Injected urbanism: urban theory from India?

ABSTRACT

This article reports on an urbanization process that can be described as injected urbanism. While conventional Northern theoretical perspectives capture an important role for one-way rural-to-urban migration of households in urban growth processes, injected urbanism centers on circular labor migration of individuals and remittances flows as crucial drivers of urban growth. Injected urbanism is incipient by nature and geographically specific to predominantly rural regions. Through a ten-point conceptual-analytical framework, I illustrate how this process unfolds in India. Injected urbanism, or locally distinctive versions thereof, can likely be found across broader geographies in the Global South, especially in areas where there is a structural employment shift out of agriculture, few local employment alternatives, and little household out-migration. The article engages with current core theoretical debates in urban geography and furthers the development of postmodern/postcolonial urban viewpoints.

KEYWORDS:

• Injected urbanism
• postcolonial urban studies
• labor migration
• remittances
• Global South

India’s emergent urban formations

In 2018 and 2019, I traveled extensively across India’s countryside, studying a socio-spatial transformation that was taking shape far beyond the limelight of India’s major cities. Employment data showed that tens of millions of people had lost their jobs in the agrarian sector over a ten-year time span (World Bank, 2018), while the latest Indian census more or less simultaneously started reporting the reclassification of over 2,500 rural villages to urban towns (Pradhan, 2017). As the Indian census definition of “urban” includes the level of nonfarm workers in a settlement as a key criterion, these two escalating trends were seemingly interconnected.¹ The widespread abandonment of agricultural work was fundamentally changing the nature of the labor force across thousands of former rural villages up to a point where it was now triggering unprecedented rural-to-urban settlement reclassification processes.

It has been argued more than once that the dichotomous labeling of settlements as either “rural” or “urban” is simplistic and arbitrary (e.g., Brenner & Schmid, 2014; Cohen, 2004; Satterthwaite, 2010; Van Duijne, 2019). In the Indian case, however, the large-scale settlement reclassification process contains valuable information on the exact whereabouts of shifting workforces away from agriculture. Through the rise of nonfarm labor, it also guided researchers’ attention to seemingly extensive restructuring of local and regional economies across what used to be predominantly agrarian zones.

But while we could identify the locations of these transformations, we knew preciously little about their nature. It was unclear how and to what extent these alleged emerging urban formations in the countryside aligned (or not) with prevailing theory on urbanization (Van Duijne, 2021). Alternative local livelihoods in the Indian countryside are limited, raising urgent research questions about newfound livelihoods and evolving social and economic geographies. Together with a team of enumerators, we systematically collected 1,000 household and firm surveys and conducted 50 interviews with heads of households across remote study sites in the states of Bihar and West Bengal. I want to use two of these household interviews to provide the décor to the wider theoretical – conceptual argument that I aim to set out in this article.

The first interview was with a household of ten members, whose livelihoods were still mostly reliant on agriculture. The main breadwinner described the hardship of his day-to-day existence – from the substantial debt incurred to buy seeds, fertilizer and animal feed, to the involuntary selling of livestock and the poor harvests or even complete crop failures due to increasingly erratic weather. Under these meager livelihood circumstances, the household was in perpetual debt and often in distress. Other household members were looking onward to build a more diversified and sustainable livelihood portfolio, but they echoed what so many others had told me before, that local or regional economic opportunities outside farming were hard to find.

The second interview was with a household that had managed to forge an alternative livelihood, away from farming. Agrarian labor could no longer sustain this household of eight members, and through an acquaintance the two breadwinners started working in the construction sector in a major South Indian city, 1,700 kilometers away. These labor migrants collectively sent home a total of 24,000 Rs. per month (approximately 300 USD) to the household that stayed behind in the village. With the move away from farming, and no other ways to earn a living locally, these remittances became the household’s lifeline. They cover daily expenses, healthcare and medication costs, and the enrollment fees for the children at a recently opened private school. Over the past five years, the household had also saved up enough to renovate the home, extending it with two extra rooms. One of the labor migrants told me that twice a year he goes home to the village, on unpaid leave, usually only for a couple of weeks. He described the harsh working conditions in the city, and how he desperately wanted to quit his nomadic laboring, not spend so much time away from his wife and children, his elderly parents, who are all in the village. He feels he is missing out on family life and tells me that he would do the same amount of work for less than half the money locally, but it is simply not there.

