Frontier density in urban India

Abstract

Urbanisation in India’s frontier regions challenges conventional understandings of the drivers, limits, and experiences of density. In this article I draw on cases from three cities in Northeast India, Dimapur (Nagaland), Gangtok (Sikkim) and Imphal (Manipur) to focus on three core dynamics of frontier density. First are the inter-legalities governing land, property and disputes. As urban areas expand into villages and other settlements, Indigenous, customary and pre-colonial (monarchical) norms and systems interact with municipal and state-level planning regimes shaping density pathways in particular urban zones. Second are the dynamics of frontier migration. During boom times property owners circumvent restrictions on sale and transfer of land to migrants by adding extra floors to existing dwellings to meet housing demands, creating enclaves of density, and vulnerability, in certain neighbourhoods. Third are military densities. Frontier cities in Northeast India have been shaped by their role in counterinsurgency through the last century. Dense nodes of military infrastructure sit behind high walls, while public space is surveilled to dilute density on the streets, and residents respond by thickening density in neighbourhoods for protection. I conclude by considering frontier cities as an urban type shaped by the mutually constitutive relationships between urban development and frontier space, bound up in continuing attempts to make legible, governable territory. Converging processes in frontier cities based on plural land regimes, migrant flows (both in and out), and militarisation shape density pathways and outline the concept of ‘frontier density’.

Introduction

Urbanisation in India’s frontier regions challenges conventional understandings of the drivers, limits, and experiences of density. As many scholars have argued, conventional understandings of density are drawn from the dominance of the Global North in empirical cases and conceptual models (McFarlane, 2016). South-led theorising challenges this yet it has its limits too, notably the tendency towards ‘metrocentricity’ (Bunnell and Maringanti, 2010) and the relegation of smaller cities (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020), including cities in frontier regions, from analysis. Throughout Asia, urban development in frontier regions is integral to making liminal frontier space legible, controllable (Yeh, 2013). Frontier regions are sites of urban expansion (and in some cases, contraction) at varied speeds, both intended and unintended, powered by a range of drivers including: resource extraction, (attempted) expansion of central state control, land and property speculation, infrastructure projects, free-trade zones, export processing zones, and urban developments projecting provincial expressions of futurity (Figure 1). Frontier cities are an urban ‘type’ of identifiable space-time entities or ‘chronotypes’ (Murray, 2022: 207), shaped by the relationships between urban development and frontier space. However, frontiers are messy. As Lund writes of emerging frontier urban dynamics in Asia, ‘land control is a complex cocktail of commodification, enclosure, dispossession, formalisation, and legalisation’ (Lund, 2019: 1). As Gillespie and Mercer argue, the resurgence of scholarship on urban frontiers in geography and other fields calls for frontier-led approaches to urbanisation arguing ‘this troubled concept has the potential to generate insights into various dimensions of the 21st century urban’ (Gillespie and Mercer, 2025: 1664), in this case density.

Figure 1.

Density as a promise of a better future, notably in a different city (Guwahati), Imphal.

This article explores density pathways in the area known as Northeast India, located at the eastern edge of contemporary India, sharing borders with Bangladesh, China, and Myanmar, as well as Bhutan and Nepal. The region, including tracts now part of surrounding polities, has been imagined as a frontier throughout pre-, colonial and postcolonial eras (Cederlof, 2014). The various people, plants, earth and animals that make up the region have been subject to continuous attempts to create legible, governable space (Pachua and Van Schendel, 2022); attempts that have provoked resistance, acquiescence, and enthusiasm in different sites at different times. As Barua (2018) argues, in recent decades communities indigenous to the region have pursued the ‘refrontierisation’ of different territories, seeking the imposition and re-imposition of restricted access imposed during the colonial period. I draw on cases from three cities: Dimapur (Nagaland), Gangtok (Sikkim) and Imphal (Manipur), and contend that the Northeast is an archetype frontier region, particular but not exceptional, making it a valuable staging ground to explore frontier density.

From these cases, this article focuses on three core dynamics/tensions of frontier density. First, frontier density is shaped by the inter-legalities governing land and property ownership. Second, frontier density pathways take shape in response to frontier migration dynamics. Third, urban areas in the frontier have developed around military infrastructure, termed ‘military density’ here. Military density refers to the dense nodes of military infrastructure and the ways these shape density pathways, alongside security measures to dilute the density of bodies in public space, and in the routinisation of surveillance from checkpoints, watchtowers and electronic surveillance systems.

