban systems (Chauvin et al., 2017)—before asking whether there
are other, equally valid and relevant questions to be examined in the South. Both groups of
scholars tend to fall into the trap of “metrocentricity” (Bunnell & Maringanti, 2010), focusing on
only the largest and most visible metropolitan centers in the Global South and ignoring a vast
array of smaller towns and cities where urbanization processes may have their own story to tell.

3

Seeing the urban South through a non-metropolitan lens
The three essays in this collection intend to address some of these shortcomings through
original empirical and theoretical work. They are motivated by the rationale introduced
above—that urbanization in the Global South may present novel planning and policy
challenges as well as new insights for urban theory. The overarching question that connects
them is: What can we learn about the nature of Global South urbanization by examining the base of the
urban hierarchy—i.e., the smallest towns and cities, including those where the process of urban genesis is
still unfolding? In other words, these papers use non-metropolitan urban places—such as
urbanizing villages, towns, and small cities—as an entry point for examining contemporary
Global South urbanization. Specifically, they are concerned with the underlying causes of urban
growth, its spatial distribution, and the associated implications for urban planning and policy.
While the first paper takes a global approach, the latter two examine India as a case study.
These papers are guided by a few foundational premises:
(a) A priori assumptions of Global South difference cannot be made based on historical
period or geographic location alone; rather, they must be demonstrated through
empirical social science.
(b) The Global South and North are both influenced by contemporary global forces that
transcend geographic boundaries. If urbanization in the Global South has attributes
that distinguish it from urbanization earlier and elsewhere, they are produced by the
interaction of these global forces, such as technological change, with local factors,
such as culture and institutions.
4

(c) Non-metropolitan urban places—such as urbanizing villages, towns, and small
cities—are important sites of inquiry in investigating the urban Global South. We
should not assume that their processes of urbanization simply mimic those of
metropolitan areas at a smaller scale (Denis & Zérah, 2017).
(d) Approaches to urban planning in the contemporary Global South must be calibrated
to grapple with the underlying mechanisms of urban growth as well as its spatial
distribution across settlements of different sizes.

Three Papers, Global to Local
The three papers in this compendium grapple with these overarching research concerns at three
scales. The first takes a global and comparative approach, examining the distribution of urban
population and urban growth across urban systems, and then considering the implications of
this distribution for urban planning practice and pedagogy. This paper proposes a revival of
“barefoot planning” as an approach for providing planning capacity to the thousands of new
and emerging urban settlements throughout the Global South, where formal planning
institutions are relatively weak or even nonexistent. The second paper utilizes multiple data
sources to conduct a district-level analysis of urbanization and migration patterns in India, with
the goal of interrogating one possible dimension of Global South difference: the relationship
between urbanization and human mobility. This paper provides empirical evidence for a
phenomenon I term “urbanization from within”—villages morphing into dense, populous and
economically complex settlements, i.e. urban towns, through the weight of their own internal
population growth rather than through an influx of migrants. The final paper utilizes a
5

qualitative case study of a district in India to investigate the urban and planning context of
places “urbanizing from within.” What follows is a synthesis of each paper’s empirical
questions, methodology, findings, and implications.

Paper 1
Urbanization beyond the metropolis: Planning for a large number of small places in the Global South
Empirical
Questions
How are urban population and its growth distributed across settlements
of different sizes? What do these patterns reveal about the urban planning
challenges of the contemporary Global South?
Methodology • Statistical analysis of Global Human Settlements Layer, a novel dataset
developed by the European Commission to measure human settlement
patterns globally through a harmonized categorical variable for degree
of urbanization
• Critical literature review assessing state of knowledge in planning for
smaller and urbanizing settlements in the Global South
Findings • A large share of the Global South’s population is concentrated in towns and
smaller urban centers. Global South countries have a larger proportion of
urban dwellers living in towns and small and medium-sized cities,
meaning urban systems in the South are more “bottom-heavy” than in
the North—contrary to popular perception and previous claims in the
literature.
• The overall distribution of urban populations is relatively stable. Larger
settlements are not growing faster than smaller ones, i.e. a settlement’s
size does not predict its rate of growth.
• The number of urban centers is expanding rapidly. Between 1975 and 2015,
the global number of urban centers increased by 4,210—almost 4,000 of
which were located in the Global South. Globally, the number of cities
with between 50,000 and 100,000 people grew by 1,600 while the
number with 100,000 to 300,000 people increased by over 1,800.
Meanwhile, the number of megacities, agglomerations of at least 10
million people, grew by 18—from 10 to 28.
6

Implications &
Importance
• While previous research correctly identifies the lack of large secondary
cities in many Global South countries, it has neglected to see that this
“missing middle” leads to demographic concentration in towns and
small cities, not megacities.
• Planning must face the significant challenge of shaping urban growth
in a large number of small urban places where professional planning
capacities are limited.
• A revival of the barefoot planning approach could help meet the
challenge of planning for a large number of small urban places. This
approach seeks to bridge grassroots engagement with technical
planning expertise by training a cohort of community members to play
certain roles generally reserved for professional planners.

Paper 2
Does urbanization depend on in-migration? Demography, mobility, and India's urban transition
Empirical
Questions
Are parts of India urbanizing—in the conventional sense of becoming
dense, populous, and economically complex—without experiencing net in-
migration? If so, what are possible causes and consequences of this trend?
Methodology • Critical literature review assessing core assumptions in urban theory
regarding the relationship between urbanization and migration
• Statistical and spatial analysis of urbanization and migration patterns in
India through construction of district-level variables measuring:
1. Population agglomeration (Data source: Global Human Settlements
Layer)
2. Non-farm employment (Data source: Indian Census)
3. Net migration (Data source: National Sample Survey)
Findings • Many places in India that see little to no permanent in-migration—and in
fact are net senders of migrants—are nevertheless experiencing
urbanization, defined as the growth and densification of population and
built-up area and the advent of a non-agricultural economy. Instead, their
physical, economic, and demographic change is propelled by natural
population growth. I call this process “urbanization from within.”
• This pattern is heavily concentrated in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plain,
notably the states of Bihar and West Bengal, and the ring of lowland
areas that encircle Bangladesh—among the poorest and most densely
populated regions in India.
• However, I also find that other kinds of migration are likely facilitating
the urban transformation of these locations, notably temporary out-
migration for work purposes.
7

Implications
& Importance
• This phenomenon implies that urban scholars may need to reconsider the
relationship between migration and urbanization, which is largely
understood through reference to urban transitions in the historical Global
North where—due to the demographic conditions of the time—
urbanization could not have occurred without mass migration to cities.
• Urbanization from within may represent a phenomenon unique to 21
st
-
century urban transitions in particular countries of the Global South.
• Because urban theory views migration as not only an immediate cause of
urbanization, but connects it to urbanization’s outcomes, urbanization
from within may have social and economic consequences that differ from
those produced by urbanization through massive population transfers.
• Investigating the causal underpinnings of this phenomenon relies on
addressing a fundamental question: Why are so few people permanently
migrating out of areas urbanizing from within, opting instead for
temporary out-migration? Possible explanations include: labor market
polarization, exclusive political cultures in large cities, social insurance
tied to rural origins, and historical demography.

Paper 3
Planning the “ruralopolis:” Circular migration, agrarian relations, and survival entrepreneurship in
urbanizing India
Empirical
Questions
What unique challenges arise for planning in historically agrarian, high-
density regions now experiencing the social and economic restructuring of
urbanization? How does their agrarian heritage, and the fact that urban
density preceded the advent of an urban economy, shape the planning
context? Does urbanization driven by natural population growth, rather
than in-migration, require a different approach to planning?
Methodology • Qualitative case study of Begusarai District in the Indian state of Bihar,
involving: unstructured background interviews, semi-structured
interviews, and focus group discussions.
• Data analysis through open coding
Findings • Temporary out-migration for work in other parts of India is a widespread
practice among men in urbanizing locations in Begusarai District.
• The growth of the non-farm economy and the shift to non-agricultural
land uses are linked to circular out-migration in Begusarai District –
through demand for non-farm goods and services fueled by remittances,
and the emergence of new non-farm enterprises enabled by return
migrants’ skills and savings.
• The nature of the non-farm economy suggests long-run challenges to
promoting opportunity-rich forms of economic development: most non-
8

farm businesses in these settlements are sole-proprietorships; the non-
agricultural sector is largely composed of service providers and retailers
and lacks evidence of cluster development or sectoral specialization.
• The local non-farm economy is subverting traditional caste and religious
hierarchies. It opens channels of wealth creation outside agriculture,
where hierarchical caste relations persist. Most non-farm enterprises in
urbanizing settlements are run and patronized by those from households
of out-migrants, who are from lower-caste, historically marginalized
groups.
Implications
& Importance
• Locations like Begusarai District represent a planning context that differs
from the migrant-dense locations where most planning knowledge is
generated. These include:
• Different population dynamics (high rates of temporary out-
migration), leading to different predictors of economic and land-use
change.
• Lower levels of tenure insecurity
• Different economic development context: central challenge is to
transform remittance-led growth of an unspecialized and non-tradable
local economy into more sustainable forms of economic development
that can generate higher-quality opportunities for workers.
• Higher levels of informality, with fewer opportunities for revenue
generation by the local state.
• Traditional agrarian systems of social stratification are likely to be
determinants of where and how urban growth occurs.

9

Chapter 2. Urbanization Beyond the Metropolis: Planning for a Large
Number of Small Places in the Global South
1

Abstract
How are urban population and its growth distributed across urban settlements of different
sizes? In the Global South, this is a critical planning question, yet its answer is muddled by
contradictory claims in the literature and inconsistent data. Using a new dataset measuring
urbanization from 1975 to 2015, we find that urban populations in the South are less
concentrated in megacities than in the North—contrary to conventional wisdom. Given an
explosion in the number (not simply size) of urban settlements in the South, we suggest
reviving the concept of “barefoot planning” as an approach for empowering communities
beyond the metropolis to shape the urbanization process.

1. Introduction
The trope associated with the “developing world” was once a rural village, stuck in an
unchanging, “pre-modern” past. More recently, this trope has been replaced with another: vast,
sprawling megacities teeming with tens of millions of people, most concentrated in slums (M.
Davis, 2007). Popular media give the impression that the urbanization unfolding across the

1
This paper was published in Journal of Planning Education and Research, October 2020, and co-authored with Chandan Deuskar.
Randolph, G. F., & Deuskar, C. (2020). Urbanization beyond the Metropolis: Planning for a Large Number of Small Places in the
Global South. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 0739456X2097170. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X20971705
10

Global South is heavily concentrated in the largest urban agglomerations, and that the future is
not only urban, but indeed defined by the megacity (German & Pyne, 2010; Ward, 2018). For
urban planning, this would suggest that the biggest challenge to be confronted in the 21
st

century revolves around planning and governing a limited number of very large cities.
This article asks a set of empirical questions to test these assumptions: How are urban
populations distributed within countries in the Global South, and how is this distribution
changing? Are urban populations concentrated, or concentrating, in the largest metropolitan
areas in rapidly urbanizing countries? We then consider what these trends mean for planning in
the 21
st
-century Global South.
For planning, both practical and epistemological concerns motivate the question of
where urbanization is occurring. Planning must examine whether the resources and capacities
to shape urbanization are being developed in places experiencing the fastest growth. The
structure of urban systems may also influence what planning approaches are most relevant in a
given country context. Demography also drives research agendas more generally. For example,
scholars have often framed their calls for a “Southern turn” (Rao, 2006) in urban studies by
citing the demographic fact that most urbanization is now occurring in countries of the South
(Parnell & Oldfield, 2014).
Yet the literature offers competing claims on the straightforward empirical questions of
how urban populations are distributed in the Global South, and how those distributions are
changing over time. One reason for the lack of consensus is that, until recently, there existed no
harmonized time-series data measuring the population of urban areas, including the smallest
urban settlements, over time using consistent definitions. In our analysis, we use a new data
11

source that fills this gap, the Global Human Settlements (GHS) database (Florczyk et al., 2019),
which planning scholars have not yet extensively utilized. As we discuss, the GHS is a
significant improvement on United Nations statistics on urban areas, the most commonly used
data for analyzing urbanization patterns.
Our analysis of GHS data underscores a phenomenon crucial to planning in the Global
South: the proliferation of new, spatially independent urban areas. While the number of
megacities—agglomerations of more than 10 million—grew by 17 between 1975 and 2015 in
low- and middle-income countries, the number of cities of 50,000 to 300,000 people in the same
countries grew by 3,160. Over the same period, growth in the population of low- and middle-
income countries living in towns—small, medium-density urban settlements where some
planning functions are necessary—was greater than the population growth of the megacities in
these countries.
We also find that, in contrast with claims frequently made in the literature, urban
populations are not more concentrated in megacities in the South as compared to the North. The
fact that the Global South hosts most of the planet’s largest cities is a reflection of overall
population more than urban population distribution. In fact, towns and small and medium-
sized cities are a particularly important part of the urban landscape in low-income and lower-
middle-income countries.
Our findings suggest that planning’s biggest 21
st
-century challenge revolves around
shaping urban growth in a large number of small places, as opposed to a small number of large
places. As our literature review illustrates, smaller cities in the Global South are among the most
resource-constrained urban areas in the world when it comes to planning capacities. In the
12

argument that follows, we call for creative strategies to ensure that core principles of planning,
such as inclusion and sustainability, find advocates in the thousands of emerging cities that lie
beyond metropolitan areas and megacities. Specifically, we propose a revival of the concept of
“barefoot planning” (Dix, 1980; Oberlander, 1987)—an approach that would provide training in
basic planning-related skills to a cohort of citizens in small towns and cities, empowering them
to perform some roles traditionally reserved for professional planners.
This article is organized as follows. First, our literature review examines competing
claims surrounding the distribution of urban growth in the South and explains how data
constraints have limited our understanding of the importance of towns and small cities. We also
consider what urban scholars know of small cities in the South and their specific planning
contexts. After describing the data, we present the results of our analysis of urban population
distributions across countries and regions, which highlight the persistence and proliferation of
towns and small cities. Finally, we consider planners’ role in shaping urbanization in these
geographies, and describe why the framework of barefoot planning balances the need for
coordinated and grassroots approaches to planning in emerging urban environments.

2. Literature Review
This paper addresses two issues of importance to planning scholars and practitioners:
the distribution of urban growth in the Global South, in particular the demographic weight of
towns and small cities; and the planning implications of a dramatic expansion in number of
urban settlements at the bottom of the urban hierarchy. In this section, we review literature
relevant to each of these themes.
13

2.1 Small cities in urban systems of the South: competing claims and methodological constraints
In the mid-20
th
century, as most Global South countries became independent from
colonial powers, development scholars grew concerned about “primate” cities that held
dominant economic and political positions within their respective countries (Berry, 1961). These
scholars argued that underdevelopment led to urban systems that transgressed Zipf’s Law
(Zipf, 1941), i.e. rank-size urban hierarchies with log-normal distributions. While the causal and
normative claims of this literature have been called into question (Sovani, 1964), the notion that
urban systems in the South are “top-heavy”—with urban populations highly concentrated in
the biggest cities—has proven durable (Sheppard, 2014). Henderson (2002) writes: “The rapid
urbanization in many developing countries over the past half century seems to have been
accompanied by excessively high levels of concentration of the urban population in very large
cities” (89).
However, these claims contrast with others who argue that, if anything, countries in the
Global South do not have large enough cities. In some countries, scholars find that rank-size
regularities would predict bigger cities at the top of the urban hierarchy (Chauvin et al., 2017);
and in other contexts, scholars argue more normatively that the economic benefits of
urbanization require bigger cities (Naude & Krugell, 2003; World Bank, 2009a). On the question
of where growth is occurring most swiftly, we observe similar contradictions. Hall and Pain
(2006) argue that the entire urban hierarchy has “shifted upwards” (9) in favor of megacity
regions and Castells (2010) claims that the metropolitan region is now a “universal urban form”
(2739). However, other scholars of urban growth, such as Angel (2012), find that “we should not
14

expect larger cities to grow any faster than smaller ones”—a restatement of Gibrat’s Law
(Gibrat, 1931)—and argue that megacities “should not command our undivided attention”
(117).
Data constraints are one factor underlying these contradictions. In particular, scholars
have lacked a clear understanding of how much of the world’s population lives in small urban
settlements, as these geographies often lie on the cusp of rural-urban binaries and fall outside
the bounds of inquiry for urban scholars. United Nations data, which are widely used in
analyses of urbanization, have been critiqued for using a collection of unharmonized, national
definitions of urban (Roberts et al., 2017). There is another issue, however, with these data:
given that they lack disaggregated data for urban areas of less than 300,000 people, they offer
little clarity on how populations are distributed at the bottom end of the urban hierarchy.
Similarly, Angel et al. (2016) create a global sample of cities, intended to represent the “universe
of cities,” but only include those with at least 100,000 people. In addition, methodological issues
sometimes result in an underestimate of small cities’ role in urban systems. For example, owing
to limitations with settlement-level data, Chauvin et al. (2017) treat district-level urban
population in India as a single city. This effectively collapses together functionally and spatially
distinct small urban settlements in most of the country’s districts, thereby artificially inflating
the average city size. As we discuss below, the GHS data we utilize in this paper address many
of these data and methodological constraints.

