Mapping the Urbanisation Pattern of Small and
Medium Towns in Kerala
Roshan Thomas
Abstract
The major focus of studies on urbanisation in the Indian context has been the outcome-based narratives that are heavily reliant on population growth and economic dimension alone, which is biased in favour of the metropolitan and large cities. In this paper, we divert our attention to the urbanisation pattern and process of small and medium towns of Kerala using a case study-based methodology. The study explores the four dimensions of urban life – namely population, land, local economy and infrastructure development of these towns over the period of conversion to municipality up to the year 2022. Here we map the urbanisation process through the changes that have occurred in the towns using the said parameters. The study finds that even though Kerala has been largely explained as a rural-urban continuum, there are nuances that exist among the growing towns in their urban growth and development and place them within the current urbanisation pattern discussion of rurbanisation and subaltern urbanisation. In this paper, we provide an insight into the localised discussion of urbanisation process of towns in Kerala focusing on the variations which are available on three factors – population, land use/development and economic activity. This paper is divided into four sections: The first section is the introduction to the research problem; the second section deals with Nedumangad town; the third section deals with Perinthalmanna town; and the fourth section forms the comparative discussion, and the last section provides the conclusion of the paper.