Articles by Gautam Bhan

Where one lives matters because patterns of spatial inequality shape the horizons of urban lives. They also critically affect urban policies, especially in large metropolitan cities where intra-urban differences can be of very large magnitudes. Gaining insights from recently released ward-level census data for urban settlements, this paper uses a set of constructed indices and geospatial maps to focus on spatial inequality within cities and across scales of settlements. Arguing that the slum is not a proxy for urban poverty and inadequate housing patterns, it underscores the need for newer methods to spatially trace multidimensional urban poverty and vulnerability.

Chaos, irrelevance, incompetence and exclusion, what do these "failures" tell us about the apparently self-evident understandings of plans, "planning" and "planned development" in Delhi? What implications does this have, in particular, for an urban politics and practice interested in the many forms and imaginations of a just and more equitable city? This paper argues that in Delhi the "chaos that is urban development" is not planned but is an outcome of planning. Plans do not control but they influence, determine and limit.

The slum data in Census 2011 needs to be interpreted with caution on three counts: the correlation between the definition of "slum" and urban poverty; the dimension of quality when estimating access to basic services; and the question of why so few cities and towns report any slums.