This book explores the spatial characteristics of the city of Kolkata in India in terms of the physical, economic, social, political, and environmental aspects of urban geography, and focuses upon the inherent processes that impact its transformation. It discusses different facets of urban geography and highlights the contemporary challenges of a major primate city in South Asia, which represents the conflicts between the traditional and the modern, the rich and the poor, the skyscrapers and the shanties. With its detailed empirical research and mapping exercises based on real-time remote sensing data, the book offers an understanding of a range of contemporary urban issues. It examines the spatial consequences of urban sprawl, land-use changes, ecological crisis, climate change, critical disasters, dynamics of the peri-urban interface, neighborhood restructuring, debates around heritage conservation, housing poverty, gray spaces, governance and the political landscape of the city. This book will be useful to students, teachers, and researchers of geography, especially human geography and urban geography, urban studies, urban development and planning, regional planning, social geography, governance, ecology, economics, and South Asian studies. It will also benefit urban planners, development professionals, and those interested in the study of the city of Kolkata and its transformations.

Asian urbanization is entering a new phase that differs significantly from the patterns of city growth experienced in other developing countries and in the developed world. According to a recent hypothesis, zones of intensive economic interaction between rural and urban activities are emerging. The zones appear to be a new form of socioeconomic organization that is neither rural nor urban, but preserves essential ingredients of each.

Originally published in 1993, Metropolis 2000 analyses 20th century metropolitan development and planning under the economic and environmental conditions of the world’s regions. Attempts to achieve the physical integration of the city without economic equality have failed. The book advances the principle of ‘integrated diversity’ which emphasises linking neighbourhood planning with a broader vision of the planned metropolis and applies a political economy approach, and argues for a new form of pro-urban thinking. The book argues that the basis for a humane approach to city planning is viewing the metropolis as a beneficial accompaniment to national independence, equality and social progress.

In the Indian context; contributed articles.