Observations of frontier density in this article are drawn from fieldwork in these cities solo and in collaboration with co-authors for other projects during repeated visits since the late-2000s. Walking was used in all three cities over multiple years to explore density and monitor changes to the urban landscape. Residents walk; thus, walking as method offers insights into how the city is navigated, experienced, and known. Walking through crowds and emptiness, dust and mud, fumes and pollens, noise and quiet, gives a sense of the density at different volumes, as does spending time ‘dwelling’ in the urban landscape indoors and outdoors (Cloke and Jones, 2001). Macpherson (2016: 427) argues that ‘walking is not only a method to gain knowledge of landscape, but rather landscape (as an idea, a space and an experience) affects the walk and thus the methodology’. Therefore, obstructions are important too; checkpoints, street closures, strikes (bandhs), protests and power outages. Observations were noted while on the move, typed into a cell-phone or recorded with audio, as photographs or diagrams, and discussed with residents to get a deeper sense of density pathways.

The article is divided into four further sections. The following section situates frontier cities in the literature on density, and particularly density in the Global South. The three sections that follow go into detail on the three core dynamics of frontier urban density: inter-legalities; enclave density; military density. The conclusion focuses on potential lessons for frontier density in sites beyond India.

Frontier density pathways

As Woods and McFarlane discuss in the introduction to this special issue, density is best conceptualised as a mid-level concept that bridges on-the-ground manifestations of density and the ideological uses of density, captured in ‘density pathways’ (see ‘Introduction’ section). Density pathways are a series of relational dynamics, shaping and shaped by urbanisation processes at different speeds and scales. Frontiers are critical sites for studying urbanisation processes as expansion, contraction, stasis and densification. In their expansive review of literature in Frontier Assemblages, Cons and Eilenberg (2019: 7) refer to frontiers as:

regions where the state is presumed to struggle to assert its authority and is thinly spread […]. But frontiers are also liminal spaces open for production and inventiveness […] (for) creative destruction and transformation where imagined wastelands and back-waters presented as unoccupied and vacant are turned into sites of capital accumulation. At the same time, they may also become spaces of social experimentation, innovation and hybridity where new political subjectivities are shaped and new governance structures tested.

Cons and Eilenberg identify three framings of frontier imaginaries: spaces for capital accumulation; spaces of lawlessness; spaces (relatively) empty of humans and rich in flora and fauna (Cons and Eilenberg, 2019: 7–8). And these frontiers are always at a distance from, and in relation to, their inverse, heartlands.

While the production of frontiers is often seen as a colonial phenomenon, frontiers have remained resolute in post-colonial statehood too, even in cases where their location and properties have shifted. Frontiers across Asia have long histories in the expansion of settlements, extraction, colonisation, and post-colonial development ideologies and policies—whether socialist, nationalist, or market-oriented (Eilenberg, 2022; Manchanda and Turner, 2024; Rasmussen and Lund, 2018). New frontiers are emerging in the expansion of extractive industries and attendant infrastructure transforming forests, coasts, and farming land into sites for capital accumulation (Barney, 2009). However, new frontiers are also made in the expansion of transport infrastructure (Schouten and Bachmann, 2022), export processing zones and other urban-like developments or ‘constellations’ (Chettri and Eilenberg, 2021; Eilenberg, 2014), casinos and ‘integrated resorts’ (Zhang, 2017), and in urbanisation itself, where state development imperatives use cities, and increasingly networked ICT in smart city programmes, to enrol frontiers into national urban systems, governance frameworks, and even aesthetics (Datta, 2026). Armed conflict alters the calculus of frontiers, keeping some areas well outside central state control during periods of conflict, and opening new opportunities for enclosure during periods of ceasefire and peace agreements. When characterised this way, frontier spaces are widespread in Asia, new frontiers are emerging, and past frontiers have been enrolled into legible, governable space; though some end up un-enrolling (Meehan and Dan, 2023).

Frontier cities shape, and are shaped by, the physical, material, demographic and imaginative elements, or ‘assemblages’ to continue with Cons and Eilenberg’s conceptualisation, that constitute the frontier spaces within which they are embedded (or proximate to). While some cities pre-date the formation of the frontier in question, many more emerge through the processes of frontier-making, a kind of ‘late-urbanisation’, not as pejorative but rather ‘the idea that when a society transitions towards more widespread urban living has a profound impact on how this transition unfolds’ (Goodfellow, 2022: 12). The cities mentioned in this article are analysed in their present forms, a transect view of their contemporary dynamics. Some frontier cities grow quickly during booms, some decline following obsolete industries or exhausted resources, while others are constantly remade as the frontier itself re-generates. In some frontier regions, temporalities are misaligned. As Woodworth (2018) shows in China’s Ordos Municipality, frontier urban development far outpaces urban growth, what Woodworth calls ‘anticipatory urbanism’, a ‘future-oriented temporality inscribed in the landscape’ (Woodworth, 2018: 903). By contrast, other frontier cities have a shortage of housing and services, exacerbated when flows of people redirect towards them seeking work, refuge, shelter, or safety.

