[Extract …] In her pathbreaking essay on modes of production of urban space in the global South, anthropologist Teresa Caldeira (2017) deploys the concept of “peripheral urbanization” to conjure “a problem-space that allows us to investigate logics of the production of the urban that differ from those of the North Atlantic … as a means of exploring processes of both socio-spatial formation and theory-making” (p. 4). Along similar lines, in this special issue, we invoke the concept of the periphery to attend to diverse and heterogeneous forms of extended urbanization that are taking shape in India. Instead of considering the periphery as a spatially fixed zone, hinged to the geographies of metropolitan centers, for instance, we mobilize the notion of the periphery as a conceptual and territorial threshold that allows us to explore the urbanisms unfolding across the country. For us, the periphery, or the peri-urban as it is often referred to, may be located on the edges of metropolitan cities and entangled with their regimes of labor, capital, and governance, or it may be further afield, in smaller towns and settlements and enmeshed with agrarian and rural rhythms and dynamics that propel such peripheral urbanization. Irrespective of their location, amid intense competition for land and other resources, peripheries have not only become key sites of contestation, social exclusion, and speculation but they have also come to embody hope and aspirations for diverse social groups. They are attractive to investors seeking to capture gains from rapidly rising land value, to migrants who come from rural areas to live and work in the peripheries, as well as to upwardly mobile city-dwellers who have placed their bets on materializing their middle-class dreams and aspirations in these urbanizing frontiers. Located materially and symbolically at the intersection of multiple modalities of rural, urban, and agrarian; of desire and displacement; of loss and possibilities, the peripheries fully embody and give expression to Doreen Massey’s (2005) conception of space as “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity” (p. 9).

2While at a theoretical level these characteristics are shared with space more generally, and with urban space in particular, we argue that the periphery in this conjuncture captures Massey’s conceptualization of space particularly well and merits special attention. First, the processes unfolding in these dynamic spaces are driving India’s urbanization trajectory through changes in land use, large-scale infrastructure projects and commercial real estate development, as well as through economic development processes rooted in local economies arising from the incremental, subaltern strategies of individuals and households. The last Census (2011) showed that growth is occurring across the urban spectrum and is not limited to metropolitan centers, where growth rates actually declined; both the peripheries of large cities and smaller settlements, notably Census towns, recorded faster growth (Denis, Mukhopadhyay, and Zérah 2012). Second, compared to earlier phases of urbanization, contemporary processes are inextricably linked to India’s increasing global engagement over the last decades and peripheries are being produced through multi-scalar relations and interactions of local, regional, national, and transnational flows of capital, expertise, and speculation. Third, they are sites where diverse modes of governance overlap or intersect, often linked to their classification as “urban” or “rural,” producing dissonance and jurisdictional gaps. Institutional fragmentation is mirrored by other types of fragmentation, most visibly spatial, the interpenetration of built-up area and open spaces that characterize the urban frontier (Angel, Parent, and Civco 2012, Hamel and Keil 2015). Relatedly, given that extensive tracts of land are acquired and converted for urban development, the peripheries have emerged as key sites of contestation over land and land regimes. And lastly, crucially, we argue that even though all spaces are dynamic and coproduced by multiple social-political relations, peripheries—owing to their pace and scale of change—are indisputably incomplete spaces, “always under construction,” (Massey 2005:9), enrolling new actors and logics that steer social and political change, sometimes in unexpected ways, and thus offer a generative site for urban studies to reflect and analyze the complex processes that are coproducing the urban frontier.