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Summary Sentence: Dr. Meenu Tewari (UNC-Chapel Hill) presents her work on India's recent urban and spatial transformation.
Full Summary: Between 2000 and 2014, India added nearly 127 million new to its towns and cities, and over the net 15 years its urban population is projected to grow by a further 177 million. Despite this rapid process of transformation, there exists relatively little rigorous empirical research on patterns and drivers of urban and spatial development in India. Dr. Tewari's work seeks to contribute to the filling of this gap by providing empirical evidence on key features of India's recent urban and spatial development based on the analysis of a combination of satellite, census and survey data. The paper documents key empirical relationships at the district level, providing, among other things, evidence of convergence in levels of development and on the importance of improvements in market access. The paper then drills down to urban areas, analyzing the relationship between various dimensions of a city's urban form and subsequent growth for a sample of 479 cities. In doing so, the paper provides evidence that cities with more compact urban forms in 2002 exhibited significantly faster growth over the period 2002-2011 controlling for both initial differences in city size and development. The paper can be downloaded here.
College of Design