Periurban Cartographies: Kolkata’s ecologies and settled ruralities

Periurban Cartographies looks through the prism of the “almost urban” to consider what a “city” is or could be. In doing so, the book challenges assumptions and reconsiders design practices. The research reported upon in this study draws on thick description of everyday life and diffuse power in periurban Gangetic West Bengal/Kolkata. It does so in the hope of enriching our understanding of incremental modes of political empowerment and the futures they make. The intention is to not just communicate the transformations at work in creating a particular “kind of urban”, but also to point to connections that make us rethink the ways in which change happens. The book is a contribution to work being done on urban theory-building from elsewhere than the Global North, specifically from Asia, and periurban Gangetic West Bengal/Kolkata. It is not simply a look at a novel and singular condition in and of itself but uses that singularity to better understand periurbanism generally and urban political ecologies particularly. Current scholarship in urban political ecology reminds us of some of the enduring tensions around the conceptualisations of region, socio-natures and agency, and practice. The urban political ecology approach in this book offers a way of moving past some of these tensions.