Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Visualizing peri-urban and rurban water conditions in Pune district, Maharashtra, India Rebecca Hui, James L. Wescoat Jr. ⁎ School of Architecture and Planning and MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, USA ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Peri-urban Rurban Drinking water Sanitation Pune Maharashtra India ABSTRACT Drinking water programs in India treat urban and rural areas separately, generally neglecting the special con- ditions of settlements referred to as peri-urban or rurban. We show how the historiography of peri-urban areas acquired negative connotations of poor water and sanitation services while rurban places have come to be associated with positive well-disciplined conditions. Previous research on drinking water programs has taken two paths, one of which generates rigorous qualitative case studies that criticize neoliberal policies, while the other employs larger scale quantitative methods to advance neoliberal policy reforms. This paper adopts a hybrid pragmatic approach to visualize strengths and weaknesses of water and sanitation services in urbanizing rural areas of Pune district, Maharashtra. We re-assess demographic definitions of the rural-urban dichotomy in India, distance-based criteria used in Maharashtra, and Census of India water and sanitation data. A combination of field research and GIS mapping identified four main peri-urban patterns in Pune district: (1) megacity fringe; (2) highway corridor development; (3) industrial zones; and (4) block town expansion. We show that while water supply has improved in some rurban areas, sanitation and drainage problems have not kept up. A second pattern of deficiency was observed in transitional towns of 5000 persons. Annually updated water and sanitation datasets at the national and state levels will make this pragmatic combination of GIS mapping and field research approaches valuable for visualizing peri-urban and rurban conditions at the district scale of water governance and planning in India. 1. Introduction Many countries distinguish rural and urban settlements, and have developed separate water supply and sanitation programs to serve them. There are large literatures on rural and urban water problems, and a growing literature that is concerned with hybrid settlements that are not well served by either rural or urban water programs. While much lamented, the rural-urban dichotomy has deep administrative, financial, and territorial roots that have constrained the development of effective water programs for hybrid settlements (Allen, 2003, 2010; Narain, 2016). Various concepts strive to bridge the rural-urban divide. Peri-urban and rurban programs have acquired salience in India and other developing countries, as have suburban and town and country planning concepts in North America and Europe. Some scholars regard these hybrid settlements as transitional sites of urbanization (cf. Brenner, 2014; Scott, 2013). A smaller group approaches them from a more rural perspective as evolving ruralities or agropolitan landscapes (Friedmann, 2011). Still others regard suburbanization as the ascendant mode of human settlement (e.g., Berger and Kotkin, 2017). All acknowledge the heterogeneity and “undisciplined” or “untamed” as- pects of hybrid places, which makes them challenging to describe, vi- sualize, and theorize, let alone serve (Allen et al., 2016; Woltjer et al., 2014). In terms of theory-building, we follow Friedmann’s (2016) view of peri-urban research as middle level grounded theory. There is growing recognition of middle landscapes between urban and rural that are extraordinarily dynamic and only “partially disciplined” in the language of this special issue. Orthogonal to the rural-urban settlement dichotomy is a theoretical and methodological opposition between policies to ensure safe drinking water and sanitation. One position advocates economic and institu- tional reforms to remedy state and local policy failures. These reforms focus on devolution of water authority, responsibility, and financing from state to household levels (World Bank, 2014). They stress that water is an economic good that requires effective pricing to sustain capital investment, maintenance, and asset management. An opposing group starts from the position that water is a human right and common good, and that policy failures stem uneven development and unjust power relations. So-called neoliberal reforms are likely to exacerbate https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.01.008 Received 25 October 2016; Received in revised form 8 January 2018; Accepted 15 January 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Room 10-390, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. E-mail address: wescoat@mit.edu (J.L. Wescoat). Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0016-7185/ © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/). Please cite this article as: Hui, R., Geoforum (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.01.008