Frontier cities, and the frontier urbanism/s that characterise them, are different in scale to ‘urban frontiers’, usually referring to zones on the edges of cities that fit similar imaginaries: capital accumulation, lawlessness and wastelands. Peck, for instance, characterises the urban frontier as suburbs on ‘the edge of the city’ and also ‘on the edge of regulation’ (Peck, 2011: 886). In a similar vein, Harms focuses on the ambiguous zones where city and country meet and co-mingle, and where people adopt an ‘edginess’, that holds ‘the possibility of social advancement or the sharp edge of social marginalisation’ (Harms, 2011: 85). Of course, frontier cities have their own edges too, sites where frontier urbanism meets the urban frontier. Furthermore, frontier cities as discussed in this article are different in scale to the ways ‘global urban frontiers’ have been imagined. Bunnell et al. (2012) argue that cities in Asia can be considered frontiers in urban studies dominated by types from the Global North. Cities in Asia follow different pathways, and the region’s urban diversity is a ‘shifting theoretical frontier’ (Bunnell et al., 2012: 2790). ¹ In the same spirit, focusing on frontier cities contributes to the mid-range theory building on density from the edges of states, the edges of governable space, from spaces both extractive and generative, adhering to the promise of comparative urban studies in ‘building theory from many different starting points’ (Robinson, 2016: 4).

McFarlane’s (2023) four-fold understanding brings density into sharper focus. McFarlane uses four measures of density as: numbers of people living in an urban area imagined at various scales from neighbourhood to city-wide; numbers of people in a house or dwelling (or encampment); numbers gathering at sites to shop, eat, play, work; and density as numbers of people moving through space such as streets, transport systems, pedestrian infrastructure etc. (McFarlane, 2023: 1550). Various social, political, and experiential factors determine when this number, the volume of bodies, is too high. And these factors are unstable. Values ascribed to density fluctuate depending on which bodies are gathered, where, and when. Thus, density is relational, and relative, rather than formulaic.

Though density is implicated in analysis of frontier cities, it is rarely front and centre, a legacy of imaginaries of frontiers as remote, lawless, and sparsely populated. Imaginaries of frontiers can be discordant with the demography of frontiers, cities in particular (Das, 2022). In analysing the past and future of Shimla, in the western Himalayas, Datta (2026) captures these dynamics in the concept of ‘distant time’. Datta writes, that distant time conceptualises a ‘form of statecraft that uses a combination of time and distance (materially and socially) to produce a form of marginality across past, present and future’ (Datta, 2026: 6). Physical distance of the frontier from the heartland can be measured in clock time, the time it takes to reach, and is also a form of social power that ‘creates imagined distances between the state and its marginal citizens, as well as the imagined separation between different versions of pasts, presents and futures’ (Datta, 2026: 9).

Northeast India is urbanising rapidly, materialised in vertical growth, especially in the hilly and mountainous areas (such as Gangtok), and sprawl, in the valleys and foothills (such as Dimapur and Imphal). Official data is dated, drawn from the 2011 Census, but identifies an overall growth trend. These figures are complicated by classification of areas as rural even if urban in form, a classification challenge across India (Jain and Korzhenevych, 2020), exacerbated in the frontier where expanding urban areas include large tracts of land under customary authority, namely authority derived from community-based rules, practices, and decision-making. In the tribal majority states of the Northeast, attempts to classify areas under customary authority as urban has caused tensions for decades. Through various measures in the late 2010s, the Government of India has redirected finance and grants away from redistribution mechanisms which transferred directly to states towards smaller units instead, including ‘urban local bodies’ (Datta, 2018; Mukherjee, 2025). Across the frontier, not evenly and not without tensions, urban areas patched together from amalgams of settlements, villages, barracks, commercial zones, ceasefire camps, encroached tracts and wastelands, under various socio-legal regimes are being transformed into legible urban space through a series of actions to codify municipal space (often as a municipal corporation), revise or create municipal acts, and hold – or attempt to hold – municipal elections (Kikon and McDuie-Ra, 2021: 83–111).