15

2.2 Understanding and planning the non-metropolitan urban South
What do we know about urban places beyond the metropolis, especially in the Global
South? In general, scholars argue that small cities are neglected in urban studies, limiting our
understanding of their specificities (Garrett-Petts, 2005; Ofori-Amoah, 2007). Bell and Jayne
(2009), for example, argue that world city theories (Friedmann, 1986; Sassen, 1991) have
relegated smaller places to a marginal position in urban studies. Zérah and Denis (2017) and
Cook (2018) note that despite growth in urban scholarship from the Global South, small cities
have received relatively scarce treatment in this literature as well.
Despite their relative neglect in urban studies, multiple strands of literature offer useful
entry points into understanding towns and small cities of the South and their planning contexts.
The oldest of these threads, which originated in the 1980s, emphasizes the critical role of towns
and small cities in the Global South in alleviating poverty by linking rural and urban economies
and promoting the symbiotic development of both (Hardoy & Satterthwaite, 1986; Rondinelli,
1983, 1988). These arguments continue to echo throughout the development studies and
development economics literatures (Christiaensen & Todo, 2013; Gibson et al., 2017;
Satterthwaite & Tacoli, 2003).
While small cities of the South may have potential to act as centers of economic
development, planning scholars have argued that they also face specific obstacles to inclusive
urbanization. In general, scholars warn of small cities’ susceptibility to elite capture (De Neve &
Donner, 2006; K. L. Sharma, 2003). Kudva (2015) finds higher levels of income inequality in
small cities as compared to large cities in India, and both Kudva and Singh (2006) find that
institutions of constructed difference—caste, gender and religion—are especially powerful
16

influences on small Indian cities. In South Africa, Giraut & Maharaj (2002) find the drawing of
municipal boundaries of small and secondary cities to be heavily influenced by the legacies of
racial apartheid. These conditions necessitate a progressive role for planning in small cities.
As scholars have highlighted, however, smaller cities in lower-income countries have scant
resources and planning capacities. In a study of Morocco, Kenya and Vietnam, Tuts (1998) finds
that human resource constraints—especially with regard to urban planning—inhibit the ability
of municipal governments in small cities to implement sustainability initiatives. In his work on
towns and small cities in West Bengal, Rumbach (2016) finds that disaster management
institutions, knowledge, and capacity are lacking—even following decentralization reforms
intended to empower local governments. Zérah & Denis (2017) argue that urban local bodies in
small Indian cities are alienated from decisions around land use by top-down regional
megaprojects.
Despite these constraints in the formal planning apparatus, small cities in the South are
not “unplanned.” Citizen groups often step in to close infrastructure and governance gaps. For
example, Bryceson's (2011) study of Katoro, a market town in Tanzania, reveals how private,
informal electricity networks have expanded service provision and spurred small-scale
industries. In towns of north India, Sharma (2012) finds that neighborhood committees have
been successful, albeit at a small scale, in organizing street sanitation and transforming vacant
lots into community gardens. Pasquini (2019), in her study of Karonga, Malawi, suggests that
the dense local networks of civil society that characterize smaller cities enable innovative
strategies for climate change governance, in contrast to larger African cities where climate
change governance is influenced more by global knowledge networks. These examples signal
17

the potential of harnessing community-based initiatives in efforts to improve the planning
capacity of small cities in the South.

3. Data and definitions
Our empirical analysis of the distribution of urban populations in the Global South uses the
European Commission’s Global Human Settlements (GHS) database, which employs the
‘Degree of Urbanisation’ approach to identifying and classifying human settlements in a
consistent manner across the world. The GHS applies criteria based on population size,
population density, and built-up proportion to classify one-square-kilometer grid cells on a
global map as belonging to various kinds of settlements. To gather these granular data, GHS
researchers utilize a combination of data on built-up areas derived from satellite images (from
the years 1975, 1990, 2000 and 2015) and population data from national censuses (Florczyk et al.,
2019; Pesaresi et al., 2016).
2
The classifications that they use, outlined below, do not depend on
any administrative boundaries or administrative definitions of “urban” applied by
governments.
• Urban center: a cluster of contiguous grid cells in which each cell has a density of at least
1,500 inhabitants/km
2
or

is at least 50% built-up, which hosts a total cluster population of
50,000 inhabitants or more;

2
Roberts et al. (2017) and Deuskar & Stewart (2016) discuss the strengths and limitations of the GHS approach and compare it with
other similar approaches and data sources.
18

• Town: a cluster of contiguous grid cells in which each cell has a density of at least 300
inhabitants/km
2
, which hosts a total cluster population of between 5,000 and 50,000, and
is not adjacent to an urban center;
• Suburb: cells which have a density of at least 300 inhabitants/km
2
and are adjacent to an
urban center or town with high-density (> 1500 inhabitants/ km
2
);
• For the purpose of this study we refer to all remaining areas as “rural.” This combines
the original dataset’s “village,” “dispersed rural areas,” and “mostly uninhabited areas”
classifications.

Our analysis was in two parts. First, we analyzed the European Commission’s
breakdowns of country-level population into the categories explained above to understand the
evolution in population distribution across settlements types from 1975 to 2015.
3
These
breakdowns were produced such that an area can change from one settlement type to another
from one time period to the next (e.g., from town to urban center). Second, we analyzed the
population distribution across GHS ‘urban centers’ in particular over time, categorizing them
into classes based on population, using the publicly available Urban Centre Database (UCDB
R2019A) (Florczyk et al., 2019).
4 , 5

3
These data were provided by the European Commission team directly to us in spreadsheet form. They are not publicly available in
the form in which we used them, but most of the data are available in a recent publication (European Commission Joint Research
Centre, 2019).
4
Available for free download at https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ghs_stat_ucdb2015mt_r2019a.php.
5
Our analysis focuses on urban centers which passed the EC’s own quality control process, filtering out false positives and urban
centers for which there was uncertainty or disagreement in identification. This reduced the total number of urban centers from
13,135 to 10,303.
19

Throughout our findings section, the term “Global South” refers collectively to upper-
middle-income countries (UMIC), lower-middle-income countries (LMIC) and low-income
countries (LIC) as defined by the World Bank, while “Global North” refers to high-income
countries (HIC).
6

4. Empirical Findings
The data reveal that the distribution of urban population in the Global South is “bottom-
heavy,” with a large share of urban residents living in towns and smaller urban centers. Despite
the rapid growth of the largest cities in the world, the overall distribution of urban population is
changing surprisingly slowly. This is because population growth in the few megacities at the
top of the pyramid is balanced by growth in existing small cities at the bottom and the
emergence of new cities through rural-to-urban transformation. This section explores these
findings in detail.

4.1 A large share of the Global South’s population is concentrated in towns and smaller urban
centers.
If towns and suburbs are considered part of the world’s urban population, then the GHS
data portray a globe far more urban than do UN statistics. Almost half of the world’s
population lives in urban centers; nearly one-fifth lives in towns; and one-tenth in suburbs
(Figure 1).
7

6
References to shares of population living in types of settlements are calculated using total national population figures from the
World Development Indicators.(https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL)
7
In our analysis of GHS data, we find that suburbs are not particularly important in LIC and LMIC, where just 1 percent and 6
percent of the population resides, respectively. However, in UMIC, suburbs host 14 percent of the total population—a share that has
grown significantly since 1975, when only 9 percent lived in such places. Suburbs are even more important in these higher-income
parts of the Global South than they are in the Global North. (In high-income countries, 13 percent of the population lived in
20

As of 2015, towns hosted 29 percent, 20 percent, and 17 percent of the total populations
of low-income countries (LIC), lower-middle-income countries (LMIC) and upper-middle-
income countries (UMIC), respectively (Figure 1). In lower-middle-income countries, which
make up the bulk of the Global South, the population residing in towns is approximately the
same as the population living in all million-plus cities combined. Whether towns would be
classified as “urban” in national statistics depends on country-level definitions, and whether
they are urban in the theoretical sense would, arguably, depend on the nature of their local
economies (Potts, 2018). Yet from a planning perspective, their size and density alone would
necessitate some networked infrastructure and collective resource management (Qadeer, 2000).
Figure 2 breaks down the population in urban centers by size, further underscoring the
importance of smaller urban places in the Global South. As noted above, the literature
frequently claims that urbanization in the Global South has resulted in greater concentrations of
population in the largest cities than in the North (Henderson, 2002; Sheppard, 2014). However,
our analysis of the GHS data calls into question this perception. A similar proportion of the total
population lives in megacities in lower-middle-income, upper-middle-income and high-income
countries.
8

suburbs as of 2015; even in the United States, the figure was only 14 percent.) The suburban expansion has been most dramatic in
China, where almost one in five people live in suburbs.
8
No low-income country has a city of 10 million or more inhabitants.
21

Figure 1: Distribution of total population by settlement type, world and income groups, 2015

Source: authors, using GHS data

The difference between the Global North and South lies in where the urban population
beyond megacities lives. Cities of 1-10 million host 22 percent of the total population in the
North, compared to only 13 percent in the South. Global South countries have a larger
proportion of urban dwellers living in towns and small and medium-sized cities, meaning
urban systems in the South are more “bottom-heavy” than in the North. Previous research,
including the 2009 World Development Report (World Bank, 2009a), correctly identifies the lack
of large secondary cities in many Global South countries, but it neglects to see that this “missing
middle” leads to demographic concentration in towns and small cities, not megacities.

22

Figure 2: Share of total population in towns and urban centers (by size classes), 2015

Source: authors, using GHS data

4.2 The overall distribution of urban populations is relatively stable
The GHS data provide empirical support for the theory that larger settlements are not
growing faster than smaller ones, i.e. a settlement’s size does not predict its rate of growth
(Angel et al., 2016; Gibrat, 1931). The correlation between a city’s size in 1975 and its growth rate
over the 1975-2015 time period is close to zero
9
—indicating that there is no large-scale
demographic shift in favor of the largest cities. This is particularly evident if we compare their
share of population over time. The megacities of 2015 hosted 6 percent of the global population
in 1975 and 7 percent in 2015, while the cities of 1-10 million in 2015 grew from hosting 13 to 15

9
The Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient between 1975 city population and 1975-2015 growth rate is -0.09. The relationship is even
weaker when examining the last 25 years: Correlation between 1990 population and 1990-2015 growth rate is -0.04.
23

percent over the same period. By contrast, the total global population in towns alone grew more
than the population in megacities during this time.
10

Many studies examining urban systems over time reclassify cities from one size category
to another as they grow (United Nations, 2018). This exaggerates the change in urban systems,
because much of the apparent shift is a result of all cities growing in population, rather than a
redistribution of population in favor of the largest cities. In our analysis (Figure 3), we show
change over time within unchanging cohorts of urban centers, defined based on their 2015
populations (e.g. an urban center that was a megacity by 2015 is placed in the megacity category
from 1975 onwards; similarly, a settlement that reached 50,000 inhabitants by 2015 is counted
among urban centers from the beginning).
11
Using this method, Latin America & the Caribbean
and the Middle East & North Africa have seen falling shares of population living in megacities.
East Asia & the Pacific, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have seen rising population share in
megacities, but only in the case of the first has the increase been impressive—with China as the
principal driver. The Chinese megacities of 2015 hosted 3 percent of the country’s population in
1975 and 7 percent by 2015. In India, by contrast, the share of the national population in the
megacities of 2015 has been almost static, changing from 6.13 to 6.16 percent between 1975 and
2015 (see Figure 4).

10
The total world population living in “towns” (see Data and Definitions) increased by 431 million between 1975 and 2015, while
the total world population living in urban centers of over 10 million increased by 392 million, allowing for reclassification of
settlements into this category between 1975 and 2015.
11
For the sake of comparison, Figure A1 in the Appendix shows change over time in urban center population distribution with
reclassification across size categories.
24

Figure 3: Distribution of urban center population by size classes and regions, 1975-2015
(unchanging cohorts based on 2015 population)

Figure 4: Distribution of urban center population, China & India, 1975-2015 (unchanging
cohorts based on 2015 population)

Source: authors, using GHS data

25

These findings suggest that, even as Global South countries urbanize more rapidly and
under different conditions than did the North, they are retaining relatively stable urban
systems. This aligns with scholarship on North America (e.g. Black & Henderson, 1999), which
shows that, while individual cities may gain and lose population in sometimes dramatic ways,
the overall structure of urban systems remains relatively durable over time. China may be an
exception, however; the state exerts powerful influence over the geography of urbanization and
has in the past articulated a policy vision of concentrating people in megacities (Heikkila, 2007;
Henderson, 2010).

4.3 The number of urban centers is expanding rapidly
Because smaller urban places are growing nearly as fast as larger ones on average, an
accelerating number are becoming “urban centers” by the GHS definition, based on population
(>50,000 inhabitants) and density (>1,500 people/km
2
). Between 1975 and 2015, the global
number of urban centers increased by 4,210—almost 4,000 of which were located in the Global
South. While the GHS data do not indicate the degree of functional integration between these
new centers and other cities, we do know based on the GHS methodology that they are spatially
independent, not territorial outgrowths of existing cities.
Globally, the number of cities with between 50,000 and 100,000 people grew by 1,600
while the number with 100,000 to 300,000 people increased by over 1,800. Meanwhile, the
number of megacities, agglomerations of at least 10 million people, grew by 18—from 10 to 28
(Figure 5). Viewed through this lens, the challenge of planning for a large number of small
places—as opposed to a small number of large places—comes into focus.
26

Figure 5: Number of urban centers by size category, 1975-2015

Source: authors, using GHS data

In summary, as the South witnesses rapid urbanization, large shares of urban
population are likely to be dispersed across a growing number of small urban areas. This
phenomenon is unobservable in other datasets which only enumerate settlements of 100,000 or
300,000 people and above. It provokes the practical question of how to plan for a large number
of small places, a question to which we turn next.

5. The 21
st
-century urban challenge: planning for a large number of small places
As our analysis illustrates, one of the greatest challenges confronting planning in the 21
st

century is how to support inclusive and participatory urban development in the thousands of
smaller urban areas emerging and growing across rapidly urbanizing countries.
12
This growth

12
This point is also observed in a recent publication by the producers of the GHS data (OECD & European Commission, 2020).
27

in the number of urban areas is occurring in countries with limited numbers of accredited
planners. Cross-country research shows that many countries in Asia and Africa, such as India,
Ghana and Kenya, have fewer than one planner per 100,000 people—as compared to about 13
per 100,000 in the United States and 38 per 100,000 in the United Kingdom (African Planning
Association & UN-HABITAT, 2013).
13
While systematic evidence on the spatial distribution of
planners within countries is sparse, the literature we outline above indicates that small cities
within these countries are especially likely to face severe capacity constraints.
Small urban centers emerging across the South also face the potential of being left
behind economically. Theory and evidence would suggest that Global South megacities are
likely concentrating wealth more than they are concentrating people. Trade liberalization has had
strong polarizing effects in the Global South, exacerbating inter-regional inequalities within
countries (Milanovic, 2005; Rodríguez-Pose, 2012). On top of this, most of the South is starting
to witness its own shift from manufacturing- to services-oriented growth (Rodrik, 2016). As we
know from extensive evidence in the Global North, this structural shift favors the biggest cities
in terms of economic growth, as high-paying, tradable services tend to cluster in “superstar
cities” (Florida, 2017; Kemeny & Storper, 2012; Moretti, 2012). If the same trends are observed
in the South, then planners will need to devise strategies for small urban centers that are
resource-poor when compared to Southern megacities.
One might argue that planning still ought to focus research and practice in 21
st
-century
megacities in the South, given that the field has relatively little knowledge of how to plan for
metropolitan regions of their unprecedented size. However, even if the field has a longer

13
China is an exception, having rapidly expanded planning education in recent years (Tian, 2016).
28

history of planning in cities of, for example, 100,000 people, planning for hundreds of such
places that are emerging simultaneously is, in fact, an unprecedented challenge; and, as noted,
the economic context in which these new urban centers are burgeoning may itself present issues
that planning has not fully grasped. Regardless, our appeal is not for planning to limit the
attention paid to megacities, but rather for scholars and policymakers to adopt a wide enough
lens to see that another set of challenges, beyond the metropolis, looms large as well.