These two accounts are arguably emblematic of the current and stressed livelihood situation of millions of households in India’s countryside today. Employment studies show that over the past fifteen years, around 40 million people have lost their jobs in India’s primary sector (Abraham, 2017; Mehrotra et al., 2014; Thomas, 2012). Considering the average rural household size in India is five, this trend potentially impacts the livelihoods of around 200 million people in total. Some of the employment loss is absorbed by local nonfarm sectors (Himanshu et al., 2013) or regional work (Chandrasekhar, 2011). However, recent research indicates that a substantial part of agrarian job losses is absorbed by male circular labor migration. Circular migration is broadly defined as “a temporary move from, followed by return to, the normal place of residence” (Deshingkar & Farrington, 2009, p. 1). It involves the repetitive movement of labor, primarily between villages and cities, and can occur both within and across national borders. With circular labor migration, individuals migrate for work, while the household itself stays put in the village and starts to receive remittances. This means no permanent change of residency for the household. Such a pattern sets the Indian experience apart from many of the migration patterns that have historically occurred across North America and Western Europe, patterns that have significantly shaped their urban landscapes.

While circular labor migration in India is not a new phenomenon (e.g., De Haan, 2002; Tumbe, 2018), its magnitude has increased steadily over time, more or less simultaneously with agrarian job losses. Numbers of domestic circular labor migrants have multiplied sixfold from 16 million in 2004 to an estimated 80–100 million by 2012 (Chandrasekhar et al., 2017; Deshingkar & Farrington, 2009; Nayyar & Kim, 2018; Tumbe, 2012). Data on international circular labor migrants from India also point to steep increases, particularly to the Persian Gulf. Over the past fifteen years, their numbers have tripled, to reach nearly 18 million (International Labour Organization, 2018; United Nations, 2019).

The ensuing remittances flows being sent back home have reached levels never seen before. According to the World Bank (2019), international remittances to India stood at 82.2 billion USD in 2019, up from just 12.8 billion USD in 2000. India is now the world’s number one international remittances receiving country, far ahead of China. Across wide geographies, the economic impact of these remittances inflows is extensive. Nayyar and Kim (2018) calculated that in certain Indian states today, particularly those considered to be predominantly “rural”, remittances make up almost 40 percent of Gross State Domestic Product. As I will show in this article, this infusion of capital is now triggering a specific kind of emergent urbanization process across India’s countryside. The nature of this process can be described as injected urbanism.²

In the spirit of the Urban Pulse series, this article furthers the development of postcolonial urban theory. The article answers calls for “new geographies” of theorizing (Roy, 2009; also see Sheppard et al., 2013) and presents new conceptual vectors for better understanding the production of space, with special consideration for places that for long have remained “off the map” of urban and regional theory-making (Robinson, 2004, 2006). In the next section, I will develop a series of conceptual arguments around the migration – remittances – urbanization nexus.

Conceptualizing injected urbanism

The alternative urbanization processes described here are incipient by nature, geographically specific to predominantly rural regions, and pertain to settlements that are relatively small (study sites in India were between 20,000 and 100,000 people). Demographics in these urbanizing formations are fairly stable: in-migration is negligible due to the scarcity of local jobs, and there is no permanent one-way out-migration of households due to the long-established “weight” of the social fabric (I will explain this below). Population growth is almost exclusively natural growth, and therefore growth rates in these settlements are not substantially different from district or state averages.

Injected urbanism can be conceptualized through the following ten postulations:

1. The most immediate way to understand the nature of this incipient urbanization process is through shifting livelihoods away from agriculture. This shift is driven by agrarian distress or by a household’s aspirations to improve well-being (e.g., Bhoi & Dadhich, 2019; Reddy & Mishra, 2010; Sainath, 2011; Saini & Khatri, 2021). Agriculture in these settlements dwindles to a peripheral economic activity. At the same time, these settlements are contextualized by limited alternative local work options outside of farming. This urbanization process may be considered in situ in the sense that it is initially driven by these local developments.