Analysing density pathways in three cities within one frontier region opens up comparisons at different scales. First, Northeast India offers insights into region-wide frontier-making dynamics in relation to the colonial and later Indian state at one scale, and shaped by territory specific, and city-specific dynamics driving density pathways at others. Second, the cases presented offer what Duara has termed ‘convergent comparisons’ (Duara, 2019: 190) in the study of frontiers beyond India. Duara writes, ‘the expansion of the territorial state into the frontier for control and accumulation […] it reveals processes that converged across different frontier regions of Asia in over a century of colonial and postcolonial rule’ (Duara, 2019: 189). I posit that convergence reveals common factors shaping urbanisation, and in turn, density pathways: land regimes, migration, and militarism. As such, frontiers produce urban ‘types’ with identifiable density pathways that add to the mid-range theorising at the heart of this special issue.

Inter-legalities

Across the frontier, the coexistence of municipal, nagar panchayat (elected urban-rural area), special constitutional provisions, and customary authority within areas urban in form, if not in formal classification, makes for complex, ambiguous, and often improvised urban governance. These inter-legalities shape density pathways in terms of where density emerges, under what authority, and with what degree of legitimacy. Developed in legal geography, inter-legalities recognises that in postcolonial contexts, ‘plural legal systems and norms interact overtly between Indigenous, customary or pre-colonial laws and those imposed by the state, with regular contestations arising in different forms’ (Robinson and Graham, 2018: 4). Inter-legalities are useful for considering density in regions like Northeast India where various constitutional provisions, customary laws, municipal codes, and national laws – particularly concerning military and paramilitary use of land, operate in relatively small geographic areas (Dasgupta, 1997). Boundaries become blurred and rarely is one legal order operating exclusively over a particular area. Their interplay shapes density pathways by splintering the authority over what can be built, where, and to what scale and volume.

Dimapur, the largest city in a tribal majority state (Nagaland, approx. 85% tribal population) with approximately 500,000 residents best demonstrates these inter-legalities on the ground. Following the ceasefire agreement between the secessionist National Social Council of Nagaland, Isak-Muivah (NSCN-IM) and the Indian Government in 1997, an urban boom of sorts – in trade, construction, and education institutions – has driven growth. ² The 2011 census notes a 22% growth rate in Dimapur District’s population between 2001 and 2011. However, the district is divided into eight ‘circles’ of which three are considered urban (Dimapur Sadar, Chumukedima, Medziphema), and their growth rate was 72.66% in the same period.

Bordering neighbouring Assam on three sides, the city’s growth since the 1960s has been driven by settlers fleeing violence and drawn to the potential frontier boom. As such, the various families, clans, and kin-networks from across the state – and neighbouring present-day Assam, Manipur and western Myanmar – have settled in their own patches of what is now the city. Village-like in scale and feel, these settlements are governed by customary authority protected by Article 371A of the Indian Constitution. Settlements usually have a foundation stone with a settlement date and even the names of pioneering settlers to firm up their territorial claim and maintain connections to ancestral villages in the hill areas outside the city towards the Myanmar border. Nagaland is a majority Christian state, and church building (or ‘raising’) helps make territorial claims in the early years of settlement and as communities and congregations accumulate wealth. As Dimapur has grown, these settlements function as urban localities, with contemporary municipal and electoral boundaries layered on top, aligned and misaligned to the boundaries of earlier settlements (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Village gate marking entrance to ‘colony’ or locality in central Dimapur.

Governing neighbourhoods as villages is effective in some areas and less effective in others. The locality goanbura, or ‘headman’, performs all kinds of duties from confirming title to resolving boundary disputes between neighbours, and crucially for allowing (or ignoring) the form of buildings on private lots such as their height, the number of dwellings on a lot, the density of persons in a dwelling (for instance, many buildings are leased out as paying guest accommodation or hostels), and whether residential or commercial (Kikon and McDuie-Ra, 2021: 17, 149–150). Centralised city-wide planning and zoning, such as it exists in Dimapur, has limited power in customary areas. The municipal corporation takes up garbage collection, pipes, roads and wires across the city, yet connective infrastructure in-between localities is notoriously poor (Medom, 2025). Members of tribal communities do not pay income or property tax to the state, however, taxation by underground groups is part of everyday life. Decades of armed resistance for Naga independence has created parallel systems of governance, most notably by the NSCN-IM, which taxes businesses, households, Indian Government employees and checkpoints to raise revenue. In their study of taxation by NSCN-IM in Dimapur, Mampilly and Thakur (2024) argue that attitudes to these payments are more complex than simple predation, rather they constitute part of a larger social order honed through periods of crisis, and are not easily dismissed or dismantled. As a consequence of these factors, limited revenue goes to the municipal corporation, diminishing its capacity for city-wide planning or zoning. By contrast, the openness (or not) of customary authorities to new construction, whether commercial, religious or residential, is more influential on density in areas under their control.