5.1 Reviving the concept of “barefoot planning”
As the previous section and our literature review make evident, planning must face the
significant challenge of shaping urban growth in a large number of small urban places where
professional planning capacities are limited. While meeting this challenge will require a range
of actions across many domains—political, institutional and economic—our field must consider
what it means for planning education and practice. “Barefoot planning” is an adaptable
framework capable of extending the reach of planning principles in rapidly expanding urban
systems. As we describe below, the term “barefoot planning” has been used in various ways.
We define it as an approach that seeks to bridge grassroots engagement with technical planning
expertise by training a cohort of community members to play certain roles generally reserved
for professional planners.
The notion of “barefoot” professionals draws inspiration from China’s “barefoot
doctors,” rural citizens who were given basic medical training soon after the Communist
revolution to cater to the day-to-day healthcare needs of their communities (World Health
Organization, 2008). The idea of barefoot professionals caught on internationally and across
29

professions, including in planning. At a 1980 conference of the International Society of City and
Regional Planners (ISoCaRP) in Tunis, the organization’s vice president, Percy Johnson-
Marshall, made the case for the barefoot planner as “a kind of environmental caretaker”
responsible for “bridging the gap between the specialist and generalist” (Dix, 1980, p. 446). The
United Nations Center for Human Settlements (UN-Habitat) took considerable interest in the
need for local training related to human settlements in the Global South, holding meetings and
commissioning research on the topic in the mid-1980s (Oberlander, 1987). A comprehensive
report by H. Peter Oberlander of the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Human
Settlements outlined the need for barefoot planners and proposed guidelines for future training
efforts (Oberlander, 1987).
Oberlander’s report includes a desk survey of 15 institutes and three projects in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America that provided some form of training in the management of human
settlements in the 1980s. Perhaps the most prominent application of the barefoot planning
concept, also during the 1980s, was in Mozambique, where the national government and United
Nations trained barefoot planners to help design and implement sites-and-services projects
(Burdett & Taylor, 2011; Lamba, 1985; “Training Barefoot Planners,” 1983). However, for
reasons that are unclear and warrant further investigation, the concept appears to have lost
currency after the 1980s. It has reappeared only occasionally in the urban planning and
development literatures (Martin & Mathema, 2010; Wamsler, 2007; Wang, 2015; Zinn et al.,
1993), and does not appear to have been implemented at scale in recent decades.
14

14
A rare example of the implementation of the concept in the 21
st
century is the training of barefoot planners as part of a planning
process in Mathare in Nairobi, Kenya, led by NGOs and universities (Mwau, 2011).
30

What roles could barefoot planners assume in smaller urban settlements of today’s
rapidly urbanizing countries? First, they could undertake the task of collecting and maintaining
community data on a fine-grained spatial and temporal scale—particularly on built
environment and land use issues with poor coverage in traditional government surveys—in
order to supply evidence in local planning processes. Second, barefoot planners could initiate
and facilitate public participation processes to gather information on planning-related issues
and solicit community input on decisions that affect the growth and management of their towns
and cities. Finally, they could utilize both sources of information to advise leaders in village,
town and municipal governments on planning-related decisions. They could act as liaisons to
government agencies, representing community interests in the development of plans or the
implementation of major infrastructure projects.
15

The technical expertise of barefoot planners could be developed through courses
focused on skills such as organizing community consultations, gathering spatial and
demographic data, drawing maps and interpreting spatial plans. Such training could be
provided to individuals within community-based organizations that already play an active role
in guiding the growth and management of their communities. Training could also integrate
instruction on issues of equity, inclusion and sustainability, enabling these core tenets of
planning to reach deeper into the network of human settlements than they currently do.

15
Oberlander (1987) lists many possible responsibilities for barefoot planners: “Local talent can be developed to enable community
action in such areas as land assembly and subdivision; raising funds from domestic, commercial and government sources; carrying
out construction works; ensuring fair distribution of project benefits; managing co-operative and commercial enterprises;
maintaining infrastructure; maintaining resources; and dealing with external authorities and institutions” (9).

31

A revival of the barefoot planning approach could help meet the challenge of planning
for a large number of small urban places. With such a tremendous expansion in the number of
urban settlements in many regions of the Global South, an expansion of planning programs in
universities must be complemented by other impactful solutions aimed at extending the reach
of planning education. It would be impractical to suggest that planning capacity gaps in rapidly
urbanizing countries can be filled entirely by professional planners, since this would require an
unfeasibly swift expansion of university-level planning education. The logic of the barefoot
planning approach is to grow professional planning capacities through enhancing and
formalizing community-based actions. In his report, Oberlander (1987) argues that “training
programs which focus on ways and means of complementing and supporting local initiative
can act as a catalyst through which local groups are assisted in articulating their needs and
priorities, and thereby implementing concrete solutions within scarce resources” (4).
For several reasons, barefoot planning is particularly relevant for small and emerging
urban settlements of rapidly urbanizing countries. First, as our literature review shows, these
are the urban environments where supplements to professional planning capacity are most
acutely needed, as they are the most neglected urban areas within countries that already face
national shortages of planners. Second, the potential range of appropriate roles for a barefoot
planner in these urban settlements is likely to be greater than in a large city, where decisions
around metropolitan-wide issues such as land use, transportation and economic development
require coordination among many different institutions and across many layers of bureaucracy.
Finally, ordinary citizens, private entrepreneurs, and community-based organizations, while
they shape cities everywhere, are especially involved in directing the evolution of smaller cities
32

(Irazábal & Neville, 2007; Miraftab, 2009; Miraftab & Wills, 2005; Mitlin, 2008; Patel et al., 2016;
Sandercock, 1998). Enabled by what Cook (2018) calls the “dense intimacy” of relationships in
smaller cities of the Global South, this capacity and local expertise, residing in groups not
conventionally considered “planners,” represents an asset to be harnessed, according to the
barefoot planning approach (Oberlander, 1987). Yet relying purely on local knowledge and
leadership can reinforce existing inequalities or lead to elite capture, an issue of concern in small
cities, as our literature review notes. Training programs originating from beyond the local
community under a barefoot planning framework can empower particular community
members to advocate for inclusion, sustainability, and consensus-building, helping to counter
this threat.
These considerations suggest that barefoot planning is particularly applicable to the
challenges at hand, namely those arising from the proliferation and growth of small urban
settlements in the South. However, the concept of training community leaders in planning-
related skills may also have broader resonance. Barefoot planners could be impactful in
addressing neighborhood-level issues in the informal settlements of large cities of the urban
South or neighborhoods of poverty and exclusion in the urban North—i.e. wherever
communities require a stronger voice in the formal planning regime.
Moreover, city size is not the only relevant variable in judging the appropriateness of the
barefoot planning approach in a given geography. Clearly, social, political, cultural and
economic factors would influence the applicability and nature of barefoot planning across
different contexts. In one-party states, for instance, the relevance of barefoot planning may be
circumscribed by highly centralized decision-making processes. Even different jurisdictions
33

within the same country may require different implementation strategies. For example, many
areas designated as “urban” by the Indian census are still administered as rural. Barefoot
planners in these contexts could influence many planning decisions through direct coordination
with village-level authorities, who have high levels of autonomy, whereas barefoot planners in
similar settlements administered as municipalities would have to interface with multiple levels
of government (Samanta, 2014). The nature of barefoot planning would also be deeply
influenced by histories of governance. For example, Indonesia hosts well-established, uniform
systems of representative government down to very small administrative units (the rukun
tetangga, or RT, usually contains about 30 households) (Bebbington et al., 2006). Barefoot
planning in this context may require close integration with participation models already
established within these governance structures. In many African contexts, barefoot planners
would need to work with traditional authorities who govern customary land (Owusu-Ansah &
Braimah, 2013). However, these context-specific factors should not preclude planners from
proposing and debating general frameworks, as planning scholars have argued (Hinojosa et al.,
1992).
Barefoot planning, as we describe it, has never been implemented on a major scale, nor
have past efforts been well documented. Based on Oberlander’s (1987) report, most previous
training programs for barefoot planners were evaluated in terms of their impact on individual
trainees as opposed to their impact on communities. Robust monitoring and evaluation
frameworks, aimed at understanding programmatic impacts on settlements and planning
processes, would be needed for future initiatives to promote swift learning and adaptation.
Further research should also investigate whether the apparent lack of focus on barefoot
34

planning and related concepts since their initial promotion in the 1980s reflects a
reconsideration of their effectiveness, a change in academic trends or internal priorities at
development institutions, or simply a change in terminology or positioning (e.g. similar
activities may now be included as components of broader ‘capacity building’ programs). Future
researchers and practitioners could also update Oberlander's (1987) guide with consideration
given to the planning contexts of the 21
st
-century, especially since advancements in technology
may render particular roles more accessible to barefoot planners than they were three decades
ago.

6. Conclusion
Many representations of contemporary urbanization create the impression that people
are concentrating in the largest cities, especially in the Global South. However, our analysis of
new data has shown that the structure of urban systems around the world remains relatively
stable and that urban populations in lower-income countries are more “bottom-heavy”—i.e.
concentrated in towns and small cities—than in the Global North. In rapidly urbanizing
countries, the proliferation and growth of new urban areas represents an important but
generally overlooked development of the last four decades. While we have discussed some
implications of this trend for planning, we hope future scholarship will deepen our
understanding of how the planning community in various national contexts is grappling with
expansion at the bottom of the urban hierarchy. For example, better data on the distribution of
planning resources across smaller urban areas, and a sharper understanding of who plans small
35

cities, would greatly enhance our understanding of the opportunities and challenges local
governments face in managing urban growth.
Barefoot planning is a way of integrating citizen and civil society knowledge and action
in emerging urban areas with professional planning expertise, toward shaping inclusive urban
futures. It is one possible approach for ensuring that core planning principles are embedded in
the global urban transition, but our findings should prompt further dialogue and research
among planning scholars and educators around how to plan for the spectacular expansion of
the global urban system.

Acknowledgements
Lewis Dijkstra and Martino Pesaresi of the European Commission provided supplemental data
and answered questions regarding construction of the Global Human Settlements database.
Lisa Schweitzer offered substantive comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. Finally,
the journal editor and five anonymous reviewers provided valuable feedback on the manuscript
during the review process.

36

Chapter 3. Does urbanization depend on in-migration? Demography,
mobility, and India’s urban transition
16

Abstract
The urban transition is generally imagined as a large-scale permanent migration of people from
villages to cities. The formation of new cities is also theorized as occurring through the
migration of people. However, recent scholarship implies that parts of India may be witnessing
an urbanization process that depends on natural population growth rather than in-migration.
This claim carries significant implications for urban theory, but it has never been tested
empirically. This article addresses that gap by examining migration patterns in India alongside
urbanization—measured in terms of densification of population and built-up area and an
economic transition away from agriculture. I find that certain parts of the country, notably the
eastern Indo-Gangetic Plain, are exhibiting all the trends constitutive of urbanization even as
they experience negative net migration—a phenomenon I term “urbanization from within.” My
analysis also highlights that these same regions see high rates of temporary out-migration—
suggesting that human mobilities may play a role in the in situ urbanization of rural
settlements, but not in the ways that foundational urban and development theories would
predict. I discuss the inequalities of India’s economic transition and its spatial regime of social
welfare as possible causal underpinnings of the trends I observe. The article’s findings suggest
that urban social scientists should open new lines of theoretical and empirical inquiry into the
role of migration in 21
st
-century urban transitions.

16
This paper has been conditionally accepted in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.
37

1. Introduction
In both the scholarly and popular imagination, the urbanization process involves a mass
migration from villages to cities—the “depopulation of rural areas” (Davis and Golden, 1954,
10). However, analyses of urbanization patterns in India have yielded some claims that
undermine the assumption that permanent migration underlies all urbanization processes. In
their theory of “subaltern urbanization,” Mukhopadhyay et al (2020) argue that India’s urban
transition is driven by “morphing places” rather than “moving people”—implying that some
rural settlements are becoming urban towns without witnessing an influx of migrants from
elsewhere. However, analysis so far has only shown that India’s pattern of urbanization is
diffuse, with significant growth at the bottom of the urban hierarchy through in situ
urbanization—that is, rural settlements becoming urban (Pradhan, 2013). Whether new urban
settlements are growing by attracting migrants from elsewhere, or through their own internal
population growth, is an unresolved empirical question.
The idea that in situ urbanization can unfold without in-migration carries major
implications for how we understand the urban transition and the nature of physical and
economic change in human settlements. In this article, I therefore confront the question directly.
Are parts of India urbanizing—in the conventional sense of becoming dense, populous, and
economically complex—without experiencing net in-migration? Not only has this question
never been directly addressed in the literature on India’s urban transition; it has never been
studied empirically in any scholarship on in situ urbanization or rural-to-urban transformation,
despite the wealth of writing on the subject (Balakrishnan, 2019b; Gururani, 2020; McGee, 1991;
38

Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020; Potts, 2018; Zhu, 2004). My analysis addresses this gap, relying on a
combination of government and satellite-based datasets to juxtapose urbanization and
migration patterns.
I demonstrate that indeed, many places in India that see little to no permanent in-
migration—and in fact are net senders of migrants—are nevertheless experiencing urbanization,
defined as the growth and densification of population and built-up area and the advent of a
non-agricultural economy. Instead, their physical, economic, and demographic change is
propelled by natural population growth. I call this process “urbanization from within.”
However, I also find that other kinds of migration are likely facilitating the urban
transformation of these locations, notably temporary out-migration for work purposes. In this
sense, “morphing places” and “moving people” appear linked in India’s urban transition, but
not in the ways that conventional urban theory would predict.
This phenomenon implies that urban scholars may need to reconsider the relationship
between migration and urbanization, which is largely understood through reference to urban
transitions in the historical Global North. Demographers have established that Europe’s rapid
urbanization could not have occurred without mass migration to cities; small populations and
high mortality rates at the time meant that dense concentrations of people could only form
through migration (De Vries, 2013; Dyson, 2011). Urbanization from within may represent a
phenomenon unique to 21
st
-century urban transitions in particular countries of the Global
South. In this sense, it is relevant to the broader introspections underway in urban studies, as
scholars question the degree to which empirical and theoretical claims advanced by studying
39

urbanization in the Global North are applicable to the contemporary urban South (Fox &
Goodfellow, 2021; Randolph & Storper, 2022; Robinson & Roy, 2016; Scott & Storper, 2015).
The stakes of this issue extend further—beyond establishing empirical difference
between historical urban transitions and the contemporary one occurring in India. In addition
to viewing migration as the immediate demographic cause of urbanization, urban theories from
economics to sociology credit migration with some of the urban transition’s most important
consequences: productivity growth, specialization, and a transformation of traditional social
relations. Urban economics and economic geography view labor migration as inherently bound
up with the agglomeration benefits that underlie urban growth and change—facilitating the
labor market matching that, in turn, aids specialization and productivity growth. In sociology,
the migrations that bring people to cities are linked to the formation of new subcultures,
identities, and affinity groups. Urbanization from within may, therefore, have social and
economic consequences that differ from those produced by urbanization through massive
population transfers. This represents a critical area of inquiry for urban scholars, planners, and
policymakers.
The structure of this paper is as follows. I review literatures that address the role of
migration in urbanization processes, circular rural-urban mobilities, and in situ urbanization,
with attention to both global and theoretical literature as well as empirical work from India.
Next, I detail my use of multiple data sources—a global satellite-based dataset measuring
concentrations of population and built-up area and two Indian government datasets—to
construct variables related to urbanization and migration. In the findings section, I show that
some places in India, clustered in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plain, are urbanizing through the
40

force of internal population growth. In the discussion, I propose several hypotheses to interpret
the causal underpinnings of this phenomenon, which contradicts long-held assumptions about
migration and the urban transition. The last section concludes by discussing major research
directions for furthering knowledge on urbanization from within, particularly its consequences
for inclusive economic development.