2. Affected settlements are not depopulating for two main reasons. First, strong social ties discourage or even preclude a permanent change of residency (e.g., De Haan, 2002; Deshingkar & Farrington, 2009; Tumbe, 2018). Households remain deeply invested in their local community/caste (Bhattacharyya, 1985; De Haan, 1997; Tumbe, 2018), and households are also often emotionally rooted in their village through family-owned lands or a shared family home (Choithani et al., 2021). Second, compounding the lack of permanent out-migration of households is the increasingly exclusionary nature of central agglomerations (Kundu, 2014; Kundu & Saraswati, 2012). India’s major cities today have become prohibitively expensive and generally unwelcoming to the less skilled rural poor (Chandrasekhar & Sharma, 2014).

3. Under these dual circumstances of being unwilling and/or unable to permanently relocate to the city with the entire household, individual male circular labor migration serves the needs of the household best. The household itself stays behind in the village and starts to receive remittances. The shift away from agriculture is thus accompanied by a high degree of outward labor movement. This continuous circulation of labor, this repetitive drift, is what really matters in understanding these urbanizing geographies.

4. Historically, male members of rural households have engaged in migration during lean seasons when local farm work was scarce, supplementing their agriculture-based incomes (Deshingkar & Farrington, 2009; Tumbe, 2018). However, in injected urbanism, circular labor migration has evolved beyond its seasonal nature and is no longer tied to the rhythms of the agrarian cycle. Consequently, the duration of such labor migrations has lengthened considerably, with migrants often spending extended periods away from their households (Choithani et al., 2021). As these extended work stints grow longer and workers earn more away from home, remittance flows have seen a marked increase.

5. These remittances lead to a substantial inflow of capital into the village. Households allocate a considerable portion of remittances to the purchase of consumer goods, resulting in “consumption-scapes” characterized by the rapid rise of large numbers of local retail shops (Van Duijne et al., 2023). These retail businesses are typically small in size, family-owned, and employ little or no outside labor, and thus in turn generate few local work opportunities. Remittance capital is crucial for the establishment of these new shops.

6. These local economies are further characterized by the conspicuous absence of manufacturing/production sectors, and there are no vertical or horizontal linkages between firms, nor agglomeration processes among firms that are in close proximity (cf. Scott & Storper, 2015). The mushrooming retail sector mostly sells goods produced and imported from elsewhere, and thus does not contribute to the formation of a secondary economic sector (Van Duijne et al., 2023). This precludes the growth of more self-sustaining local economic activity, and jobs.

7. Remitted earnings lead to higher levels of spending power locally when compared to former agrarian-based incomes. Households want their newfound economic status met by a certain level of “urban” services. Alongside the growing retail sector, this finds expression in the proliferation of relatively expensive private education and healthcare providers. Remittances propel the number of private schools, study centers, training centers, medical stores, diagnostic centers, and health and dental clinics. Injected urbanism can thus sustain a small tertiary sector locally.

8. Remittances are also used on the construction of new homes, or the upgrading and expansion of existing homes (Iyer, 2017). This can trigger substantial spatial-morphological change in these settlements, leading to the formalization of the built environment, densification, and spatial expansion. In some regional cases, formerly dispersed, individual settlement units begin to exhibit a growing contiguity. In this manner, injected urbanism can create larger amalgamations of urbanizing formations (Van Duijne & Nijman, 2019).

9. The urbanization process can also instigate social change, albeit different from conventional Northern theoretical perspectives. Because social and cultural norms pose restrictions on the mobility of women, labor migration is more commonly undertaken by men (Choithani, 2019). This can alter gender power dynamics within the household, as women may assume different roles during their husbands’ absence. At the community level, the urbanization process can also induce shifts in class divisions. For instance, international labor migration, often associated with relatively high remittances, can alter income distributions between social groups, putting tension on earlier agrarian class divisions. However, in many cases, the economic status, social standing, and networks of migrants prior to their departure determine the type of work they can secure and their destination within the city. This typically follows legacies of earlier agrarian social stratifications (e.g., Acharya, 2021; Das & Dutta, 2007; Mosse, 2018).