Tensions come when attempts are made to govern these spaces as urban, according to the reforms advocated in national bodies. In Dimapur, extending the area under municipal control and increasing the responsibilities of municipal government provokes local anxieties around property tax, codification of property boundaries, and proposals to extend municipal electoral politics, including the reservation of 30% seats for women candidates, following customary authority. These anxieties led to the rejection of several revisions to the state municipal act over the last two decades, and the violent disruption and cancellation of elections in 2011 and 2017 (Buragohain, 2024). The revised Nagaland Municipal Corporation Act of 2023 allowed for reservations for women in municipal elections in exchange for no property tax levied on the tribal population (Moitra, 2023), and elections were finally held in mid-2024 with an 83% turnout (Morung Express, 2024).

While there is now a newly elected municipal body in Dimapur, its capacity to shape density pathways remains limited to designated commercial areas, designated as such during the colonial era. In the main commercial areas, ³ non-tribal migrants have established businesses, places of worship, hotels, and housing. Dimapur has long drawn non-tribal migrants from other parts of India, particularly given its role as a supply hub and in military transit. ⁴ The form of these areas is distinct from tribal neighbourhoods in that they are often high-rise and mix commercial and residential and conform to the aesthetics of density common in any Indian city (Figure 3). In contrast to areas under customary authority, the feel of these commercial areas is more generic, a generalised bustle peopled by communities from outside the frontier. New arrivals gravitate to these areas looking for work and accommodation. Non-tribal migrants can also live in areas under customary authority, housed in additional floors added to existing dwellings, in improvised dwellings built along roadsides at the edge of properties, and in informal settlements on land with ambiguous title or inactive claims, including under and adjacent to infrastructure projects such as flyovers and pedestrian bridges. Regarding the latter, permission to start these settlements is usually granted, and taxed, by someone – whether or not they hold the relevant authority.

Figure 3.

Familiar density forms in the commercial area near Dimapur train station.

Density pathways are shaped by inter-legalities, the interplay between hybrid legal regimes. In the Northeast, accommodating and codifying diverse land regimes has been a strategy by the Indian state for enrolling frontiers into national territory, notably through state-specific constitutional provisions. ⁵ As urban areas have grown in frontiers, the inter-legalities of different land regimes complicate authority over the built environment, shaping density pathways in vernacular forms adjacent to municipal planning.

Enclave density

In Gangtok, the capital city of the Himalayan state of Sikkim, density is characterised by multi-storey buildings in very steep mountain topography. A former kingdom like neighbouring Bhutan and Nepal, Sikkim was merged with India in 1975, controversially (Chettri, 2017). Unlike many other frontier cities in the region, Gangtok’s recent history is not shaped by violent conflict in the city itself, rather the reverberations of the India-China War in 1962, partially fought in what was then the North East Frontier Agency (now Arunachal Pradesh) to the east of Sikkim (Rose, 1969), and the anticipation of impending conflict with China (Sankaran, 2023). Successive Indian governments go to great lengths to ensure a stable, loyal, frontier state. Sikkim’s economy is almost entirely financed through transfers from the Central Government as a share of central taxation, plan grants (for salaries, subsidies, loans), and non-plan grants (projects under various ministries; McDuie-Ra and Chettri, 2018). Dependency on India for finance, policy, expertise (such as engineers), capital, defence and goods has deepened since 1975. Almost all goods travel to Gangtok (and beyond) along a single road, National Highway 10, which winds into the mountains carrying dense flows of vehicles, goods and people, vulnerable to blockades caused by political agitations, weather, wear or accident (Middleton, 2023). Sikkim has strong income, education, and health indicators and positions itself as a model frontier state, particularly in a region of somewhat dysfunctional polities. All this relative wealth, these model developments, bring migrants from near and far. The limited availability of land materialises demand as vertical density. Gangtok’s population at the last census was 283,583 for the district or 56% of Sikkim’s population (Census of India, 2013). ⁶