2. Migration and the foundations of urbanization theory
Migration lies at the heart of explanations for urbanization. In his theory of the mobility
transition, Zelinsky (1971) views rural-urban migration as the connective tissue linking the
demographic and urban transitions. He argues that as societies enter a demographic
transition—with rapid population growth enabled by falling mortality rates—they witness
increasing rates of internal migration, with population movements favoring urban areas and
therefore driving the advent of a largely urban society. Rees et al. (2017) offer a more formal
model for this foundational Zelinsky precept, representing the urban transition as permanent
population movement from low- to high-density regions. Indeed, large-scale permanent
migration to urban areas has been observed in much of the world, both in the historical urban
transitions of the Global North and in more recent urban transitions in the Global South
(Jedwab et al., 2017).
Therefore, a central aim of urban theory is to account for why people move to cities. The
dominant explanations have come from economics, which refers to structural transformations
in the economy that drive people away from rural areas and pull them toward cities—an
“urban pull” and “rural push” (Alvarez-Cuadrado & Poschke, 2011). Mechanization reduces the
41

need for human labor in agriculture (Caselli & Coleman II, 2001; Gollin et al., 2002; Matsuyama,
1992; Schultz, 1953), just as declining mortality, itself a product of technological advancements,
rapidly expands the supply of labor and constrains the availability of cultivable land (De Vries,
1990; Dyson, 2011). Meanwhile, improvements in production technologies and reduction in
transport costs enhance regional specialization and expand inter-regional trade and non-
agricultural activities, generating labor demand in cities (Bairoch, 1988). This spatial imbalance
in the demand for labor produces a large rural-urban wage gap that fuels rural-urban migration
(Harris & Todaro, 1970; Lewis, 1954). During the urban transition, migration becomes self-
reinforcing because as cities grow in size, they reap greater benefits from agglomeration—the
returns to specialization and scale that are enabled by density (Duranton & Puga, 2003; Jacobs,
1969; Krugman, 1991; Marshall, 1890)—in turn enlarging the rural-urban wage gap even
further.
In canonical urban theories, migration is more than simply the demographic means by
which cities form. It is viewed as a key force driving economic and social transformation.
According to urban economics, migrants get access to agglomeration benefits by moving to
cities, finding a better match for their skills and better learning opportunities (De La Roca &
Puga, 2017; Glaeser, 1999; Long, 2005). Migration enables economic specialization and the
clustering of particular industries through a dynamic sorting process of firms and labor
(Storper, 2013). Migration also feeds agglomeration economies by expanding the size of cities,
resulting in thicker labor markets (Krugman, 1993).
Classical texts of urban sociology similarly foreground migration. Wirth (1938) named
social heterogeneity, facilitated through migration, as a definitional component of urbanism,
42

and Mumford (1925) attributed the process of development in Europe and the United States to
successive waves of human migration. Sociologists have conventionally viewed rural-urban
migration as underlying a process in which the importance of primary associations (traditional
family and kinship ties) erodes in favor of secondary associations (membership in affinity
groups, unions, political organizations and subcultures) (Fischer, 1975; Perlman, 1979; Wirth,
1938). In this sense, migration to cities has been considered central to “modernization”
(Durkheim, 1893).

2.1 Circular mobilities and barriers to permanent migration
Scholars, especially those from demography, sociology, and development studies, have
sought to nuance this basic story, often with reference to recent and contemporary urban
transitions in the Global South. They argue that population pressures (Fox, 2012), conflict (Fay
& Opal, 1999), climate change (Henderson et al., 2017), and an “urban bias” in policymaking
(Lipton, 1977) can all drive rural-urban migration regardless of broader structural
transformation in the economy. Economists have questioned their own assumptions that rural-
urban wage gaps, induced by urban productivity growth, are the deterministic factor in shaping
migration behavior. Stark (1991) argued that factors like income uncertainty and information
asymmetries influence migration behavior, and that migration does not reflect atomistic
individual decisions but rather a resource-allocation problem for households.
Scholars have also complicated earlier models of rural-urban movement, which define
migration as a permanent relocation from origin to destination. Particularly in the
contemporary Global South, they highlight the prevalence of short-term, seasonal, temporary,
43

and return migration—all of which indicate patterns of circulation rather than unidirectional
transfer (Cooke et al., 2018). Urban theorists have noted that these circular mobilities often
result from barriers to permanent migration (Kundu & Saraswati, 2012; Sheller & Urry, 2006),
but also that they enable rural-urban migrants to maintain persistent ties to their places of
origin (Sheppard, 2014).
These theoretical innovations in migration and mobility studies have been informed by
empirical work in India. Regarding the question of why people do (or do not) move to cities,
scholarship in India has discovered multiple factors that dull the incentive to permanently
migrate to urban areas, despite the country’s large rural-urban wage gaps. These include
informal caste-based networks that shield rural households from economic shocks and reduce
distress migration (Munshi & Rosenzweig, 2016); barriers to accessing social welfare programs
outside one’s place of origin (Kone et al., 2018); and exclusionary political cultures and labor
markets in big cities (Kundu & Saraswati, 2012; Mukhopadhyay & Naik, 2018).
The shift toward recognizing multiple forms of mobility also finds resonance in India.
Researchers there call the constant flow of temporary migrants between urban and rural areas
“circulatory urbanism” (Srivastava & Echanove, 2013) and estimate that there may be as many
as 100 million circular migrants (Deshingkar & Akter, 2009). However, with the exception of
one case study by Iyer (2017), scholarship has stopped short of asking whether circulatory
population movements into and out of cities might be producing (urban) transformations in
rural areas. Nor have scholars considered that barriers to permanent rural-urban migration,
such as those identified in India, may lead to the persistence of rural settlements or indeed their
attainment of urban population densities.
44

2.2 Planetary and in situ urbanization
Urban theorists have long recognized the extended reach of the city. Cities wield power
over a geography that is far larger than their functional boundaries, even seeding the creation of
new urban settlements. Louis Wirth (1938) wrote that “the influences which cities exert upon
the social life of man are greater than the ratio of the urban population would indicate, for the
city is not only in ever larger degrees the dwelling-place and the workshop of modern man, but
it is the initiating and controlling center of economic, political, and cultural life that has drawn
the most remote parts of the world into its orbit and woven diverse areas, peoples, and
activities into a cosmos” (2). Brenner and Schmid (2014) update this concept in their theory of
planetary urbanization, arguing that no place in the 21
st
-century world is untouched by the
influence of capitalistic urbanization. However, as long as people, built-up area, and economic
complexity remain unevenly distributed across the landscape, we can interpret some places as
being more urban than others (Scott & Storper, 2015). In this sense, the geography of
urbanization, and the question of urban genesis—how, where, and why new cities form—
remain relevant in the 21
st
century.
How do scholars explain the emergence of new urban settlements? In theoretical models
of urban systems, designed by urban economists, new towns are born when firms find it
profitable to leave an existing city and start a new one—that is, when the congestion costs of
density begin to outweigh its agglomeration benefits for certain economic activities (Fujita et al.,
1999; Henderson, 1974). Relocated firms “hire small amounts of capital and labor away from the
45

initial city” (Henderson, 1974, p. 653)—in other words, they create a new migration destination.
Thus, in the economic explanation for the birth of new cities, migration remains the central
demographic mechanism.
Empirical literature has also examined the dynamics and processes by which rural
settlements become urban—generally termed in situ urbanization. Much of this work has been
led by scholars of the Indian context. Over two decades ago, Mohammad Qadeer (2000)
highlighted that many agricultural regions of India has attained urban population densities,
coining the term “ruralopolis.” More recently, Mukhopadhyay et al. (2020) describe India’s
diffuse patterns of urbanization, involving considerable in situ change, as “subaltern” and
“alternative.” Pradhan (2013) shows that thousands of villages in India have recently been
reclassified as urban towns based on their growing populations and changing economies. Both
Balakrishnan (2019b), who utilizes the concept of “shareholder cities,” and Gururani (2020), in
her work on “agrarian urbanism,” describe how caste and land relations are structuring rural-
to-urban transformations on the outskirts of large metropolitan areas. This work has emerged in
dialogue with other scholarship in the Global South, which has similarly studied the political
economy, spatial organization, and administrative classification of urbanizing rural settlements
(McGee, 1991; Potts, 2018; Zhu, 2004).
Despite its richness, none of the scholarship on rural-to-urban transformation or in situ
urbanization has confronted the foundational claim from urban systems theory that urban
settlement formation relies on migration. The only exception is Moriconi-Ebrard et al (2016),
who suggest that new agglomerations may be forming in West Africa exclusively through
46

natural population growth, though they do not test this hypothesis.
17
In summary, the role of
demography in in situ urbanization—that is, to what degree it is driven by migration versus
natural population growth—has been neglected in scholarship.

3. Data and Methods
Examining patterns of urbanization and migration in India presents considerable
methodological challenges. To address these, I draw on multiple data sets for my analysis. In
this section, I discuss my sources and approaches to measurement, as well as limitations of my
strategy and how they are addressed.
I use two data sources to measure the urbanization process in India, defined as the
densification of population and built-up area alongside a transition away from agriculture.
First, the Global Human Settlements (GHS) database, developed by the European Commission,
defines human settlements based on a combination of satellite data and national population
statistics. GHS classifies each square kilometer of land area in the world into one of six
categories based on the population density and built-up area within and surrounding it. I utilize
two of these categories—“urban center” and “dense urban cluster”—which are clusters of
contiguous grid cells where each cell has a density of at least 1,500 inhabitants/km
2
or is at least
50 percent built-up, and which host a total cluster population of at least 50,000 inhabitants
(urban center) or 5,000 inhabitants (dense urban cluster).
18
To simplify the analysis, I combine

17
Jedwab et al. (2017) show that many African countries are urbanizing especially swiftly because their cities have high rates of
natural population growth, on top of receiving migrants from rural areas. In this sense they highlight the importance of natural
increase in the urban transition. However, they do not examine the question of how new towns/cities are forming, and their
methods formally exclude the possibility of any type of in situ urbanization.
18
There are two additional “urban” categories that I leave out in my categorization of a “dense agglomeration:” urban clusters and
suburbs. These two categories have minimum thresholds for population density (300 persons/km
2
) and built-up area (3%) that,
47

these two categories to create a binary variable such that every grid cell is designated as either
part of a “dense agglomeration” (DA) or not. Combined with GHS population data, I use this
DA variable to measure the population in dense agglomerations at three points in time (see
Table 1).
The GHS does not include economic criteria in its classification, making it a measure of
physical and demographic densification more than a measure of urbanization, which implies
economic change (see Potts, 2018). Therefore, I also utilize data from the Indian Census to
categorize workers into agricultural and non-agricultural occupations. I use these data to
measure growth in the share of workers primarily engaged in non-agricultural activities.
The benefit of analyzing urbanization through these two constitutive measures—densification
and structural transformation—rather than using the Indian government’s definition of
“urban,” is that the latter is applied using administrative boundaries for settlements.
19
Empirical
work in India has shown that this presents an unreliable portrait of urbanization patterns, given
that actual agglomerations rarely follow these boundaries. As a result, populations spatially and
functionally integrated into dense, non-agricultural agglomerations are often classified as
“rural” simply because the small administrative units in which they live are peripheral and fail
to qualify as “urban” on their own (van Duijne, 2019). The Indian government’s definition
presents other issues as well; for example, it considers only male employment in its economic
criterion.

arguably, set the bar too low for the South Asian context. (The average population density of India as a whole is over 450
persons/km
2
.) I exclude them to avoid an overly inclusive definition of urbanism.
19
The Indian central government defines an administrative settlement as urban if it meets three criteria: (1) at least 5,000 inhabitants;
(2) at least 400 persons/km
2
; and (3) at least 75% of the male main workforce in non-agricultural occupations.
48

To estimate net migration flows, I use the 64
th
Round of the National Sample Survey
(NSS), conducted in 2008, which contains more detailed migration information than any other
government survey. These data enable estimation of permanent in-migration, permanent out-
migration, and seasonal migration (those who spent 1-6 months working outside their main
place of residence in the past year).
20
The main reason for using migration estimates from the
NSS rather than population data from the decennial Census of India is that the latter releases
data only on in-migration and thus cannot be used to track net flows. To understand
migration’s role in the demography of urbanization, it is essential to analyze both in- and out-
migration.
For both urbanization and migration measures, I use the district as my geographic unit of
analysis, constructing share variables for the purpose of analyzing data at the district level (see
Table 1). Boundaries of Indian districts, which are roughly the size of counties in the United
States, change over time through subdivision, presenting a challenge to historical analysis. To
solve this issue, I recombine districts that were subdivided during the two-decade period of
analysis so that all units of analysis have consistent spatial boundaries in the three observed
time periods. Through recombination, I arrive at 399 consistent districts for my analysis—
hereafter referred to as simply “districts.”
21
This approach of analyzing urbanization at the
district scale is similar to that of Chauvin et al. (2017); however, because they rely on India’s

20
Much of what is reported as migration in India is women changing households following marriage. While relocations for
marriage are an important phenomenon (Rosenzweig & Stark, 1989), analyses of general migration patterns in India, even those that
focus on women, generally exclude these movements as they are typically shaped by different factors than migration for work,
education, business or other “push” and “pull” factors (Mazumdar et al., 2013). Following this precedent, all migration analyses in
this paper are based on summing all reasons for migration (work, business, education, joining household member, or other) apart
from marriage.
21
These districts were constructed to have consistent boundaries beginning in 1987.
49

administrative definition of “urban,” whose limitations I described above, I consider my
method an improvement on this previous work.
Table 1. Variables, Definitions, Sources for Urbanization and Migration Analysis
Category

Variable Variable
Construction
Geographic
Unit
Data Source
Migration
Inter-district in-
migrants to total
population (%)
Total number of
inter-district in-
migrants, 1991-
2011 / Total
population in
1991 (interpolated
values for 2009-
11)
Consistent
District
National
Sample
Survey, 64
th

Round
(2008)
Inter-district out-
migrants to total
population (%)
Total number of
inter-district out-
migrants, 1991-
2011 / Total
population in
1991 (interpolated
values for 2009-
11)
Consistent
District
National
Sample
Survey, 64
th

Round
(2008)
Inter-district net
migration to total
population (%)
Inter-district in-
migration ratio –
Inter-district out-
migration ratio
Consistent
District
National
Sample
Survey, 64
th

Round
(2008)
Urbanization
Physical and
demographic
density
Densification (%-
point)
Growth in
population share
living in dense
agglomerations*
(2000-2015)
Consistent
District
Global
Human
Settlements
(1990, 2015)
Dense
agglomeration
growth (persons)

Absolute growth
in population
living in dense
agglomerations*

(2000-2015)
Consistent
District
Global
Human
Settlements
(1990, 2015)
Structural
transformation
Structural
transformation
(%-point)
Growth in share
of main workers
in non-
agricultural
occupations
Consistent
District
Census of
India (1991,
2011)
* Dense agglomerations (Das) are contiguous grid cells in which each cell has a density >1,500 inhabitants/km
2
or is at
least 50% built-up, and which host a total cluster population >5,000 inhabitants.

