[Extract …] In her essay “Is There an Indian Urbanism?” historian Janaki Nair (2013: 42) asks,

Is India imprisoned in the older sociological categories that were laid out by Max Weber in his study of the medieval Western city, or can one theoretically account for the apparent regeneration of some historical features of Indian urbanism in the contemporary city?

In a similar spirit, this special issue turns its attention to contemporary South Asia and in acknowledging the shared colonial histories, predominantly agrarian context, and postcolonial developmentalist telos that have informed the political and economic planning of this region, asks if, in the current urban turn, we can discern patterns and pathways of urbanisation that can qualify as “South Asian urbanism or suburbanism.” If so, what are the postcolonial trajectories, actors, agents, discourses, and practices that shape the terrain of this expanded urbanisation and how do they depart from those that animate Eurocentric urban theory? Importantly, how can other landscapes of capitalist urbanisation produce a “new epistemology of the urban” in this political–economic conjuncture? (Brenner 2013)