10. Conventionally, urbanization has been linked with development, as economic growth and urban growth typically move in tandem. This has been the historical experience in North America and Western Europe (Alkema et al., 2013; Scott & Storper, 2015; Spence et al., 2009). General understanding of urban (economic) theory holds that higher levels of economic growth originate in labor movement from lower productivity, agrarian-based economic activities to higher productivity, urban-based ones. While such labor shifts are also evident in injected urbanism, development outcomes tend to be more complex. On the one hand, the shift away from agrarian livelihoods can come with improvements in standards of living locally as more households are food secure, have better access to healthcare and education, and live in improved housing (Choithani et al., 2021). On the other, circular labor migration is a livelihood strategy of the last resort for many, a forced route to take with a heavy toll on the labor migrants and on the left-behind household (e.g. Acharya, 2021; Choithani, 2019; Deshingkar, 2019; Srivastava, 2019). Labor migrants in the city or abroad often find themselves in vulnerable positions, compelled to accept any available work, the majority of which is in the informal sector. Their employment often provides little to no legal security, and they can find themselves in precarious and exploitative labor conditions.

This framework contributes to current theoretical debates in urban studies and urban geography. It invokes immensely important aspects of an agrarian urbanism (Gururani, 2019) and planetary urbanism (Brenner & Schmid, 2014, 2015), while fostering new and additional conversations between urban and migration studies.

Discussion

Postcolonial urban thinkers have for long challenged the perceived importance of existing Northern theories of urbanization, and have called to include a wider range of localities in urban theoretical knowledge production. This scholarship puts renewed emphasis on the localized complexity, distinctiveness and particularity of place, initially as a way to speak back against “universalizing” urban theory that is narrowly conceptualized on the historical experience of the North (Sheppard et al., 2013). Some have expressed apprehension about such “deconstructive manoeuvres” for urban theory (Peck, 2015), others reflected on the possibility of a “hollowing out” of existing theory or an “impasse” in theory-making (Blokland & Harding, 2014; Peck, 2015).

I posit that postcolonial currents in the literature can serve as productive entry points for alternative theorizing, paving the way for new paradigms that can guide how contemporary urban environments are shaped, reshaped, and understood (e.g., see Schindler, 2017). The focus on “new” localities from which to develop urban theory can puncture a bubble in models of urbanization originating in the North. For instance, in large parts of the Global South, the central role of circular labor migration in forging livelihoods is decentering earlier Northern urban theoretical perspectives. Circular labor migration is markedly different from the one-way out-migration of entire households – a trend that has been significant in historical urban growth processes in North America and Western Europe – where there is a permanent change of residency of the household itself.³ De Haan (2002, p. 115) made an important observation when he wrote that “Circular migration is not the transitory phenomenon that many, particularly modernisation theories, expect it to be.” Today, more than ever, circular labor migration offers a pathway to sustain a livelihood for many households living in what used to be predominantly agrarian areas (also see e.g., Choithani, 2017; Datta, 2016; Datta et al., 2014; Rogaly & Coppard, 2003). Far from it being a transitory phenomenon, it is an increasingly crucial part of livelihoods across the Global South.

In identifying and analysing new loci from which to develop urban theory, geographers must strike a fine balance between understanding the particularities of a place and the ability to theorize from a case (which has always been a core struggle for geographers). However, I believe that comparative urbanism offers a path forward (McFarlane, 2010; Nijman, 2007; Robinson, 2011; Ward, 2008), and urbanization processes are not “beyond compare” (Nijman, 2015; Peck, 2015). In this paper, empirical regularities across locally distinct study sites in Bihar and West Bengal formed the basis for alternative theorizing. This is not to say that this framework of injected urbanism can predictably and consistently be repeated across a large and highly diverse country as India, and we have to be careful with generalizations. The study sites in Bihar and West Bengal each have their own unique geographical-historical context. Nevertheless, with sensitivity to localized particularities, it is plausible that variations of injected urbanism exist beyond these sites. I foresee particularly interesting and useful comparative studies across the states of Odisha, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu, where the Indian census simultaneously reports rapidly shifting workforces out of agriculture, growth in nonfarm work, and the rural-to-urban reclassification of settlements in remote rural regions.

