Research on urban South Asia, the history, material and cultural aspects of South Asian cities, has become an established scholarly concern over the last decades. Of particular importance is the role of the city in wider processes of globalization, and the transformation of urban space and urban lifestyles that is associated with it.

This Handbook is the first to systematically discuss the way urban South Asia has been analysed – as a result of colonial rule, as a set of problems associated with ‘underdevelopment’ and, increasingly, as exemplary for capitalist integration and problematics associated with urbanisation worldwide. It draws attention to processes and phenomena that emerge at different points in metropolitan, city and small town development, and their social and cultural implications.

The Handbook is structured into six sections:

Infrastructures
Urban Lives
Inclusion and Exclusion
Transitions
Mapping urban space
Beyond the City
Contributions by experts in the field shed light on different aspects of urbanity, and focus on what makes South Asian urban social and cultural relations singularly interesting. Chapters illuminate the social and cultural life if cities and towns in South Asia, and show how structural processes, various legal and planning instruments and material productions contribute to these processes and are determined by them.

The Handbook highlights how the analysis can contribute to relevant comparisons beyond the region, and it will be thus of interest to academics interested in urban infrastructures, subcultures, urbane lifestyles, group-based identities, class relations, built environment, planning processes and representations of the urban in a range of media.