50

The rationale for using the district as the unit of analysis, rather than the settlement or
population agglomeration, is that migration data are not available at more fine-grained scales.
The risk in this approach is that what appears to be urbanization without in-migration may, in
fact, be urbanization through local, intra-district population movements. However, I develop a
robustness check—using intra-district migration data from NSS to calculate the maximum
possible contribution of in-migration to the growth of dense agglomerations—and show the
impossibility of local migration driving the identified urbanization trends.
My analysis focuses on the two decades following the liberalization of India’s economy in
1991, which was a major moment of social, economic, and political transition. I examine
migration and non-farm employment growth in the period of 1991-2011 and densification in the
period of 1990-2015, given the years for which GHS data are available.
22

4. The urbanizing “ruralopolis”
The data demonstrate that certain regions in India are densifying and developing non-
agricultural economies even as they see more out- than in-migration—that is, urbanizing from
within. This pattern is heavily concentrated in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plain, notably the
states of Bihar and West Bengal, and the ring of lowland areas that encircle Bangladesh—among
the poorest and most densely populated regions in India. Their population and settlement
patterns inspired Qadeer's (2000) term, “ruralopolis,” as a descriptor for high-density agrarian

22
For migration data, the 64
th
Round of the NSS was conducted in 2008. The years 2009, 2010 and 2011 are interpolated based on
prior trends to enable analysis of a two-decade period aligned with the census. While there is a four-year gap between 2011 values
for employment and migration data and 2015 data for population agglomeration (GHS) data, I do not consider this to be a threat to
my key findings. The patterns I identify using GHS data are long-run structural trends; they are not likely to have fluctuated
significantly between 2011 and 2015.
51

regions—except that in recent decades they have become increasingly, and in some cases
principally, non-agricultural. The maps in Figure 6 demonstrate this confluence of structural
transformation, growth in dense agglomerations, and negative net migration.
A typical case is Maldah district in West Bengal, squeezed between Bihar and
Bangladesh and situated along the Ganges River. Maldah has been densely populated for many
centuries thanks to the productive agriculture of the Ganges floodplain, but its economy is
changing rapidly. The share of workers engaged in non-agricultural occupations almost
doubled in the 20 years between 1991 and 2011, and now accounts for roughly half the
workforce. Nearly two-thirds of Maldah’s population lives in dense agglomerations, a share
that grew by nine percentage points between 1990 and 2015. Yet during the 1990s and 2000s,
Maldah lost about five times more people to out-migration than it gained through in-migration
(5% and 1%, respectively, of its 1991 population). Nonetheless, during the 25-year period
between 1990 and 2015, the population in Maldah’s dense agglomerations grew by 1.1 million,
owing to natural population increase.
The type of urban transition unfolding in places like Maldah is not the only kind of
urbanization happening in India. The peripheries of large metropolitan areas are witnessing a
more conventional form, fed by permanent in-migration. For example, in Rangareddy, a
suburban district encircling Hyderabad, net migration alone expanded the population by 33
percent over the 1991-2011 period—occurring in tandem with densification and structural
transformation. A similar transition has occurred in the Gurgaon-Mewat district and
52

Bulandshahr-Gautam Buddha Nagar-Ghaziabad district, which both include exploding satellite
cities of Delhi.
23

However, my analysis suggests that in India, metropolitan peripheries like Rangareddy
and Gurgaon may be less significant to new urbanization processes than non-metropolitan
places like Maldah. Table 2 summarizes key indicators in districts experiencing the swiftest
urbanization—defined as those in the top quartile in both non-agricultural employment share
growth and dense agglomeration population share growth. Only seven of the 29 districts in this
group experienced significant positive net migration; collectively, these seven districts saw the
populations within their dense agglomerations expand by 9.2 million people over the 1990-2015
period. Meanwhile, in the 22 districts experiencing urbanization with negative or near-zero
rates of net migration, dense agglomerations grew by over 24 million people.
24
This suggests
that more people live in urbanizing locations witnessing negative net migration than in
urbanizing locations seeing major influxes of permanent in-migrants.
As noted above, my measurement of these patterns at the district scale leaves open the
possibility that places like Maldah are urbanizing through the internal reorganization of
population, i.e., short-distance migrations within their boundaries. However, I can reject this
hypothesis by estimating the maximum possible contribution of all migration—both intra-
district and inter-district—to the growth of dense agglomerations (DA). The combined estimate

23
A different phenomenon is continued structural transformation in regions where both densification (percentage-point growth in
DA population share) and absolute growth in dense agglomerations has stagnated or fallen. A clear example is Kerala. While Kerala
shows up prominently in analyses of rural-to-urban reclassification in India (Pradhan, 2013), GHS data suggest that the state is not
experiencing any new urbanization. Instead, persistent decline in the agricultural share of employment is leading many settlements
to cross the Indian government’s threshold for reclassification.
24
These 22 districts are those whose net migration rate was 2% or less. I include Begusarai and South 24 Parganas in this group
because their net migration rates (1% and 2%, respectively) are near zero, and there is strong family resemblance between these
districts and the other 20 whose net migration rates are negative or zero.
53

of all inter-district in-migration (into Maldah from other districts) and intra-Maldah migration
over the 1991-2011 period is 114,118, against the figure for total growth in dense
agglomerations, i.e., 1.1 million. Thus, even in the unlikely scenario that all intra-Maldah
migration was from non-DA to DA locations, all migrants into Maldah from other districts were
destined for DAs, and none of the out-migration from Maldah was from DAs, net migration to
these dense agglomerations would equate to only about 10 percent of their growth.
25
This
clearly indicates that the key vehicle of urbanization is neither inter-regional nor intra-regional
migration but instead a form of rural-to-urban transformation where populations grow in place.

25
Among the 22 districts experiencing “urbanization without migration,” the median value for maximum possible contribution of
migration is 5.4 percent.
54

While declining fertility could ultimately slow down urbanization from within, natural
population increase is still far from its endpoint in the places I have identified. Of the 22
districts experiencing urbanization with negligible or negative rates of net migration, only three
Figure 6. Net Migration, Structural Transformation, and Densification across Consistent
Districts
Sources: National Sample Survey, Global Human Settlements, Census of India
55

have total fertility rates (TFR) at or below replacement level. Most will see fertility well above
replacement until the middle of the 21
st
century; if rates of TFR change in the 2001-2011 period
persist into the future, the median number of years it will take for a district in this group to
reach replacement-level fertility is 38.
26
This raises the prospect of urbanization driven by
natural increase persisting for several decades in these locations.
While natural population growth, rather than in-migration, is the demographic vehicle
of urbanization in most newly urbanizing locations in India, closer examination of mobility
patterns in these districts (Table 3) suggests an alternative relationship between urbanization
and migration. Rates of seasonal out-migration, defined as working for 1-6 continuous months
per year outside one’s place of residence, are significantly above average in these places.
According to NSS estimates, 2.5 percent of the population migrates seasonally out of districts
experiencing urbanization from within,
27
as compared to 1.4 percent of the country’s total
population.
Seasonal migration is likely related to the urbanization of these once-rural locations, in
two senses. First, because seasonal migrants do not change their place of residence, this form of
migration (unlike permanent out-migration) does not act as a demographic drain on origin
locations, helping to sustain their natural population growth. Second, seasonal migration
effectively expands the territorial scale of a given settlement’s labor market; households can
draw income from a more diverse range of locations than if workers labored only locally. This
could enable a local economic transition away from agriculture by enhancing local demand for

26
To calculate these figures I have used TFR data provided by Guilmoto and Rajan (2013).
27
A population-weighted average of the 22 districts I refer in footnote 11.
56

non-farm goods and services. In addition, while these districts do not have a higher rate of
permanent out-migration than the average district in India (a population-weighted average of
about 7 and 8 percent, respectively, over the period of analysis), the states in which they are
located are major recipients of remittances from internal migrants (Tumbe, 2018); these
remittance flows are further fuel for their non-farm economies.
28

28
This does not imply that the shift away from agriculture is an administrative artefact, with all the non-farm work taking place
elsewhere. The agrarian exit in the districts identified in Tables 2 and 3 involves a much larger workforce than the seasonal migrant
population alone. Moreover, because seasonal migration is defined as less than six months away from the place of residence, an
agricultural worker who migrates seasonally for non-farm work would still be classified as working in agriculture.
57

Table 2. Consistent Districts of Rapid Urbanization
CDs in Top Quartile of Both Non-Ag Employment Share Growth & Dense Agglomeration Share Growth
Dense Agglomeration Structural Transformation
State Current District(s)
Composing Consistent
District
DA Population
Share (%) (1991-
2011)
DA Share
Growth (%-
point) (1991-
2011)
Non-Ag
Workforce
Share (%)
(1991-2011)
Non-Ag
Workforce
Share Growth
(%-point)
(1991-2011)
Bihar Muzaffarpur 71% 13% 38% 20%
Himachal
Pradesh
Bilaspur 61% 25% 60% 30%
Jharkhand,
Bihar
Chatra, Hazaribagh,
Kodarma, Ramgarh
67% 6% 50% 21%
Bihar Siwan 67% 5% 40% 24%
Manipur Bishnupur 42% 16% 59% 31%
West Bengal Purba Medinipur 57% 12% 54% 23%
Bihar Banka, Bhagalpur 75% 5% 37% 21%
West Bengal Maldah 62% 9% 48% 21%
Jharkhand,
Bihar
Deoghar, Dumka, Godda,
Jamtara
72% 5% 40% 24%
Assam Cachar, Hailakandi,
Karimganj
58% 12% 64% 35%
West Bengal Darjiling 63% 13% 84% 42%
Arunachal
Pradesh
Kurung Kumey, Lower
Subansiri, Papum Pare
29% 11% 57% 23%
Assam Darrang, Sonitpur, Udalguri 25% 9% 48% 29%
Manipur Thoubal 56% 12% 47% 24%
Manipur Imphal East, Imphal West 61% 9% 77% 23%
Jharkhand,
Bihar
Pakur, Sahibganj 68% 8% 44% 27%
Meghalaya Jaintia Hills 50% 6% 44% 21%
Assam Nagaon 48% 23% 46% 21%
Assam Baksa, Barpeta, Bongaigaon,
Chirang, Dhubri, Goalpara,
Kamrup, Kamrup
Metropolitan, Kokrajhar,
Nalbari
42% 13% 53% 21%
Tripura Dhalai, North Tripura, South
Tripura
44% 8% 52% 24%
Bihar Begusarai 76% 10% 42% 23%
West Bengal South 24 Parganas 75% 8% 67% 27%
Haryana Gurgaon, Mewat 64% 25% 76% 31%
Nagaland Dimapur, Kohima, Peren 65% 5% 65% 25%
Puducherry Karaikal 55% 11% 82% 32%
Uttar Pradesh Bulandshahr, Gautam
Buddha Nagar, Ghaziabad
73% 4% 71% 26%
Sikkim East 61% 6% 75% 26%
Telangana,
Andhra
Pradesh
Rangareddy 65% 6% 72% 28%
Daman & Diu Daman 67% 33% 98% 27%

58

Table 3. Migration in Districts of Rapid Urbanization
In-, Out-, Net and Seasonal Migration

Migration
State Current District(s)
Composing Consistent
District
20-Year In-
Migrant-to-
Population Ratio
(%) (1991-2011)
20-Year Out-
Migrant-to-
Population Ratio
(%) (1991-2011)
20-Year Net
Migration Ratio
(%) (1991-2011)
Seasonal Out-
Migrants as
Share of
Population (%)
Bihar Muzaffarpur 0% 14% -14% 2%
Himachal
Pradesh
Bilaspur 4% 18% -14% 0%
Jharkhand,
Bihar
Chatra, Hazaribagh,
Kodarma, Ramgarh
1% 15% -14% 2%
Bihar Siwan 0% 11% -11% 4%
Manipur Bishnupur 0% 9% -9% 0%
West Bengal Purba Medinipur 3% 10% -7% 2%
Bihar Banka, Bhagalpur 2% 8% -6% 7%
West Bengal Maldah 1% 5% -4% 7%
Jharkhand,
Bihar
Deoghar, Dumka, Godda,
Jamtara
1% 5% -4% 5%
Assam Cachar, Hailakandi,
Karimganj
0% 4% -3% 1%
West Bengal Darjiling 2% 5% -2% 1%
Arunachal
Pradesh
Kurung Kumey, Lower
Subansiri, Papum Pare
0% 2% -2% 1%
Assam Darrang, Sonitpur, Udalguri 0% 2% -2% 3%
Manipur Thoubal 0% 2% -2% 0%
Manipur Imphal East, Imphal West 2% 3% -1% 1%
Jharkhand,
Bihar
Pakur, Sahibganj 1% 1% -1% 2%
Meghalaya Jaintia Hills 0% 1% 0% 1%
Assam Nagaon 3% 3% 0% 1%
Assam Baksa, Barpeta, Bongaigaon,
Chirang, Dhubri, Goalpara,
Kamrup, Kamrup
Metropolitan, Kokrajhar,
Nalbari
7% 7% 0% 1%
Tripura Dhalai, North Tripura, South
Tripura
3% 3% 0% 0%
Bihar Begusarai 4% 3% 1% 4%
West Bengal South 24 Parganas 7% 4% 2% 2%
Haryana Gurgaon, Mewat 15% 3% 11% 0%
Nagaland Dimapur, Kohima, Peren 20% 6% 15% 4%
Puducherry Karaikal 24% 6% 17% 1%
Uttar
Pradesh
Bulandshahr, Gautam
Buddha Nagar, Ghaziabad
25% 6% 19% 0%
Sikkim East 32% 6% 26% 0%
Telangana,
Andhra
Pradesh
Rangareddy 37% 4% 33% 0%
Daman &
Diu
Daman 69% 1% 68% 0%
61

59

5. Causal underpinnings: metropolitan inequality, uneven spatial regimes of social
insurance, or historical demography?
Why is rural population growth fueling in situ urbanization in the countryside, as
opposed to propelling faster out-migration? The conditions of “urban pull” and “rural push” in
India appear ripe for a much larger exodus to cities. Dense parts of the countryside face
extraordinary pressure on the supply of cultivable land,
29
the vagaries of climate change are
making agricultural livelihoods increasingly precarious (Berchoux et al., 2019), and the rural-
urban wage gap is over 25 percent after correcting for cost-of-living differences (Munshi &
Rosenzweig, 2016). Yet permanent rural-urban migration is not occurring on the scale that
standard urbanization theory would predict. Instead, population persistence and growth,
combined with local economic change, is urbanizing the “ruralopolis.”
Investigating the causal underpinnings of this paradox is the next step in a research
agenda around urbanization from within. The fundamental question to be addressed is: Why
are so few people permanently migrating out of areas like Maldah, opting instead for
temporary out-migration? The literature reviewed above offers several hypotheses, which I
detail in this section as a foundation for future research.
First, it may be that the nature of India’s structural transformation—which “leapfrogged”
manufacturing, transitioning from an agriculture- to services-based economy—has not created
enough of the types of jobs that would enable, and motivate, migrants to permanently relocate
to cities. In contrast to urban transitions driven by manufacturing—whether in Europe, the

29
According to the Agricultural Census (2015-16), over 75 percent of all agricultural landholdings in Bihar and 60 percent in West
Bengal are smaller than 0.5 hectares (1.2 acres), and the size of the average agricultural landholding has been declining for decades.
(See http://agcensus.nic.in/)

60

Americas or East Asia—economic growth in India’s cities since 1991 has relied primarily on
modern services such as information technology, apart from a few manufacturing hubs located
in western and southern states.
30
Because these sectors require more specialized skills and
employ fewer workers than labor-intensive manufacturing, the major metropolitan areas where
they are located host highly polarized labor markets: a salaried professional class alongside a
large working class laboring in (mostly informal) retail, hospitality and personal services
(Azam, 2012). Work opportunities in the latter segment of the labor market are generally
precarious, contingent, and temporary. When earnings in casual urban employment are
compared to rural wages, the incentive to migrate looks much weaker than when examining
average wages across locations (Mukhopadhyay & Naik, 2018). This “missing middle” labor
market structure is a contemporary challenge throughout the world (Goos & Manning, 2007),
even in countries at lower income levels (Rodrik, 2016), yet in India it coincides with, rather
than follows, the urban transition. Therefore, it may be that urbanization patterns in India
diverge from the expectations of conventional urban theory because there is greater incentive to
migrate temporarily than permanently for most rural people, sustaining both the demographic
growth and economic viability of migrants’ places of origin.
Another factor that may be at play is the political culture of large Indian cities. Cities like
Delhi and Mumbai have become somewhat hostile to the poor, most especially poor migrants,
through an emphasis on world-class city-making (Ghertner, 2015), which often involves
“sanitization” (Kundu & Saraswati, 2012) through demolition and eviction in informal

30
Manufacturing’s value-added in Indian GDP has been in steady decline since the mid-1990s, when it reached its peak at only 17.9
percent (1995) (World Bank, 2020).

61

settlements (Bhan, 2009; Ghertner, 2014). Nativist movements directly seek to limit the influx of
migrants from other states or reserve jobs for locals (Tumbe, 2018)—part of a broader pattern of
regional identity politics (Nielsen & Bedi, 2017). For example, the government of Haryana, a
state adjacent to New Delhi that hosts many multinational corporations, recently passed a law
that forces private companies to reserve 75 percent of low- and middle-salaried jobs for locals
(G. Das, 2020). Thus, the political environment may discourage migrants from establishing
permanent homes in large cities and cause them to view metropolitan areas as little more than a
place for occasional temporary employment.
Finally, a third factor that may explain circular as opposed to permanent out-migration
is the spatial regime of formal and informal social welfare in India, which makes rural origins
the anchors of the country’s safety net. While India has seen an explosion in rights-based
entitlements in recent decades, most of these programs are targeted only to rural areas or
otherwise tied to one’s place of permanent residence. For example, the Mahatma Gandhi
National Rural Employment Guarantee program, which entitles rural households to 100 days of
paid work per year on public works projects, has no equivalent in urban areas.
31
These location-
bound programs dull the incentive to leave rural origins and limit the distance migrants are
willing to travel (Kone et al., 2018; Morten, 2019). On top of formal social insurance in rural
areas, households also benefit from informal caste-based networks for borrowing during times

31
Because a rural administrative designation leads to more generous support from the central government, these social welfare
programs also disincentivize state governments from reclassifying rural settlements as urban, leading to a proliferation of “census
towns,” i.e. places designated “urban” by the Census of India but still classified and governed as “rural” by state governments
(Samanta, 2014).

