The development of Delhi and its metropolitan area bears witness to a major tendency in the urbanization process in India: an increasing concentration of the urban population in metropolises of a million or more inhabitants. The extent of this process of metropolisation is however underestimated by the administrative definition of the urban areas: thus, powerful forces of physical, socio-demographic, economic and functional urbanisation are also at work in peri-urban zones classified as rural. 
 
The case study of Delhi’s pattern of population growth and outward expansion – analysed in the first part of this paper – exemplifies the gaps between the ground reality of the peri-urbanisation process and the administrative and statistical classifications. 
 
In the second part of this study, the factors contributing to the outward expansion of Delhi are examined. The approach adopted here for identifying – and better understanding – the forces of change at work in the peri-urban spaces is the analysis of the settlement pattern in these areas, including an evaluation of its various components in terms of population and housing. Thus, we estimate the respective share of the native populations (the original villagers) and migrants – settlers from the central zones of the metropolis or migrants from outside the metropolitan area.  This analysis is linked to the various evolving urban forms found in the peripheral zones, including expansion of suburbs – planned as well as informal (squatter settlements and unauthorized colonies), formation of new residential quarters in surrounding rural areas, urbanisation of the fringe villages and the creation of satellite towns.
 
This study is based on two main sources of data: decennial population censuses (the most recent conducted in 2001), and a survey on population mobility conducted in 1995 complemented by in-depth interviews and field visits during the 1995-2000 period. The survey included five peripheral zones that illustrate the dynamics of urban expansion, and covered a sample of 1249 households or 5981 usual residents.
 

The processes that underlie urban development in the metropolitan area of Delhi contribute to an interweaving of urbanized zones and countryside, as well as to a blurring of the distinction between rural and urban population categories. This is especially evident at the fringes of megacities like Delhi. The continuous geographical expansion of the urban agglomeration of Delhi entails, first of all, a physical integration of urban and rural spaces through the incorporation of villages in the urbanized zone. The process of peri-urbanization and rurbanization around Delhi is also expressed by a functional integration of the metropolis and new residential neighbourhoods established in the rural fringes, without (necessarily) continuity of built-up space (at least during the initial phase of emergence of these outlying clusters). The daily commuting of the new dwellers in the rural-urban fringe between their decentralized housing estates and the centers of employment in the capital reflects the link of economic dependency between the different spaces.
 
In the context of fast developing metropolises, as in the case of Delhi, the speed of urban spread and transformations, especially in the urban-rural fringes, implies that the concept of peri-urban zone cannot be a static one. Consequently, the physical delimitation of the urban-rural fringe or a peri-urban zone around a metropolis at a given point of time is bound to become quickly obsolete.

The lack of spatial access to work (an income earning opportunity) and livelihood needs (such as potable drinking water, primary health service, sanitation, basic education, cooking energy, recreation and social networks) is an indicator of poverty situation of the peri-urban low income households in Delhi.  The cost in terms of money and time (the spatial access cost) spend in gaining access to work and livelihood needs is an invisible factors for planners and policy makers towards formulation of polices and programs for the socio-economic development and creation of urban basic services. 
 
The urban poor locate themselves in the available places in the city or the periphery of the city due their inability to access to the formal sector housing since they are economically poor. The Squatter households locate their shelter (mostly on the public land found vacant) in the periphery of the city becomes disadvantageous towards access to work and livelihood needs when compared with their counter parts living the city areas. Access to land and close to friends and relatives determine to choose to live but the spatial access to work and livelihood needs remains a night mere for the many squatter households in the per-urban Delhi.
 
The squatter households move in the local area and in the city to work and gain access to livelihood needs takes considerable movement by foot or bi-cycle or bus construct an inward pattern of spatial mobility in the city from the periphery where they live. Urban squatter households live in the periphery and work and socialize in the city and the local area. The mobility pattern of the squatter households in the peri-urban Delhi is work based, recreation based, livelihood based and social networking based. Interestingly, there are households with mobility based work for their livelihood. Households living in the peri-urban Delhi are informal and very less institutional support available to gain access to work and livelihood needs. So the households use informal means adopting a number of strategies to gain access to work and livelihood  needs. The strategies used to gain access to work and livelihood needs are vary as familial relations, social networks, affiliation with political parties, informal contacts with city corporation officials, police departments, electricity offices, city development authority etc.
 
This paper is based on the research done on the two squatter settlements located one on the southern and the other on the northern periphery of Delhi. The paper focus on the two basic questions related to spatial access to work and livelihood in terms of (1) What is the mobility pattern of the per-urban squatter households towards gaining spatial access to work and livelihood needs and (2) What are the strategies used to gain spatial access to work and livelihood needs.

Cities are about difference.  The desire to rationally manipulate urban spaces to create a unitary city has always also found an echo in the city of difference, organized on grounds of gender, race and community. In this paper I seek to look at this production of difference through an entirely different lens, that of environment, which has not found the same privilege as the other categories of difference, namely gender and race.  The question that I pose is fairly straightforward - what constitutes the 'inside' and 'outside' of Delhi, its core and periphery, if we are looking at smoke and particles, nuisance and pollution? What is the sense of margins and boundaries that these considerations evoke? The answer, I suggest, is a much more than simply that of physical separation. Instead, the argument is that the core and the periphery relate across social class, as much as they do across space. And to the extent that it is so, imaginations of the periphery are also about time, such that persons and material practices may reside in only one time, viz. that of the present, in order that the urban can be ‘properly’ secured as ‘modern.’ Time, space and populations, I argue, together configure the city and its margins; the ‘peri’ in ‘peri-urban’, is as much within the city as outside it.

From a planned royal capital to a regional city and later on capital of a democratic state of Union of India, Jaipur has grown within the last twenty years to be at the beginning of the third century a large metropolis deeply integrated into national as well as international networks. This fast growth leads to a tremendous expansion of the urban space, the new constructions extending far away from the city limits not only for residential purposes but also for economic activities. This phenomenon affects the rural population and also concerns the pattern of the urban society. A part of the rural settlers goes to town all working days, to work in shops, offices or factories or to sell their produce, when the urban people who settle in the city fringes find there an occasion of a new way of life, commuting every day to the city from their rural environment For the people who work in the factories, which have been established in the peri-urban space, mobility is more complex : the executive are more often coming from the inner city while the workers come from villages, extending far away the influence of the town.
 
The project is to understand the special pattern of the peri-urban phenomenon in Jaipur. The hypothesis conducting the study is the one of specific processes operating in the urban fringe of the city, link it to the special characters of the Jaipur society:
 
First, Jaipur is still an erstwhile royal city with social groups maintaining strong links with villages, and obviously close-by villages, where they built modern large residential houses and own well maintained farm houses.
 
Second, Jaipur has experienced during the beginning of the 1990 a fast development of economic activities due to several factors, viz., its good connections with Delhi; its stable political environment, and with no doubt the investments of its rich diaspora, staying either in other Indian states or foreign countries and still looking forward to business opportunities locally more out of emotional reasons than profit motives.
Third, Jaipur is today largely a middle class city mostly dependant on service, trade and commerce. A large part of this new population earns good income and consumes intensively, seeking a new way of life in the urban fringes.
 
Fourth, the numerous global activities related to export market, tourism and gems industry and new business opportunities such as software development and BPO are largely responsible for peri-urban growth of Jaipur.
 
The paper presented to the seminar will result in an exploratory study which intends to reinforce this hypothesis and to work on the methodology to go further in this area of research.