Over the past few decades, scholarship within diverse disciplinary fields has directed our attention to the complex ways in which new spatial formations have emerged in the Global South (Bhan 2016; Ghertner 2015; Roy and Ong 2011; Ranganathan, Pike and Doshi 2023). New urban forms and related processes of intense movements of people, capital and labour have marked Indian cities as places that have experienced significant changes in a short span of time. This moment of hyper-visibilisation of cities, especially in the developing world, often eclipses several other compelling and layered processes at work. Integral to this layering are the relatively under-researched changing landscapes of education and the complex ways in which they interface with urban transformations.

In this volume, we hope to address the multitudinous shifts that have occurred in systems of education and urban formation in India. The conceptual richness of multidisciplinary intermixing, along with a range of methodological strategies, can be seen in the different chapters in the volume. What we learn from these explorations is that the nature of the relationship between education and the urban has developed along socio-spatio-temporal lines inhabiting different sites, institutions and voices. In academic terms, the volume opens a conversation between education studies and urban studies by paying attention to the rapid expansion of institutional spaces, the elements of change in predominantly agrarian regions, the formation of peri-urban towns, the enclavisation of schools and the possibilities of imagining educational futures in swirls of change.