62

of economic distress, which has also been shown to reduce the need to migrate out of rural
areas (Munshi & Rosenzweig, 2016).
Aside from these three factors, which all may act to dull the benefits of permanent rural-
urban migration, the role of historical demography must be considered. The locations
experiencing urbanization from within are heavily concentrated in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, a
region that has hosted high population densities for millennia due to intensive agricultural
practices supported by one of the most extensive fluvial plains in the world. By 1951, before the
period of most rapid demographic growth in the state, Bihar already hosted 221 people per
square kilometer, about double that of India as a whole (Prasad, 1956). If population density is
already high at the onset of a demographic transition, conditions are ripe for in situ
urbanization driven by natural increase—at least in the absence of a massive out-migrant
exodus.

6. Conclusion: implications for research on urbanization and development
This paper has shown that some parts of India are urbanizing through natural
population increase rather than in-migration. I have proposed that “morphing places” and
“moving people” are nevertheless linked in this process—not in the conventional sense of in-
migration creating demographic density, but instead because these areas see high levels of
temporary out-migration that indirectly enables their urbanization. This form of urbanization
has been largely overlooked in existing scholarship. More broadly, the trends I have described
in India signal the potential for a more expansive, comparative investigation of the relationship
between migration and urbanization.

63

Future research is required to tease out the relevance and magnitude of the potential
causes of urbanization from within that I hypothesize—labor market polarization, exclusive
political cultures, social insurance tied to rural origins, and historical demography. Qualitative
case studies in settlements urbanizing from within would help to interrogate the importance of
these factors and may yield insight into variables I have not considered here. Formal
econometric methods would also be useful in determining the relative significance of different
factors and contributing to generalizable explanations for urbanization from within.
In addition to investigating the causes of urbanization from within, another question for
future research is whether this phenomenon is unfolding elsewhere. Given that they occurred
under different conditions, urban transitions from earlier centuries do not likely contain any
equivalent. Urbanization from within may be a specific expression of what Fox and Goodfellow
(2021) call “late urbanization”—urban transitions occurring under the unique demographic,
technological and governance conditions of the 21
st
century. If urbanization from within results
from the factors I have hypothesized in the previous section, then other parts of the Global
South that face similar structural conditions, notably Sub-Saharan Africa, may be witnessing
similar urbanization patterns. Indeed, research by the Africapolis project on in situ urbanization
indicates the likelihood of urbanization from within in West Africa (Moriconi-Ebrard et al.,
2016). Fox (2017) also highlights that “rural transformation” has been an underappreciated
driver of urbanization in the region.
Beyond the questions of its causes and geographic scope, future research must examine
the consequences of urbanization from within. While these could be explored through the lens
of sociology, anthropology, or political science, I focus here on economic geography questions.

64

Aside from becoming non-agricultural, do the locations identified in India exhibit increasing
specialization, spatial clustering of sectors, and increasing returns to scale with growing size
and density? This question holds important implications for urban theory. If these “morphing
places” do not enjoy the economic benefits of urbanization, then this would imply a
weakening—in the worst-case scenario, an inversion—of the relationship between urbanization
and economic development. Alternatively, if agglomeration benefits are evidenced in locations
like Maldah, this could motivate reexamination of an enduring belief in urban and development
economics that labor migration is a crucial precondition of urban productivity growth. Or, more
conservatively, temporary forms of migration might enable the learning and specialization
associated with permanent migration, but to the benefit of origin economies—similar to the
skills transfers sometimes found in research on international return migration.
The answers to these questions have direct relevance for policy and planning. If
urbanizing locations of impoverished regions like the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plain are growing
richer through their urbanization, then policy action could prioritize investments in local public
goods to promote this economic growth and ensure it is sustainable and equitable. On the other
hand, if these communities are experiencing the costs of urbanization (such as congestion and
pollution) without its benefits, this may exacerbate interregional inequalities and necessitate a
different type of policy response, aimed at unlocking barriers to permanent out-migration. In
this sense, a deeper understanding of local economic change in India’s “morphing places” is
crucial to ensuring that the country’s urban transition is one that promotes inclusion.

65

Acknowledgements
This article would not have been possible without the intellectual support of members of my
dissertation committee with whom I have had innumerable brainstorming sessions on
“urbanization from within:” Michael Storper, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, Sai Balakrishnan, Jorge
De la Roca, and David Sloane. Manuel Castells, Huê-Tâm Jamme, Sean Kennedy, and Lisa
Schweitzer provided valuable feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Mentorship from
Partha Mukhopadhyay has been vital in this work, and Sean Fox and Chinmay Tumbe have
been important conversation partners in enhancing my understanding of migration and
demography. I am indebted to Aditya Chhabra and his indispensable skills in compiling,
cleaning, and organizing quantitative data used in this article, and Arnab Datta and Mukta
Naik, for their advice and support as collaborators on topics related to urbanization and
migration in India. Any errors are my own.

66

Chapter 4. Planning the ‘ruralopolis’ in India: Circular migration,
survival entrepreneurship, and the subversive non-farm economy
32

Abstract
Urban research has scarcely investigated the planning context of the “ruralopolis” (Qadeer,
2000) – poor and predominantly agrarian regions of the Global South with very high population
densities. Today, some of these regions are urbanizing, in the sense that other elements of
urbanism, beyond density, are emerging. This paper utilizes a case study of an Indian district in
Bihar to investigate urbanizing ruralopolis settlements. I identify and discuss the planning
implications of three distinctive features of their urbanization: circular out-migration, a non-
farm economy rooted in consumption and survival entrepreneurship, and shifts in agrarian
social hierarchies that present progressive possibilities.

1. Introduction
At the turn of the 21
st
century, Mohammed Qadeer coined the term “ruralopolis” to
describe poor, agricultural regions of the Global South where human densities had already
reached the level of many Western metropolitan areas (Qadeer, 2000). He pointed to India’s
Lower Gangetic Plain (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal) and other regions—Java, the
Lower Nile Valley, and northeastern Nigeria—as examples. Unlike other concepts of the semi-
urban, these vast regions are not peripheries of a central city or interstices of a polycentric

32
This paper is under review at the Journal of Planning Education and Research.

67

metropolis, but rather function as a decentralized network of towns, large villages, and small
cities. Pointing to the “paradox of poor agrarian regions supporting population concentrations
of urban magnitude,” Qadeer argued that these “urban frontier[s] [were] ripening for spatial
and infrastructural crises” (1583). Yet the field of planning – despite its growing interest in
small-town and rural contexts (Dandekar & Hibbard, 2016; Frank & Reiss, 2014) – has paid little
attention to ruralopolises, and two decades later, knowledge of the social and economic
dynamics that inform their planning needs remains scarce.
Today, many ruralopolises are urbanizing – in the sense that other conditions of
urbanism, beyond density, are emerging. For example, labor market data indicate that non-
agricultural employment is growing rapidly in parts of the dense and “rural” Global South,
even as chronic poverty persists and out-migration continues to outweigh in-migration
(Randolph, 2022). The emergence and growth of large, non-agricultural, nucleated settlements
in ruralopolis regions is partly responsible for the enormous proliferation of independent towns
and small cities throughout the Global South (Moriconi-Ebrard et al., 2016; Mukhopadhyay et
al., 2020; OECD & European Commission, 2020; Randolph & Deuskar, 2020). Scholars of India
in particular have argued that much of the country’s urbanization is hidden by rigid
administrative definitions, with states like Bihar far more urban than they appear in official data
(van Duijne, 2019). These trends should renew, and strengthen, Qadeer’s entreaty to take
seriously the planning needs of high-density regions located far from metropolitan areas and
their peripheries.
This paper asks a set of questions aimed at addressing this gap in the literature. What
unique challenges arise for planning in historically agrarian, high-density regions now

68

experiencing the social and economic restructuring of urbanization? How does their agrarian
heritage, and the fact that urban density preceded the advent of an urban economy, shape the
planning context? Does urbanization driven by natural population growth, rather than in-
migration, require a different approach to planning? I address these questions through a case
study of the Begusarai District in the Indian state of Bihar, at the heart of India’s Lower
Gangetic Plain, a quintessential ruralopolis. Through semi-structured interviews and other
qualitative methods, I investigate urbanizing settlements in terms of economic, social, and
political dynamics that are likely to influence attempts to plan and govern their urbanization.
My findings elucidate three distinctive features that shape the planning context of
urbanizing towns of Begusarai District: the prevalence of circular out-migration, a
consumption-based non-farm economy built on remittances and survival entrepreneurship, and
the persistent but changing role of agrarian social hierarchies. I discuss the planning
implications of these features.
This paper contributes to a wider ambition to shift the empirical geography of urban
studies and urban planning to the contexts where most urbanization is unfolding. Nearly two
decades ago, scholars called for a “Southern turn” in urban research agendas (Rao, 2006), but
urban research on the Global South has remained disproportionately focused on the largest
metropolitan areas (Bunnell & Maringanti, 2010; Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020). Urban
populations in the South, meanwhile, remain heavily concentrated in small cities, and much
contemporary urban growth is occurring through the emergence of new settlements at the
bottom of the urban pyramid (Randolph & Deuskar, 2020). A mismatch between the geography
of urban research and the geography of urbanization concerns planners as both a practical and

69

epistemological matter (Randolph & Deuskar, 2020). The urbanizing ruralopolis – “the future
form of human habitat in large parts of Asia and Africa in the 21
st
century” (Qadeer, 2000: 1601)
– represents a context that is neglected in planning research but highly significant to
contemporary urban transitions.
The paper is structured as follows. I place the ruralopolis in the context of a broader
literature illustrating the importance of rural-to-urban in situ transformation in contemporary
urban transitions. Next, I describe my case selection process and methodological approach.
Following a description of Begusarai District, the findings section is organized into the three
identified themes relating to migration, the local economy, and social relations. I then discuss
the planning implications of my findings and call, in the conclusion, for broader research and
action to promote inclusive and sustainable urbanization in ruralopolis regions.

2. Urban transformations in the “rural” Global South
Since the mid-20
th
century, when teeming “primate” cities became symbolic of “Third
World” urbanization (Berry, 1961), a perception that urban populations of the Global South are
concentrated in the largest cities has proven durable (Henderson, 2002; Sheppard, 2014; World
Bank, 2009b). However, innovations in the measurement of global urbanization patterns are
casting doubt on this impression, as scholars begin to recognize the persistence, proliferation,
and growth of settlements at the bottom of the urban hierarchy in many Global South countries.
Utilizing the Global Humans Settlements database, Randolph and Deuskar (2020) find that
high-income countries actually host larger shares of their urban and overall populations in
megacities of over 10 million people than do lower-income countries; the same is true for the

70

share of population in cities with over 1 million inhabitants. Other evidence echoes these
findings. The Africapolis project has found rapid growth in the number of small urban
agglomerations in West Africa (Moriconi-Ebrard et al., 2016), and several scholars in India have
noted similar trends (Pradhan, 2013; Swerts, 2017).
Yet urban research agendas have yet to prioritize non-metropolitan geographies. Several
scholars note the scarcity of urban literature on towns and small cities in general (Bell & Jayne,
2009) and the non-metropolitan South in particular (Bunnell & Maringanti, 2010; Cook, 2018;
Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020; Zérah & Denis, 2017). Nevertheless, the extant research on towns
and small cities in the Global South outlines some of their salient features, including: their
important role in linking the rural and urban economy and reducing poverty (Christiaensen &
Todo, 2013; Gibson et al., 2017; Satterthwaite & Tacoli, 2003); the unique spaces they create for
women to negotiate with and against social norms (Naik, 2022); their susceptibility to elite
capture and inequality (Kudva, 2015; K. Sharma, 2012; Singh, 2006); and the dense, intimate
civil society networks that characterize their social and political life (Bryceson, 2011; Cook, 2018;
Pasquini, 2019; K. Sharma, 2012). Planning research points to the dearth of resources, including
human capital, for managing urban growth and environmental risks in towns and small cities of
the South (Rumbach, 2016; Rumbach & Follingstad, 2019; Subramanyam, 2020; Tuts, 1998) –
especially given that, in countries like India, their administrative status often lags behind their
actual level of urbanization (Jain, 2018; Pradhan, 2013; van Duijne, 2019; Zérah & Denis, 2017).
While most research on in situ urban transformation focuses on the peri-urban, Qadeer’s
ruralopolis “is not an extended metropolis or a rural area being drawn into an urban orbit”
(Qadeer, 2000: 1590). As compared to earlier concepts of the “rurban,” such as the desakota

71

(McGee, 1991), the densification of human habitats in the ruralopolis is associated far less with
industrialization and agglomeration. This idea finds resonance in the more recent concept of
“subaltern urbanization” in India, which Mukhopadhyay et al (2020) describe as “vibrant
smaller settlements––outside the metropolitan shadow––sustainably supporting a dispersed
pattern of urbanization” (582). I have shown in other work that many of India’s rapidly
urbanizing locations are experiencing population growth that is entirely internal – that is,
independent of in-migration (Randolph, 2022). This is a demography of urbanization that
contradicts canonical models of urban genesis developed by urban economists, in which the
formation of new cities invariably relies on in-migration (Henderson, 1974).
Taken together, this literature indicates that some parts of the high-density, non-
metropolitan Global South are urbanizing as agrarian villages transform into urban towns by
the force of internal population growth and a social and economic evolution wrought by
density. Much of the evidence comes from India, but similar trends are appearing in other
regions too, notably Sub-Saharan Africa (Fox, 2017; Moriconi-Ebrard et al., 2016; Potts, 2018). As
these patterns contrast with the dominant understanding of the urban transition – structural
transformation in the economy leading to mass rural-urban migration and the expansion of
cities (Lewis, 1954) – urban planning has yet to grapple with their implications.

3. Case selection and methodological approach
To better understand the social and economic context of an urbanizing ruralopolis, and
the associated implications for planning, this paper utilizes a case study of a district in Bihar,
India. Districts are approximately the size of counties in the United States, making them small

72

enough to observe local processes of urbanization but large enough to study multiple
settlements that are spatially independent. Moreover, in India, the district is arguably the most
important unit of local government (Sabharwal and Berman, 2013: 424).
To identify the universe of urbanizing ruralopolis districts in India, I first undertook
detailed statistical analysis based on the Indian Census and the Global Human Settlements
(GHS) database. I filtered Indian districts based on three criteria:
(1) Rapid physical and demographic densification: The GHS classifies each square
kilometer of land area in the world into categories based on population density and
built-up area within and surrounding it (A. J. Florczyk, Corbane, Ehrlich, et al., 2019). I
constructed a district-level variable, defined as the share of the district population living
in either of two GHS categories—“urban center” and “dense urban cluster.”
33
I then
filtered districts that experienced a growth rate in this share variable in the top quartile
of all districts over the period 1990-2015.
(2) Rapid growth of non-farm employment: In filtering, one of my goals was to identify
districts that were not only densifying, but urbanizing in the sense of developing a non-
farm economy (see Potts's (2018) discussion distinguishing densification from
urbanization). I used decennial Census data to construct a district-level variable, defined
as the share of the district workforce engaged primarily in a non-agricultural
occupation. I then filtered districts that experienced a growth rate in this share variable
in the top quartile of all districts over the period 1991-2011.

33
These are clusters of contiguous grid cells where each cell has a density of at least 1,500 inhabitants/km
2
or is at least 50 percent
built-up, and which host a total cluster population of at least 50,000 inhabitants (urban center) or 5,000 inhabitants (dense urban
cluster).

73

(3) Located in a ruralopolis: Interpreting Qadeer’s description, I defined a district as being
within a ruralopolis if it met two conditions:
a. Not adjacent to or containing a city of greater than 500,000 people (as of 2011
Census) and not containing a state capital
b. District-wide population density above 400 people/km
2
(as of 2011 Census)
34

Twenty-nine districts in India met the first two criteria. These are districts where the
fastest urbanization is happening – that is, growth and densification of nucleated settlements
combined with non-farm employment growth. A more thorough explanation of the analysis
and the locations I identified is detailed elsewhere (Randolph, 2022). Of these 29, 12 met the
third condition – that is, they fall within a ruralopolis. This offers initial confirmation that
urbanization of the ruralopolis is an important contributor to India’s overall urban transition.
From among these 12, I chose Begusarai District based on several considerations: its location in
Bihar, the state that hosts the highest number of urbanizing ruralopolis districts I identified; its
range of differently sized settlements that are functionally distinct from the administrative
headquarters of Begusarai City, enabling me to study multiple cases of urban growth; and its
lingua franca being Hindi, the only South Asian language I speak fluently.
I made a reconnaissance visit to Begusarai District in October and November of 2021 to
conduct unstructured background interviews and identify field sites within the district. I
identified four settlements – Bakhri, Bhagwanpur, Manjhaul, and Mansurchak – that host dense,
nucleated populations according to GHS data; are spatially independent of the district

34
This density threshold for the district is the same as the Indian government’s density criterion for defining a settlement as urban. I
reason that, if an entire district has already reached this density level, it should be considered to have urban-like densities, as per
Qadeer’s description.

