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The article engages with the literature that has emerged since the 1990s in urban studies in India and in this context, discusses the nature of India's urban modernity. It suggests that scholars in India participate and engage with the global discussion on urban studies by removing themselves from the epistemic confusions of colonial episteme and of methodological nationalism that has bound sociology in India. It suggests that contemporary processes of capitalism have enveloped the entire territory of the country into an urban space with the mobile upper classes termed 'middle classes' and the state policies linking unevenly the so-called rural and urban areas through new forms of capitalist accumulation. These organise specific patterns of spatial inequalities and exclusions and in turn fuel contradictory processes of politics relating to gender, caste, ethnicity and religiosities. The focus of the urban studies should be to analyse the way the global intersects with regions and localities as these are being spatially constituted in the context of uneven urbanisation.

The following listing is based on the files of centers and public and private research agencies currently engaged in research on urban problems maintained by the staff of Urban Affairs Quarterly. This list will be constantly updated for periodic publication. Any information about new centers and about foreign centers would be deeply appreciated and should be sent to the Quarterly in care of Sage Publications, Inc., 275 South Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, California 90212. (N. B. Centers located in the United States are listed by state, and within states, alphabetically by city.)

Graduate education in urban studies can make significant contributions toward strengthening urban research and extension. A new relationship between the academic person and the urban service professional is needed, as well as more interdisciplinary involvement of the research research worker and substantive changes in urban professional education.