New urbanisms in India: Urban living, sustainability, everyday life

One of the primary aims of the project was to gather data on a diversity of experiences of urban transformation. Forty core families participated from diverse social backgrounds. Examples of this diversity included: i) families who lived on the land prior to the development, with ancestral links to the land and its past; ii) migrant workers and their families, who were contracted to work on the build; iii) students who had moved to the area for Higher Education; iv) families who had bought a villa or a flat; and v) families who were supporting the tourism industry, from hotel workers to restaurateurs and shop keepers.

Young participants (under the age of 10) were asked to draw a picture – ‘Draw a picture to show a child in another country where you live.’ This method was used to introduce the young participants to the research project and to be used as a prompt in the first interview ‘Getting to know you’ – where the researcher and the participant would talk through the drawing to glean further information about their life and experiences of urban change. These drawings and narratives formed a key part of the data collection. 72 anonymised drawings are included in the archive.

Core families took part in a series of interviews about various aspects of their everyday lives. The first interview focused on ‘Getting to know you’ and the second was in relation to mobility, going through the data collated from the mobile app ‘Map my Community’. During this interview, participants would be asked a series of questions about their data (tracks from the GPS) and using Google Earth they navigated around their tracks and spoke to the data. Interview three focused on access and experiences of nature and green space. 164 anonymised interview transcripts are included in the archive.

Participant-led guided walks were used to further gather data on mobility and everyday interactions with the natural and built environment. The guided walks were arranged with young people, either individually or in peer groups and they guided the researcher around their local area, prompted with questions. Typically, guided walks would last over an hour and would involve walking through the forest, taking familiar journeys and highlighting areas of the development participants liked or thought needed improving. During the monsoon guided walks were extremely difficult to organise, thus, these became ‘Google guided walks’ (using a laptop and Google Earth to navigate through and around where they live). This method had many benefits, including the ability to show the researchers other spaces of importance to them, which were often out of reach on a traditional guided walk (i.e. where the family collects water or an area of the forest used to collect berries).

The app, ‘Map my Community’ was designed as an innovative mapping tool to capture data on young people and their families’ mobilities, their access to services and everyday experiences of their local environment. Mobile technologies are being increasingly used as tools to support social research (Hesse-Bieber 2011; Ergler et al. 2016; Hadfield-Hill and Horton 2014), indeed the mobile app and the data collected was seen as part of the broader suite of qualitative methodologies. The use of the app builds on previous ESRC funded research (New Urbanisms, New Citizens: RES-062-23-1549 - see Related Resources) which used GPS devices to collect and visualise participant data. The use of a mobile app in this research was particularly innovative given the direct insight into social and spatial practices which the data yielded. The data gave extraordinary insight into everyday mobilities, marginal spaces and temporalities of life in a new urban development. The data revealed insight into everyday interior and private spaces and moments which are normally difficult to access in social science research, favourite spaces, family routines and habits. The app participants took part in a follow up interview about their mobility (Interview B). The mobile tracks are not stored in the data archive as these are Geo-tagged locations of young people and their families homes and routines. The photographs from the app have not been shared due to anonymity.

Photographs from the fieldwork (all those without people) are uploaded to the archive.

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