Introduction

India is now the fastest urbanizing country in the world, and such urbanization is typically associated with opportunities for greater income, education, and social mobility. But the city is far from a monolithic whole; it encompasses makeshift slums to wealthy gated neighborhoods and everything in between. It is becoming increasingly clear that simply “growing up in a city” has little meaning—where you grow up in the city matters a lot for a bevy of social and economic outcomes. At the same time, global capital is engendering unprecedented inequalities in economic well-being, and rising land prices in many cities are pushing disadvantaged populations to the fringes of urban areas.

If the disadvantaged are systematically pushed to the urban periphery, they are likely to be “peripheral” to the social gains from urban growth, a phenomenon that has already been observed in many Western cities and urban agglomerations. Under these circumstances, disadvantaged populations benefit little from investment in the urban core and remain segregated from wealthier residents and their tools of wealth generation; there is a genuine fear that urbanization does little for the social mobility of the disadvantaged in such a scenario. The National Capital Region (NCR) has seen soaring land prices and incomes since the 1990s along with very high rates of in-migration, exactly the conditions under which one might expect increasing peripheralization of disadvantaged populations. For these reasons, understanding the spatial distribution of marginalized caste/religious groups and economic well-being at the scale of the entire NCR is of critical importance.

There are, however, good reasons to believe that the described model of “spatial inequality” and peripheralization in the previous paragraph doesnot translate well to the NCR or many urban contexts in the Global South. Classic models of urban spatial inequality have largely been developed in the West and are typically imbued with a very particular understanding of racial and immigrant relations. The experience of India's marginalized urban communities, namely Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Muslims, (while deeply problematic) cannot be easily compared to the black experience in America or the immigrant experience in Europe.