Urban Geography and Scaling of Contemporary Indian Cities

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of Indian cities using scaling laws and geographic data, revealing patterns in urban density, infrastructure, and socio-economic indicators, with regional variations and specific insights into crime and innovation.

Contribution

It offers the first integrated scaling and geographic analysis of Indian urban characteristics, highlighting regional patterns and discussing data limitations.

Findings

Urban systems in India show scaling behaviors similar to other countries.

Regional variations significantly influence urban indicators.

Crime and innovation patterns are linked to local factors.

Abstract

This paper attempts to create a first comprehensive analysis of the integrated characteristics of contemporary Indian cities, using scaling and geographic analysis over a set of diverse indicators. We use data at the level of Urban Agglomerations in India from the Census 2011 and from a few other sources to characterize patterns of urban population density, infrastructure, urban services, economic performance, crime and innovation. Many of the results are in line with expectations from urban theory and with the behaviour of analogous quantities in other urban systems in both high and middle-income nations. India is a continental scale, fast developing urban system, and consequently there are also a number of interesting exceptions and surprises related to both specific quantities and strong regional patterns of variation. We characterize these patterns in detail for crime and innovation and connect them to the existing literature on their determinants in a specifically Indian context. The paucity of data at the urban level and the absence of official definitions for functional cities in India create a number of limitations and caveats to any present analysis. We discuss these shortcomings and spell out the challenge for a systematic statistical data collection relevant to cities and urban development in India.