When seen through the lens of the “new economics of labour migration” (Stark, 1991; Stark & Bloom, 1985; Stark & Lucas, 1988; Taylor 1999), injected urbanism could potentially carry relevance beyond India. This framework from economics and migration studies has for long shifted attention from the “economically optimizing” individual migrant, who largely makes his own decisions based on wage differentials between places, to a more holistic view that sees labor migration as a strategic decision made at the household-level (cf. Fields, 1975; Harris & Todaro, 1970). Circular labor migration is framed as a way to diversify dynamic household livelihood portfolios, minimize risk, and overcome local market failure. By shifting the focus from the individual to the household level, the new economics of labor migration also redirected attention to source areas of migration. It started a line of research on how migration could lead to increased investment in origin communities and help overcome capital constraints in the village, mainly through remittances. This framework has been particularly influential in development studies, offering a broader and more nuanced perspective on sustainable rural livelihoods (Ellis, 2003; Pritchard et al., 2014; Scoones, 1998). Yet, it has remained largely isolated and divorced from discussions in urban geography.

A preliminary attempt to bridge frameworks from the new economics of labor migration with urban geography can be made through Brenner and Schmid’s (2015) concept of planetary urbanization. I do not consider injected urbanism an expression of what they call “extended urbanization”, if understood solely as rural localities that are connected to and supportive off distant urbanization processes and agglomerations. Instead, I perceive interdependent relations between central agglomerations and rural localities undergoing injected urbanism. Labor flows in one direction (from countryside to city) and remittance capital in the opposite (from city to countryside), both propelling urbanization processes of different sorts. We cannot understand injected urbanism in India without connections to Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, or the cities of the Persian Gulf. But how rural localities are subsequently transformed by these urban connections remains unclear from the planetary urbanization literature. This paper sketches the conceptual contours of what such socio-spatial transformations may look like.

In closing, I want to emphasize the need to better understand the development path of injected urbanism, as its sustainability and robustness remain uncertain. As long as the local economies do not generate sufficient employment opportunities, the development paths of these localities will remain perpetually dependent on remittances, and this leaves these urbanizing geographies vulnerable to external shocks. The recent pandemic made this vulnerability painfully obvious (Breman, 2020). The lifeline of remittance-dependent households was abruptly cut off, leaving them in a precarious state. Those with local nonfarm jobs were also deeply affected, as the retail and tertiary sectors are largely sustained and kept afloat through remittance capital. With these flows halted, I suspect that parts of the local economies may have imploded. Long-term longitudinal studies at various geographical scales can provide insight into the evolving dependency of injected urbanism on other places. Such studies shed light on the development path and evolution of what will likely constitute an important part of India’s urban system.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Prof. Dr. Jan Nijman and Dr. Chetan Choithani who were both part of the research team investigating emergent urban formations in India’s countryside. Prof. Dr. Karin Pfeffer and Dr. Fenne Pinkster for guidance and for providing valuable comments on the manuscript. I am grateful to Dr. Papiya Raj who suggested the term injected urbanism during a presentation of the research at IIT-Patna in September 2019. The essay has benefited from thoughtful comments by Prof. Dr. Annapurna Shaw, Dr. Shubhra Gururani, Prof. Dr. Christian Schmid, and two anonymous reviewers. I am indebted to local field assistants Anamika, Asim, Jitendra, Malati, Shree Bhagwan and Subir.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), grant agreement No. 406.16.567.

Notes

1 Besides the structure of employment, with more than 75 percent of males engaged in nonfarm work, the Indian census also uses a size criterion of over 5,000 people, and a density criterion of more than 400 people per square kilometer.

2 During a seminar on this research project at IIT-Patna in September of 2019, Dr. Papiya Raj suggested this term.

3 As one reviewer pointed out, one-way out-migration patterns of households have historically been important in urban growth processes in the Global North. Historical examples are the large-scale rural-to-urban permanent migration patterns seen during industrialization, the Rust Belt to Sun Belt migration patterns in the U.S., permanent East-West migration flows in Germany, or longstanding migration trends from rural areas into London in the UK. These human migration flows were all for employment reasons, and could thus also be classified as “labor migration”. However, these flows are distinct from circular labor migration in the Global South. The former flows represent more permanent changes in residence, while the migration patterns and trends observed in India and other parts of the Global South are circular, temporary and repetitive in nature. The household stays put in the village, while (male) breadwinners travel to and from cities in a repetitive drift.