First Onsite Meeting in India – Part 1

French Institute of Pondicherry

By Rémi de Bercegol

The first URBALTOUR conference was held in India from the 21^st to the 26^th of May 2023 at the French Institute in Pondicherry and in Yercaud, a small hill station in Tamil Nadu. It was attended by the entire team and a few external guests, totalling thirty one participants. The meetings were spread over several days, with the first two days devoted to discussions and presentations on the progress of each member’s work, followed by a two days field trip in Yercaud, a small  town in the Shevaroy Hills of Tamil Nadu.

The French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP), UMIFRE 21 CNRS-MEAE, is a research institution under the joint supervision of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

The workshop at the IFP was split into four sessions:

– After an introduction by the project coordinators and IFP management, the first session was devoted to historical perspectives on the project, followed by a second session on spatial analysis work;

– The other two sessions took place the following day, and were focussed on the initial results of the empirical research, with feedback from the researchers associated with the project.

As well as providing an opportunity for all the team members to meet, these events also gave a clearer picture of the progress made in each case study, raising the prospect of fruitful collaboration between the South Asian and South East Asian perspectives. Putting the cases into perspective highlights the profusion of diverse cases, pin-pointing the emerging social and political dimensions surrounding land issues, notably stressed in the case of South Asia, as well as the question of the hinterlands, common to all cases, with landscapes being shaped by touristic urbanisation dynamics.

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