A growing body of research on urban India and China shows that the concepts drawn from the histories of urbanization in the West are not adequate for understanding the new forms of power, networks, capital, and infrastructure that constitute the rapidly changing urban ecologies of China and India. The authors of two recent books will discuss the meanings and significance of the “urban” in two of the largest and most populous urban centers in the world: Greater Mumbai and the Municipality of Chongqing. Drawing from their research on transformational processes that span conventional boundaries of rural-urban, formal-informal, state-society, citizen-subject, the panel addresses questions of governance, migration, infrastructure, and public goods provision. Lisa Björkman is the editor of Bombay Brokers (Duke University Press, 2021). Nick R. Smith is the author of The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

Speakers

Lisa Björkman
Associate Professor, Urban and Public Affairs
University of Louisville

Senior Research Associate
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany

Lisa Björkman is a political ethnographer and anthropologist interested in the material infrastructures and mediations of political life. She is the editor of Bombay Brokers, published by Duke University Press in 2021. Her research in the Indian city of Mumbai has studied how global-level processes of urbanization and urban transformation are redrawing lines of socio-spatial inclusions and exclusions in that city, animating new arenas of political mobilization, contention, and representation. Her current research builds on themes that emerged out of her doctoral research on everyday politics of infrastructural provisioning and access in Mumbai, to explicitly pursue anthropology of democracy, mediation, and mass-political representation in contemporary India.

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Nick R. Smith
Assistant Professor, Architecture and Urban Studies
Barnard College of Columbia University

Nick R. Smith is a scholar of urban transformation and planning. His work explores the city as an institution and planning as a process of institution building. Combining the perspectives of new institutional economics, development anthropology, and urban sociology, Smith investigates how urbanization inscribes the “rules of the game” into the space of the city. Using a combination of ethnography, spatial analysis, and archival research, he primarily pursues these processes through investigations of peri-urban villages—contexts of instability, liminality, and rapid change where new forms of urbanization are produced and contested.

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