While dated, this figure gives a sense of the outsized presence of Gangtok in the state. Further, the city hosts an iterant population that is hard to capture in data but can be observed in changes to the built environment, most notably in densely clustered vertical buildings. The Sikkim Government exercises a high degree of control over the built environment through a mixture of new legislation and the ‘Old Laws’ safeguarded by Article 371F of the Indian Constitution (Kazi, 2009). Article 371F determines where migrants can settle, whether they can own property, the sectors of the economy within which they can work, and whether they have to pay taxes. These laws protect the transfer of land from ‘Sikkimese subjects’ to non-Sikkimese and a series of additional restrictions to protect tribal groups within the Sikkimese population (Bhutias, Lepchas, see Chettri, 2017). In the face of increased demand for housing, protective laws incentivise property owners to maximise revenue on owned/titled land by constructing buildings with multiple residences on single lots. This, along with the steep topography and limits to sprawl, produces densely populated buildings, blocks, crowded narrow streets, and a range of infrastructure challenges exacerbated by this density, such as water shortages, sewage problems, landslides, and vulnerability to earthquakes. Further, as Chettri (2020) demonstrates, land grabs from above – through the promotion of industrial development – and below – through landowners seeking rapid construction to house workers in industrial sites, pharmaceuticals in this case – demonstrate the flimsiness of these protective laws under certain conditions.

With a shortage of land, and limitations on land ownership, Gangtok grows vertically, upwards and downwards, to accommodate the demand for housing from migrants. The state government controls building height to between 1.5 and 5.5 floors, yet vertical growth routinely reaches 7–8 storeys. In recent years, an observable phenomenon is the practice of building upper floors outward into ‘air space’. Ground level floors conform to property boundaries, subsequent floors jut out gradually as the building goes upwards, especially if the building hangs over a ridge or over street space. Similar tactics can be observed building ‘down’ off ridges and into valleys.

Vertical growth has helped migrants find housing while deepening the spread of landlordism among the Sikkimese upper and middle classes. Rental floors are usually the least desirable in a building; usually high floors added in later years of a building’s life which require traversing many flights of stairs, or lower floors built down from street level that are usually damp and dark (Figure 4) and vulnerable to weather events such as flooding. Floors built for rent are often less finished than floors where property owners and extended family live, sometimes without insulation and in-room running water; they have a temporary, improvised feel. As such, enclaves are not realised simply as vertical enclaves rising from the surface level, but also horizontally as enclaves of upper-floors in some localities, and lower floors in others depending on the localised topography. Narrow street space exacerbates the feeling of density. Gangtok has narrow roads, high car ownership and a (limited) road-based public transport network. Walking is fading from urban life as the city extends over steeper and steeper topography, with an abundance of vehicles and underemployed drivers to ferry passengers up and down the steep roads. It is an unnerving experience being so close to the sky in Gangtok, so close to the views of some of the world’s tallest mountains, but being unable to see them, or even feel the light of the sky in the perpetual darkness of frontier density.

Figure 4.

Vertical density at different stages of completion in Gangtok.

Enclave density in Gangtok epitomises what Harris refers to as ‘ordinary’ vertical urbanisms, reflecting the ‘variety of experiences, imaginaries and practices of vertical urban life’ (Harris, 2015: 602). Enclave density can sever the connections between neighbours and fragments social networks, bringing out-of-towners who supposedly erode local cultural sensibilities through physical, sonic, visual and olfactory affect. As argued elsewhere, among Sikkimese there is some nostalgia about a time when there was less density, expressed as frustration at urban growth, migration, traffic, and lack of greenery (McDuie-Ra and Chettri, 2020: 10). Yet these feelings do not seem to reduce the appeal of city living, nor diminish the status of those who can build taller residences and make money from renting out extra floors.

Restricted land ownership and transfer laws are codified in much of Northeast India in state laws and the Indian Constitution, and desired in many areas where they are lacking. In urban areas restricted land ownership limits planned growth of housing stock and during periods of high demand from migrants, drawn to frontiers for labour opportunities from state and capital expansion, local land owners add density to existing plots, vertically in the case of Gangtok, creating migrant enclaves in certain neighbourhoods, and crucially, at certain elevations in vertical urbanism.

