Date: 24/09/2025
Title: Indian Cities or Suburbs? Trends and Causes of Suburbanization
About the Talk:
This talk, drawing on a published book with the same title, addresses questions regarding the suburbanization of persons, households, and jobs in India’s cities, their regional variations, the factors associated with this sprawl, and its consequences. We use granular data from the Global Human Settlements Layer (GHSL) at the sub-kilometre grid level for 100 Indian cities. We find that the downward-sloping population density function is appropriate for studying India’s cities. Further, we find that in 2015, India’s population was significantly more suburban (82%) than urban. Cities in southern and more urbanized states are more sprawling compared to cities across India overall, while those in slower-growing states are relatively more compact. We also find that employment is more decentralized than population suburbanization in 2015. On average, half of all jobs are concentrated within a 5-km radius of the core. Jobs in urban areas of southern and metropolitanized states are more suburbanized relative to those in slower-growing states and the country as a whole in 2011. Moreover, we find that the lagged value of the gradient and poor central city economic conditions push residents toward the suburbs. Finally, we observe negative effects of sprawl on the environment, particularly in relation to the delivery of basic services such as water supply, healthcare, and education, as well as air quality.
Speaker Bio:
Kala S. Sridhar is a Professor at the Centre for Research in Urban Affairs, Institute for Social and Economic Change, India. She was a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for South Asia (CSA) from March to August 2025, and an Honorary Fellow at Stanford’s CSA from June to August 2024. A recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she was hosted by UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, Department of Urban Planning, in 2021 and 2022, and was a Visiting Scholar at George Mason University during June–July 2023. She holds a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and an M.S. from the University of Iowa. She has authored and edited books published by Routledge, Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, and Sage, and has published papers in leading journals including Regional Science and Urban Economics, Urban Studies, Cities, Applied Economics, Area Development and Policy, Regional Science Policy & Practice, Case Studies on Transport Policy, Journal of Urban Management, and Environment and Urbanization Asia, among others. She is a Managing Editor of the Journal of Social and Economic Development (Springer) and serves on the editorial advisory boards of Area Development and Policy (Taylor & Francis), Urban India, and Frontiers in Built Environment – Urban Science. She has conducted extensive research for the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and has received several national and international awards for her research on urbanization, including the highly competitive Global Development Network Medal for outstanding research on development.
The talk will be followed by a discussion and Q&A
CITAPP’s Monthly Seminar Series is an attempt to create a forum where researchers across IIIT-B domains can meet and discuss cutting-edge research on the chosen theme of the semester. The Series hopes to explore a technology or topic for its ramifications in different realms of social activity. In particular, we are interested in understanding the specific kinds of complexity that these domains present for technological innovation and design.