Engaging with different literatures in economic geography, postcolonial urbanism, and planetary urbanization, this article seeks to develop a theoretical understanding of remote urban formations taking shape India’s countryside. The analysis draws on extensive primary data collected at two study sites Bihar West Bengal, which rendered an uncommonly rich set for such areas. We observe emergent t...

INTRODUCTION The concept of “urban sprawl” has become so popular in American planning and design literature that it has produced its own dedicated lexicon of specialized terms. Words like “asphalt nation”, “McMansions”, and “lollipop suburbs” define the conditions of low-density, automobile-dependent land use patterns that characterize the American landscape with ever greater degrees of specifi...

Cities are so common today that we cannot imagine a world without them. In fact, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and that number is expected to increase to two-thirds in the next century. For most of our history, however, there were no cities. Understandably, scholars want to know why, how, and when urban life began. Was the emergence of the city just a matter of nucle...