74

headquarters; and were witnessing, according to local informants, rapid growth in their
markets (i.e. non-farm economies).
During data collection in April 2022, I conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews
with 24 people across the four settlements, with the highest concentration in Mansurchak.
35
The
interviews focused on several themes: employment and livelihood opportunities; migration;
and social, economic, and physical change in the settlement over the respondent’s lifetime. The
interviewees were residents of diverse ages, occupations, and caste and religious groups.
However, they were nearly all men; gender norms in many parts of north India make it difficult
for a male researcher to speak privately with a woman to whom he is not related. To address
this gap in my research, I collaborated with the female director of a local non-profit to co-lead
five focus group discussions with women. These focus group discussions focused on the same
themes as the semi-structured interviews. In addition to the interviews and focus groups, my
research is informed by participant observation and background conversations with local and
district-level government officials surrounding infrastructure, the farm and non-farm economy,
and the implementation of central and state government programs.
36

In analyzing the qualitative data, I began with a thematic analysis to pinpoint core topics
in the interviews that related to my research questions. Having identified the themes of circular
out-migration, agrarian caste relations, and the non-farm economy, I next conducted a content
analysis to deduce more specific issues that would speak to these: for example, what work
people do; what migration decisions they make; and how the built environment and social and

35
I discontinued semi-structured interviews upon reaching saturation.
36
I did not record conversations with government officials due to sensitivities with speaking on the record.

75

political dynamics of the settlements have changed over time. Finally, I performed a narrative
analysis to understand how people in the settlement interpreted the changes unfolding.
The biggest limitation to my methodological approach is the constraints to
generalizability that are inherent to a case study. Begusarai District, while it was selected to be
representative of a broader phenomenon – the urbanizing ruralopolis – may still have some
unique characteristics that are not present in other districts with similar population and
economic characteristics. Nevertheless, a descriptive case study is often considered the best
method for establishing a research agenda, by identifying trends, patterns, and issues that can
direct hypotheses in research with larger sample sizes (Flyvbjerg, 2006). In this sense, it is an
appropriate method to employ in analyzing a context of urbanization about which planning
scholars and practitioners have limited knowledge.

4. Begusarai District and Bihar: the context
Begusarai District lies in central Bihar, one of India’s poorest and most underdeveloped
states since British rule. Sitting atop rich alluvial soils irrigated by annual monsoon floods, Bihar
lies in a region that is arguably the world’s largest ruralopolis. The contiguous Indian states of
Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal, together with Bangladesh, constitute the lower Indo-
Gangetic Plain. The region is home to nearly 520 million people living in a land area of
approximately 520,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of France).
37
Bihar alone hosts over

37
These figures are calculated using 2023 population estimates from the Indian Census for Indian states
(https://www.census2011.co.in/states.php) and from the World Population Review for Bangladesh
(https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/bangladesh-population). They include the region’s two megacities, Kolkata and
Dhaka; however, even excluding these two urban agglomerations, the Lower Indo-Gangetic Plain contains at least 480 million

76

130 million people, though it is only the size of South Carolina and contains no metropolitan
areas larger than its capital of Patna, home to 3.8 million people.
While it was once a center of political and economic power in India, Bihar’s modern
history is one of deindustrialization, impoverishment, and organized crime. The state’s political
economy is shaped by legacies of the exploitative zamindaari sharecropping system established
in colonial times, which disincentivized capital investments in agriculture and aggravated caste
relations (A. Banerjee & Iyer, 2005). Industrial policies in both colonial and independent India
disadvantaged Bihar, as they funneled investment toward coastal areas at the expense of inland
industrial hubs (King, 1990) – leading to “pauperization in the countryside” (A. N. Das, 2018).
India’s 1960s Green Revolution, which boosted agricultural productivity through irrigation,
hybrid seeds, pest controls and mechanization (Dandekar, 2016), largely failed in Bihar and
other Lower Indo-Gangetic states – generating a persistent “spatial rift” in India’s economic
development patterns (Balakrishnan, 2020). In 2004, the Economist magazine, in an article titled,
“An Area of Darkness,” wrote that Bihar had “become a byword for the worst of India” (The
Economist, 2004).
Conditions in Bihar began to change with the election of Nitish Kumar, in 2005, as chief
minister. Kumar’s administration is widely credited with improvements to public service
delivery, infrastructure, law and order, and management of public finances and government
expenditure (Mukherji & Mukherji, 2015). Some of the most impressive gains have been in
electricity infrastructure, with major improvements to both access and quality; between 2014

people (utilizing the Demographia Atlas for population estimates of the urban agglomerations of Kolkata and Dhaka
(http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf).

77

and 2019, the average number of hours of electricity jumped from 12 to 18 (Sudarshan &
Greenstone, 2019). Bihar has also benefited from a dramatic expansion in rural road
infrastructure that has occurred across India; between 2005 and 2020, nearly 100,000 kilometers
of roads were constructed in Bihar through central and state government programs, according
to the chief minister (IANS, 2020).
Lying along the Ganges River, the city of Begusarai is the third largest in Bihar, and the
district of Begusarai ranks fourth on a measure of infrastructure quality (Mukherji & Mukherji,
2015). Though today the only major employer is a state-owned thermal power plant, the city
and its adjoining suburb of Barauni were once a significant industrial hub. The district became a
stronghold of the Communist Party of India (CPI) starting in the 1960s. Today, Begusarai is best
known as the hometown of Kanhaiya Kumar, a national figure and left-wing political activist
who was once jailed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Ironically, the lineage of leftist leaders
from Begusarai, including Kanhaiya Kumar, have all come from the local land-owning elite, the
Bhumihaar caste. The Bhumihaars amassed power under the zamindaari system and retain
significant control over the district’s politics and economy (Begg, 2019).
Since economic and political reform have taken hold in Bihar, Begusarai District has
seen rapid growth in its non-farm economy. In 1991, non-farm employment in the district
accounted for only 19 percent of the workforce, whereas by 2011 it accounted for 42 percent.
38

Most of this growth has occurred in settlements outside of Begusarai City, which has stagnated
amid deindustrialization. In Bakhri and Mansurchak, approximately two-thirds and three-

38
These figures are taken from the Primary Census Abstracts of 1991 and 2011, available at
https://state.bihar.gov.in/main/cache/1/Figures/Table-019.pdf and https://censusindia.gov.in/nada/index.php/catalog/40901,
respectively.

78

quarters of the local workforce, respectively, labored in non-farm occupations as of the 2011
census. In Bhagwanpur and Manjhaul, the other two settlements where fieldwork was
conducted, the figure stood at about half in 2011.
39
Yet official data offer little insight into the
nature of this non-farm economy, making it important to investigate on the ground.
Morphologically, these towns are independent of the city of Begusarai. While all four
towns have benefited from recent infrastructure investments, none lie on the major national
highway that runs through the district, and only Manjhaul lies on a state highway, indicating
their local, rather than national or regional, economic functions. Except for Bakhri, all are
proximate to rivers that were once used for transportation. In Figure 7, the district of Begusarai
is overlaid with the 2015 Global Human Settlements classification for “urban centers” (in black)
and “dense urban clusters” (in dark gray) (see Case selection and methodological approach).
The figure highlights that much of the district beyond Begusarai City, including the case sites, is
already highly urbanized in either a physical or demographic sense.

39
Primary Census Abstract, 2011 (see footnote 38)

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Figure 7: The Urban Morphology of Begusarai District

Three of the four settlements studied are currently governed by gram panchayats, or
village councils. While these councils reflect traditional forms of village governance dating to
precolonial times, they were formally recognized as the official unit of rural self-governance
through an amendment to India’s constitution in 1992 aimed at democratic decentralization.
Despite the aspiration to devolve political power and financial resources to directly elected gram
panchayats, they have few sources of revenue generation (e.g. taxing markets and religious
pilgrimage sites) and remain heavily dependent on fiscal transfers from the central and state
governments—limiting their autonomy (R. Banerjee, 2013). The councils are responsible for
formulating economic development plans and implementing central government schemes such
as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), they remain subservient in most

80

ways to state governments. In the largest and most urbanized of the four settlements, Bakhri,
the state of Bihar has established an urban local government (nagar panchayat), which has basic
powers of property taxation and land use regulation. Bakhri also enjoys a marginally higher
level of services—for example, street lighting and wider roads. A range of political economy
factors – including the additional resources required for maintaining an urban local body –
prevent faster municipalization of settlements such as the other three covered in this study
(Samanta, 2014).

5. Distinguishing features of an urbanizing ruralopolis
5.1 Circular out-migration
Among the most prominent features of Begusarai District’s social and economic
landscape is the widespread practice of male out-migration for work in other parts of India.
Destinations include metropolitan regions such as Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore, as well as
wealthier agricultural states that are less labor-abundant, such as Punjab. When asked about
employment, a common refrain repeated by residents of the district was that local options are
minimal and therefore most people in search of wage work must leave.
These migrations, especially among lower-income and lower-caste households, are
almost always temporary. It is rare for young men to leave with the intention of settling
permanently elsewhere. As Irfan,
40
a return migrant who had lived in Delhi and Mumbai,
commented: “How will we live there, when our heart is here? We go there only for hard work,
with some goal, like to solve a problem at home. Someone will think: if I stay there for six

40
All names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the respondents.

81

months and earn 10,000 rupees per month, then I will earn 60,000 – enough to cover two debts
of 30,000 each.” Manohar, whose father is currently working in Delhi, explained the migration
as seasonal: “After the wheat harvest, working class people here will not find work, so they will
start to move out again, to the cities. In the big cities, you will work hard for four to six months,
earn some money, and then return when there is farm work.”
By the official data, Begusarai District sees similar levels of out- and in-migration.
According to estimates generated from National Sample Survey data, 2.9 percent of the
district’s 1991 population had out-migrated by 2011, while in-migration over the same period
was equivalent to 3.8 percent of the 1991 population – a net migration rate of less than 1
percent.
41
These government data underestimate the actual scale of out-migration, which, given
its temporary nature, goes unrecorded depending on when migrants or their origin households
are enumerated (Chandrasekhar et al., 2017). Though a hint of this does lie in the official data:
3.5 percent of the district population reported in 2008 that they had migrated seasonally – for
between 1 and 6 months – in the past year.
42
In addition, it is evident on the ground that much
of what is recorded as in-migration is likely to be return migration; only one interviewee had
been born in a different (neighboring) district, and none was aware of any trend of in-migration
from elsewhere.
At first glance, it appears counterintuitive that one of the most rapidly urbanizing
districts in India would see such high volumes of out-migration; in-migration is generally
assumed to be the demographic mechanism of urbanization, the way that settlements reach

41
These estimates are based on the Employment, Unemployment and Migration Survey of the 64
th
Round of the NSS, available at:
http://microdata.gov.in/nada43/index.php/catalog/117/study-description.
42
See footnote 41.

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urban densities and then continue to grow. However, there are two ways in which circular out-
migration contributes positively to urbanization in the settlements where I conducted my
interviews: (1) Because the migration is circular, and because it generally involves only one or
two household members, it does not act as a demographic drain. In a context like Bihar where
fertility is still higher than replacement, natural population growth is thus not constrained by
out-migration, and “rural” settlements continue to fill up and fill in. (2) Settlements like the
ones studied can sustain a larger, denser, and more non-agricultural population than their local
economy would otherwise support, because households are arbitraging their labor across an
expansive economic geography.
To use a metaphor, if internal population growth is like the steam inside a pressure
cooker, circular out-migration acts like the whistling valve, relieving demographic and
economic pressure. In Manohar’s words: “I’ve told my father many times to come home, but he
says, ‘if I live at home, running the house will be difficult. How will we survive?’ My father also
tells me that if things don’t work out here in Mansurchak, I can come to Delhi too and look for
work, whatever kind of work suits my skills.” This also illustrates a common claim among
interviewees: for those without high levels of education, working in a big city is not an
aspiration, but a fallback plan when local livelihood options are exhausted or supplemental
income is required.
Most planning knowledge is developed in contexts where in-migration structures
society, economy, and space. Urban problems in both the North and South are often framed as
conflicts between the interests of long-time residents and recent migrants (Caldeira, 1992; Ding
& Loukaitou-Sideris, 2022; Hyra, 2015; Slemp et al., 2012; Yiftachel, 2000). We need to ask,

83

therefore, whether inherited planning theories and models require adaptation in a demographic
context shaped by circular out-migration rather than the influx of newcomers.

5.2 An entrepreneurial, yet survivalist, non-farm economy
The growth of the non-farm economy and the shift to non-agricultural land uses are also
linked to circular out-migration in Begusarai District. As Ikhlak, an elderly shopkeeper and
informal historian of Mansurchak explained, circular migration has been spawning land
investment and non-farm economic activity since the 1980s. At that time, the families of lower-
caste laborers from Mansurchak and nearby villages who had migrated out of Bihar to work in
coal mines began buying land located near the road. “In that era, the children of those people
had the courage to say, ‘Our father has money, let’s buy land, let’s start a business, run a shop.’
…This is the main reason this area is as developed today as it is: outside money came from
people retiring from coal mining. Even today you will see that those families have a lot of land
here.”
The same pattern of investment by return migrants continues. Many people in
Mansurchak point to a new “mall” – more of a miniature department store, which opened in the
summer of 2022 – as evidence of its rapid development. The owner worked for two decades in a
rice factory in Punjab. He used his savings to finance a local political career and secured a 2.5-
million-rupee loan (about $32,000) to finance the construction of his new store. Another return
migrant, Rajkumar, runs a business in Mansurchak that employs about 25 people and
manufactures commercial kitchen equipment. In his time working outside of Bihar, he stayed in
each job for only four to six months, until he felt he had acquired as much technical knowledge

84

as he could. While he gathered about 300,000 rupees (~$3,800) in initial startup capital – around
20 percent from his own savings and the rest borrowed from relatives – he claims that it was the
knowledge, skills, and self-confidence he built while working away from home that enabled his
success.
These stories are inspirational, but a more structural analysis of the non-farm economy
in these urbanizing settlements raises several concerns. First, whether they are run by return
migrants or not, the bulk of non-farm businesses in these settlements are various forms of
survival entrepreneurship. The typical business employs no full-time workers, and the typical
business-owner views their work as a last resort; they lack agricultural land and view farm
labor as a nonviable livelihood – either because of its low remuneration or because of the
feudalistic caste relations that persist in agriculture. Kamlesh, a resident of Bhagwanpur and a
return migrant, runs a small fast-food stall. Profit margins are so slim that on some days he
earns nothing at all. “Yes, sometimes God gives us something, good money, like 200 or 400
rupees [in net profit] (about $2.50 to $5) and we use that money to buy rations to last us 10 or 15
days.”
Second, the non-agricultural sector is largely composed of service providers and
retailers; Rajkumar’s is one of the few manufacturing enterprises. Table 4 shows the range of
non-farm businesses I observed over several visits to Mansurchak. The settlements I studied
function mostly as market towns, located at strategic junctions where they serve the
consumption needs of a proximate population, with the exception of Bhagwanpur, whose
growth is more specifically tied to co-located sub-district government offices. Third, these
settlements exhibit very little cluster development or sectoral specialization. In Mansurchak,

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there is an old community of artisans who create murtis, statues used in Hindu religious
ceremonies, and in Manjhaul there are several businesses that manufacture ghumtis, small
wooden structures out of which roadside vendors run their shops. However, these examples of
local specialization are few in number and limited in scale.
Vikas, a hardware store owner in Manjhaul, provided his own analysis of the
underlying cause of the non-farm economy’s growth. The market around him, he claimed, has
grown not because of vikaas (development or progress), but rather because of population
increase alongside a lack of viable livelihoods. “It’s because unemployment persists that the
market has gotten this large. In my family, there are five brothers, and not one of us has a job.
So what will we do?” The result is an oversaturation of barely profitable businesses competing
over limited demand.
The growth of non-farm employment in Begusarai’s urbanizing settlements, therefore,
can be tied to two competing narratives: a vibrant, if nascent, local economy led by the skills,
capital, and ingenuity of return migrants; or an amalgam of self-employment coping strategies
among surplus laborers. While my research provides evidence of both, the lack of specialization
and the limited growth of tradable sectors – in which wages, working conditions and
productivity tend to experience faster improvement (Storper, 2013) – raise serious concerns
about the economic sustainability of these settlements and their capacity to enable economic
mobility.