Military density

Imphal, the present-day capital of Manipur state on the far-eastern edge of current Indian territory bordering Myanmar, is one of the oldest settlements in the frontier, believed to have been inhabited since 33 A.D. Imphal was the seat of power of the Meitei Kingdom, Kangleipak, located in a fertile (but wet) valley surrounded by hills. The contemporary city grew around historically fortified areas, such as Kangla Fort, occupied by the British and later Indian armed forces (to 2004; Lokendra, 1998) Manipur was merged with India in 1949, after a brief two-year return to ‘independence’, and administered directly from Delhi until 1972 when it was granted state status (Mangal, 2020). With around 500,000 people, Imphal is the second or third largest frontier (after Guwahati and Dimapur), it includes areas under municipal authority, customary authority and military control.

Since the 1949 merger, Manipur has been an arena for separatist struggles in ebbs and flows by groups seeking the restoration of the formerly independent kingdom, by left-wing groups seeking independence and radical social restructuring, and by ethno-nationalist groups challenging the state’s contemporary boundaries (Hanjabam, 2008; Parratt, 2005). Standard accounts of Manipur claim hill areas as home to tribal communities with ties in surrounding states and across the present-day border with Myanmar, while the valley, where Imphal is located, is home to the Meitei community (also Indigenous to the frontier, but not considered ‘tribal’ in colonial or postcolonial classification systems). This bifurcation breaks down quickly on the ground in Imphal (see Jilangamba, 2015). Communities from across Manipur and across the frontier have a presence in the city, along with migrants from other regions within India, Nepal and Bangladesh (McDuie-Ra, 2016: 47–63). More than any other city in the Northeast, Imphal is shaped by what Mona Harb, referring to Beirut, calls ‘permacrisis’, an ‘open-ended condition rather than an episodic shock’ (Harb, 2025: 293). Like Beirut, crisis is normalised in Imphal, ‘it is the everyday grammar through which the city is governed, inhabited and imagined’ (Harb, 2025: 293). Control of space in the city is fragmented into microsites of contention where state, quasi-state (military and paramilitary) and non-state actors (ethno-nationalist and separatist groups) seek to control space, often the same space. This condition, to return to Harb, becomes the city’s permanent infrastructure, ‘institutions adapt to instability rather than against it, converting emergency rules into standard operating procedures’ (Harb, 2025: 294), and, I argue, into the density pathways of the city.

Permacrisis shapes density pathways in three main ways. First, are the dense nodes of military infrastructure, personnel, and weaponry around which the city has grown. Headquarters, transit camps, and barracks are situated throughout the city. These range in size, such as the sprawling Assam Rifles paramilitary transit camp that dominates the Ragailong neighbourhood close to the city centre, or the small barracks on the hill-top overlooking the highway at Chingmeirong in the city’s north. Some barracks have been moved, such as the Assam Rifles Inspector General headquarters from the Kangla Fort in 2005 to Mantipukhri around 5 km away, requiring farmland and new infrastructure. The facility at Mantipukhri includes schools, banks temples, churches, housing, helipads and a firing range. Others, like the enormous Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) complex at Lilong remain relatively isolated from the rest of the city, though as the city grows residential areas continue to fill the gaps in between, meaning everyday life is lived in their shadow, their gaze (McDuie-Ra, 2016: 67–73).

Second are the laws and techniques used to sort and surveil the civilian population, thinning out dense volumes of humans. Gathering in groups is difficult in Imphal; from 1980 to 2004 the city was declared ‘disturbed’ by the Indian Government and subject to Armed Forces Special Powers Act 1958 (AFSPA). AFSPA allowed, and protected, any member of the Indian Armed Forces and paramilitary to fire ‘even to the causing of death’ upon individuals assembling in a group of five or more people, acting in contravention of any law or order, or carrying weapons (or anything capable of being used as a weapon). Suspected persons could be detained for 24 hours with unlimited extensions/renewals, and members of the armed forces were permitted to enter any premises (Mathur, 2012). AFSPA was lifted from Imphal in 2004, though this does not mean a reduction in military/paramilitary presence, nor prevent the imposition of other laws such as Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code 1973 (Mandal, 2021). Section 144 prevents the assembly of more than five people and the unlicensed carrying of firearms and other weapons (including sticks and stones). Section 144 is frequently imposed at the district level (Imphal is governed under two districts, east and west), often for months at a time, and is usually accompanied by internet shutdowns. In 2023, the Indian Government shut the internet down in Manipur for 212 days amidst violence between ethnic groups (Human Rights Watch, 2025; P Kar, 2024). ⁷ Under permacrisis, Imphal is always on the edge of violence, and density is always a threat to order.

