McGee in his recent writings on Asian urbanization highlights extended metropolitan
regions and proximate non-urban settlement systems with an intense mixture of agricultural
and non-agricultural activities. The latter McGee terms as desakota, a neologism coined in
Bahasa Indonesian, to signify the fusion of desa (rural) and kota (urban).
Some of the ecological preconditions for desakota are high rural population densities;
labour intensive rice cultivation with agricultural labourers in need of non-farm work in the off
seasons and/or labour shedding by green revolution effects. McGee however recognizes that
desakota can also occur in other ecologically dense habitat of non-rice crops with high
population densities. Kerala State in India is one such region with a mix of rice and non-rice
crops.
This study examines the urban-rural fusion that is observed in Kerala and provides an
empirically informed assessment of the McGee desakota hypothesis. While basically affirming
the desakota hypothesis, the study at the same time raises some caveats. First, desakota in
Kerala is not dependent on any central urban system and intra-desakota dynamics are
significant. While M c G e e has recognized that such desakota do occur, his writings tend to
neglect this type of desakota. Second, McGee's writings on extended metropolitan regions
and desakota are increasingly associated with the recent rapid e c o n o m i c growth occurring in
some of the Asian countries. Desakota in Kerala blurs this characteristic as it appears to have
occurred beginning in the late colonial p e r i o d of the British Raj. Third, a unique mix of factors
in Kerala make the political economy central to making desakota in Kerala intelligible.
Undoubtedly in the specificity of the Kerala context the political economy is important.
Nonetheless this study raises a critique of the underemphasis of the political economy in
McGee's work on extended metropolitan regions and desakota.
The research on desakota in Kerala involved the examination of the regional
geography of Kerala. Kerala with its radical politics and remarkable social development in a
context of low economic growth, attracted the attention of social scientists. But in these
studies the spatial dimensions were largely ignored. This study emphasizes that geography
matters in understanding Kerala, and that there is an important nexus between the space and
political economy of Kerala.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/2924 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Casinader, Rex A |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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