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Table 4. Non-farm businesses in Mansurchak
Category Types of businesses
Retailers • Fruit and vegetable vendor
• Dairy
• Ready-made garments store
• General store
• “Cold drink” store (sodas,
snacks, and other fast-
moving consumer goods)
• Mobile phone store
• Petrol pump
• Party supply store
• Gift and toy shop
• Electronic appliances store
(televisions, speakers,
refrigerators, washing
machines, fans)
• Sewing machine retailer
• Hardware and construction
materials supplier
• Fertilizer supplier
• Lumber shop
Service
providers
• Car and bike mechanics
• Tailors
• Blacksmith / metalworker
• DJ/recording services
• ATM / financial services
• Xerox and printing services
Hospitality • Chai stall
• Sweet shop
• Small restaurant (4-6 tables)
Education • Tuition center (tutoring)
• Coaching center (preparation for government civil service exams)
Manufacturing • Furniture
• Religious sculptures (murti)
• Commercial kitchen
equipment
• Metalwork

5.3 The subversion of caste and religious hierarchies
A vital thread linking the trends discussed so far – circular out-migration and the rise of
an entrepreneurial, if survivalist, non-farm economy – is the central function of traditional
agrarian social relations. During fieldwork, the issue of caste and religion emerged subtly but
persistently as I questioned why urbanization was occurring more in some settlements than
others. A narrative that surfaced was the role of “ekta” (unity) in spurring the growth of market
towns. Several interviewees intimated that Mansurchak and Bakhri – the two most urbanized
settlements of the district, outside of Begusarai City itself – had grown because of their
demographic composition. While many parts of Begusarai District are dominated by members

87

of the Bhumihar land-owning caste, these two settlements contain a more diverse population,
with high concentrations of lower-caste and Muslim households.
Several mechanisms connect non-farm economic growth to a settlement’s caste and
religious composition. As several interviewees explained, places in the district where
Bhumihars hold the most power have historically seen more “rangbaaz,” or bullies, which made
them unsafe for non-farm business activity. To put it mildly, these upper-caste groups were not
interested in a flourishing non-farm economy: not only would this open channels of wealth
creation outside agriculture, over which they had control, but it would also erode the supply of
farm labor on which their wealth depended. Multiple interviewees explained that in
Mansurchak, the lower-caste (Scheduled Caste) and Muslim population “cooperated” to resist
the “bullying.” The local non-farm economy, in this sense, is subverting traditional hierarchies.
This also helps to explain why people like Kamlesh, despite their struggle in running a barely
profitable business, prefer this to farm labor, where they may still be subjected to intimidation
and indignity.
Another mechanism is political. As Rajesh, who runs a local non-profit explained,
“where there are multiple viable parties, there is more development…where there are more
Muslims there is more of a multi-party system.” In places where one political party has
historically dominated – which, given the links between caste, religion and political
participation, tend to be locations dominated by Bhumihars – local politicians have faced less
competition and, therefore, less accountability. For example, infrastructure investment, an
important driver of economic development throughout Bihar, is more evident in
demographically diverse places. Several interviewees pointed to the poor road conditions in the

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settlement of Bacchwara – which historically was dominated by the CPI due to its majority
Bhumihar composition – as evidence of this relationship between demographic diversity,
political competitiveness, and infrastructural improvement.
A final link is through migration itself. The kind of temporary and seasonal migration
that prevails in these settlements is undertaken mostly by those of lower-caste backgrounds.
Wealthier groups, such as the Bhumihar, also migrate, but their movement is more likely to be
permanent, education-related, and (eventually) involving the entire household. Circular out-
migration – and the urbanization it spurs through population persistence, the genesis of non-
farm businesses, and land investment – is commonly practiced by those without the means or
education to establish themselves permanently in a metropolitan labor market. The
urbanization observed in the case study settlements could truly be considered “subaltern” in
this sense (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020) and contrasts with the way that urbanization reinforces
agrarian hierarchies elsewhere in India (Balakrishnan, 2019b).

6. Planning the urbanizing ruralopolis
The imperative for scholars and practitioners to consider the planning needs of
ruralopolis settlements, given their high densities and rapidly transforming economies, has only
grown since Qadeer coined the term. The characteristics of urban growth I have identified point
to a unique planning context defined by out- rather than in-migration; a survivalist non-farm
economy built on consumption and remittances; social relations structured by an agrarian past;
and a lack of local planning institutions.

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First, the population dynamics of these settlements – with high levels of circular out-
migration, very little in-migration from elsewhere, and sustained natural population increase –
differ profoundly from urbanizing environments in which most planning knowledge is
generated, where urban politics are frequently framed as conflicts between long-time residents
and recent migrants (Caldeira, 1992; Ding & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2022; Hyra, 2015; Slemp et al.,
2012; Yiftachel, 2000). From a land-use perspective, we should anticipate future urban growth in
ruralopolis locations that have high levels of temporary out-migration combined with above-
replacement fertility, holding all else equal. Some features of migrant-rich urbanizing places,
such as widespread tenure insecurity, are less salient in these locations, suggesting that
planners should focus more on other housing-related issues, such as households’ access to
finance for incremental construction and upgrading. High levels of circular mobility also
present obstacles for designing participatory planning processes, such that the voices of those
who are frequently absent are intentionally included.
Second, the economic context of such locations introduces specific challenges. Planning
in these contexts must grapple with an urban economy that is almost entirely informal. Most
research on informality has taken place in settings where large formal and informal economies
are interwoven, existing in parallel (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004). In places like Mansurchak, only a
handful of formal enterprises exists. While Global South cities with large tradable sectors often
host high concentrations of informal employment – that is, wage workers employed informally or
in an informal firm – survivalist entrepreneurs like Kamlesh are own-account workers, neither
employee nor employer. The policy problem is not one of incentivizing firms to formalize their
workforce, but a deeper structural challenge of creating employment in the first place.

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Planners are accustomed to promoting prosperity and job creation by attracting capital
from elsewhere; enhancing the competitiveness of local tradable industries; or developing the
skills of the local workforce. Here, economic growth is fueled by the earnings sent or brought
back by migrants, which generates a consumption-oriented local economy. And much of the
local workforce has built skills, usually informally, through migrating out and gaining
experience in distant labor markets. The challenge for economic development planning,
therefore, is to transform remittance-led growth of an unspecialized and non-tradable local
economy into more prosperous forms of economic development that can generate higher-
quality opportunities for workers – e.g. by promoting industrial clusters. This likely entails
creating ways for return migrants to harness their savings and skills into productive
investments – that is, to make stories like Rajkumar’s more common.
Third, the caste and religious dimension of urban growth adds another layer of
complexity to planning in these environments. In development theory, agrarian wealth and
non-farm economic activity in rural areas are thought to reinforce one another through a
symbiotic relationship (Satterthwaite & Tacoli, 2003). However, in Begusarai District, subaltern
non-farm economies are growing with limited patronage of wealthy landowners. Economic
development and environmental planning should still seek to promote symbiotic growth of the
farm and non-farm economy, but this goal must be mediated by sensitivity to feudalistic social
relations: agrarian elites may resist the growth of the local non-farm economy, and groups
oppressed by agrarian social hierarchies may rightfully object to sustaining the agriculture
sector, regardless of what it promises them economically. Caste is an institution specific to
South Asia, but there are broader implications here. Traditional agrarian systems of social

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stratification are likely to be determinants of where and how urban growth occurs in ruralopolis
regions, even if their role morphs in the course of the urban transition – similar to
Balakrishnan's (2019) concept of “recombinant urbanization.” The relevance of these agrarian
institutions is likely to be reinforced by the lack of in-migration from elsewhere, which might
otherwise restructure them. At the same time, if the patterns I observe in Begusarai District –
that is, a non-farm economy propelled by subaltern groups – is evident in other ruralopolis
geographies, then these places may present progressive possibilities for the empowerment of
marginalized groups.
Finally, these are settings where the local state is not equipped to shape the process of
urbanization. As discussed above, three of the four settlements I studied are still governed by
gram panchayats (village councils), rather than urban local bodies. The local government,
therefore, not only lacks the capacity to shape urban growth, but the mandate to do so. Given
that they have no authority to raise revenue from local firms, village councils have little
incentive to encourage the development of a formal economy – notwithstanding the major
structural challenges associated with doing so. Nor could they be expected to regulate land use
when they have no authority to tax property. Revenue generation is a challenge in most Global
South cities, but the urbanizing towns I studied are acutely dependent on state and central
government funds, which are largely earmarked for specific programs. And as Zérah and Denis
(2017) argue, when it comes to infrastructure planning, such places are often treated as blank
spaces on the map among higher levels of government. Without major institutional reform
aimed at municipalization or a sweeping effort to entrust village councils with more resources,

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autonomy, and capacity, it is difficult to imagine a local state capable of fostering urbanization
that is inclusive, sustainable, or prosperous.

7. Conclusion
Davis and Golden (1954) once wrote that the urban transition equates to a
“depopulation of rural areas.” The opposite is true in ruralopolis locations like Begusarai
District, which are filling up, filling in, and experiencing the social and economic restructuring
of urbanization. Despite this trend, planning scholars and practitioners have limited knowledge
of what structures urban growth in dense, agrarian, non-metropolitan places. This paper has
aimed to help fill this gap. I have argued that several social and economic features distinguish
the urbanization in this context: the predominance of circular out-migration and demographic
densification led by natural population increase; a consumption-based local economy lacking
sectoral specialization or formal economy firms; and the persistent relevance of agrarian
hierarchies, against which out-migration, the non-farm economy, and urban growth act in
subtle, subversive ways. All these characteristics shape the planning context.
This article is just one step forward in building a deeper understanding of ruralopolis
urbanization. For planning scholars, an important task is to investigate the generalizability of
this paper’s findings to other ruralopolis locations in India and beyond. This effort will enable
urban scholars to study variation in ruralopolis settlements and the social and economic change
they are experiencing. In addition, scholars and practitioners must identify and address the core
planning challenges related to urbanization in ruralopolis regions. This paper already points to
some of these, including the need to encourage greater economic dynamism and invest more

93

resources and authority in the local state. However, there are likely many other planning
challenges that are specific to places like Begusarai District, and which may require their own
planning approaches to address. Such a research agenda supports the planning field’s broader
aim of aligning the geography of knowledge production with the geography of urbanization.

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Chapter 5. Conclusion
Taken together, the three essays in this collection make several theoretical and empirical
contributions to urban studies and planning while also raising important issues for practice.
First, they unsettle two major assumptions that run throughout the urban studies literature. The
first paper busts the myth that urbanization in the Global South is “top-heavy”—more heavily
concentrated in the biggest metropolitan areas than in the Global North. In fact, the share of
urban population in megacities is relatively even (and stable) across South and North. While it
is true, on average, that countries in the Global South have fewer large secondary cities than
countries in the North, this leads to demographic concentration in small cities and towns rather
than megacities. The second paper undermines a different, more fundamental assumption—
that mass permanent migration underlies all urbanization processes. As my district-level
analysis in India demonstrates, urban transitions can also occur as agrarian populations grow
and densify in place while shifting gradually into non-farm occupations. This understudied
phenomenon of “urbanization from within” is undoubtedly related, at least in the Indian
context, to the importance of towns and small cities in contemporary urban growth.
By revealing the phenomenon of “urbanization from within,” this work also identifies a
novel form of urbanization produced by the development conditions of the 21
st
century. Until
recently, demographic conditions would not have allowed for “urbanization from within;”
historical demographers have demonstrated that mass rural-urban migration is the only way
that societies could have urbanized in the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries. While in situ
urbanization—the transformation of a rural place into an urban one—is certainly not new, this
process has historically coincided with, and often been led by, the influx of people from

95

elsewhere. By contrast, settlements in the Begusarai District are expanding and densifying
through natural population growth, an arbitraging of their work force across multiple regional
labor markets through circular and temporary migration, and resulting changes in local
occupations, land uses, and social relations. Not only do these findings help to substantiate and
nuance the thesis offered by Mukhopadhyay et al. (2020)—that India’s urbanization is driven by
“morphing places” rather than “moving people”—they also direct the attention of researchers
and practitioners to a new urbanizing frontier. To date, most of the scholarship on rural-to-
urban transformation has been located in the peripheries of metropolitan areas.
The identification of “urbanization from within” as a significant contributor to India’s
urban transition also speaks to the broader debate over urban theory and the Global South. In
one sense, my findings substantiate the claims advanced by some scholars, that parts of the
Global South are urbanizing along historically specific trajectories, rather than mimicking the
urban transitions of the Global North. However, in another sense—and as I have argued
elsewhere (Randolph & Storper, 2022)—this work shows the enduring importance of variables
that have long structured urbanization processes. Understanding the causes, consequences, and
dynamics of “urbanization from within” requires reference to theories of the demographic
transition; local and regional economic development; human mobility; and labor market
polarization. None of these theories is “South-specific” or India-specific. In other words, while
“urbanization from within” may be an empirical expression of urban growth that is historically
unique, it is produced by a recombination of fundamental forces that shape urbanization
processes across time and space. Recognizing this fact also calls for an examination of where
else in the world the phenomenon may be occurring.

96

Importantly, however, this new empirical expression of urbanization may require
context-specific models of urban governance—precisely because fundamental forces of urban
growth can interact in new ways that produce new policy problems. For example, places
“urbanizing from within” challenge the notion that urban poverty can be tackled by
redistributing the gains of urban agglomeration—an underlying assumption in community and
economic development planning. Urbanizing villages in Bihar have been ignored, more than
exploited, by India’s capitalist processes of development. Compared to industrial urban
economies, there is less non-agricultural wealth in these locations, but it is more evenly
distributed—presenting both an opportunity for and challenge to equitable urban development.
From the perspective of community engagement and consultation, the lack of in-migration from
elsewhere may simplify community dynamics in some ways—the anti-migrant politics that
persists in large metropolitan areas are absent—while complicating them in other ways—social
hierarchies rooted in agrarian relations may exert a more powerful influence than in migrant-
rich metropolitan areas. From a participatory planning perspective, the highly mobile nature of
the population in these locations also presents a context-specific challenge to community
consultation. Of course, addressing these planning issues in any particular location also requires
an analysis of how they intersect with local and hyper-local factors—for example, caste politics
in Bihar or, even more specifically, relations between Bhumihars and other caste groups in
Begusarai District.
These insights point to a way forward for urban research and practice in the Global
South, grounded in a few core principles: (1) engagement with canonical theories of
urbanization and development, not for the purposes of predicting specific outcomes but rather

97

as a useful analytical scaffolding and starting point; (2) heightened attention to the ways in
which fundamental forces of urbanization—such as demography, climate and technology—are
interacting and recombining in new ways in the contemporary Global South to produce new
forms of urbanization; and (3) willingness to reevaluate inherited models of urban policy and
planning for urban contexts formed out of the novel recombination of urbanization’s
fundamental forces in interaction with local social, cultural, and institutional factors.

98

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Most contemporary urbanization is unfolding in the Global South, motivating a “Southern turn” in urban studies. The increasing focus on cities and urbanization processes in Global South countries—broadly defined as low- and middle-income countries—has ignited a spirited debate among scholars regarding generalizability in urban social science and the historical specificity of urbanization in the South. In three distinct papers, this dissertation engages these theoretical questions through an approach focused on the bottom of the urban hierarchy. At three different scales—global, national and local—the three papers ask what we can learn about contemporary urbanization in the Global South by focusing on non-metropolitan places: towns, small cities, and urbanizing villages. Collectively, they advance the following contributions: (1) contrary to prevalent claims in existing scholarship, urban populations in the Global South are more concentrated in towns and small cities than are urban populations in the Global North; (2) in India, much of the urbanization occurring at the bottom of the urban hierarchy is the result of natural population growth rather than in-migration motivated by industrialization; and (3) both the distribution of urban population in small and urbanizing settlements and the demographic and economic context of these settlements hold significant implications for where and what type of planning capacity is required to shape the global urban transition. The evidence points to historically specific trajectories of urbanization in the South, while also demonstrating that fundamental and global forces, such as demographic transition and technological change, shape urbanization across time and space.

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Creator Randolph, Gregory F. (author)

Core Title Urbanization beyond the metropolis: three papers on urbanization patterns and their planning implications in the contemporary global south

School School of Policy, Planning and Development

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Urban Planning and Development

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 04/20/2023

Defense Date 03/14/2023

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag agrarian,cities,demography,Economy,Global North,global south,india,Labor,migration,non-metropolitan,OAI-PMH Harvest,small cities,society,Towns,urban hierarchy,urban system,urbanization

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Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth (committee chair), Storper, Michael (committee chair), Balakrishnan, Sai (committee member), De la Roca, Jorge (committee member), Sloane, David (committee member)

Creator Email gfrandolph@gmail.com,grandolp@usc.edu

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