Even during times when these laws are paused, public space is designed to dilute density (McDuie-Ra, 2024). Counterinsurgency has shaped the field forms of Imphal to maximise surveillance, both in terms of area under surveillance and time under surveillance, and to control movement, mostly at slow speed. Surveillance is built into the walls, the watchtowers, the narrow gates, the check-points. Government and public buildings, markets, stadiums and valuable commercial buildings are buttressed by empty zones surrounding them, barricaded using roadblocks or oil drums, high walls and fences, check-points and parked military vehicles (Figure 5). Therefore, even in ‘regular times’ civilians are wary of gathering, and many people avoid potential encounters by taking circuitous routes or staying home, given the legacies of violence against civilians in the city (see Jilangamba 2016; Mukherjee, 2022). Manipur’s interethnic tensions are also at play in these encounters, depending on the moment. There are class components too; those able to travel in private cars usually have better mobility when compared to those who travel on foot or on bicycles and motorbikes. And those with access to private spaces can gather, whether in private residences, places of worship, or commercial venues. To be sure, there are crowds of people moving about Imphal, gathering in markets, queuing for autorickshaws, queuing outside government buildings. There are protests and hunger strikes and outdoor concerts too. However, this can be diluted quickly, and months can go by with orders against gathering, against density, in place.

Figure 5.

Passing military density near Khuman Lampak sports complex.

Third, and in response, there is a thickening of density in residential neighbourhoods. Given the weak protections on private space during the city’s recent history, the unpredictability of public space, and the fluctuations in relationships between Manipur’s main ethnic groups, neighbourhoods are crucial sites to buttress the rest of the city. The most obvious materialisations are walls surrounding property. From the street, residential lots are hidden behind thick walls of brick and concrete, usually with small gates made of steel or roll-down shutters. This makes it difficult to see into dwellings from the street. In areas in the older core of the city, adjoining walls encircle whole blocks, and residential streets take the form of narrow roadways surrounded by walls on both sides. This narrows the point of entry and exit to neighbourhoods. In some tribal neighbourhoods, these entryways have gates (as in Dimapur), and during certain times, such as funerals, the gates can be closed to traffic completely.

Thickening is uneven; pronounced in older areas (Thangmeiband, Bamon Lekai, see Figure 6), emergent in newer settlements (e.g. Langol, Makha). There are ethnic variations too. In established Meitei neighbourhoods, multiple dwellings for different branches of the same patri-local family create density in a single compound. In tribal neighbourhoods it is more common to find single households walled in on the street sides. In the urban periphery, especially in neighbourhoods established by settlers from the hill areas without ancestral ties to the city, density takes time, and houses are more exposed to the street, forest, and wastelands around. Notably, the thickening of residential density has become a major flooding hazard as concrete has replaced natural drainage systems (Yambem, 2018).

Figure 6.

Residential thickening in central Imphal.

Urban areas in Northeast India have grown around military infrastructure; infrastructure that is constantly being expanded, shifted and contested, shaping density pathways within and outside military spaces. Furthermore, in areas of active counterinsurgency, density in public space is diluted by checkpoints, roadblocks and barricades, while in neighbourhoods residents densify dwellings and compounds in response.

Conclusion

Frontier spaces are commonly imagined as extractive zones, remote, lawless and sparely populated. However, frontiers are productive spaces too; sites of urban expansion (and contraction) at various speeds and in various forms, revealing vernacular density pathways. Frontier density pathways are shaped by mutually constitutive relationships between frontier space and urban space. If we are to take frontier cities as a type, and consider what this type can contribute to the relational dynamics of density, there are three factors generalisable to other frontiers based on the convergence of plural land regimes, migrant flows (both in and out), and militarisation and security. First, with regard to plural land regimes, frontier density is shaped by inter-legalities from systems of land ownership and possession practiced on the edges of state control. For state actors and their proxies, controlling frontier territories has necessitated a level of accommodation with local practices, the co-option of these practices, and, in some cases, attempts to abolish local practices altogether. As cities in frontiers take form, attention to these inter-legalities are essential for understanding density pathways and future urban forms.

Second are the dynamics of frontier migration. Frontier booms draw migrants in search of work, and in turn, housing. Frontier cities analysed in this article have different controls on housing and land, allowing housing density in certain forms (vertical), and in certain zones. Outside these zones, density pathways operate through different relationships and at a different, slower speed. However, not all frontier cities have protections on land and property for Indigenous communities, and in these cities the dynamics of frontier migration play out in other ways, often producing conflict between migrants, settlers, and Indigenous communities, or by deepening the geographic divide between urban space as migrant space and peri-urban/rural space as Indigenous space. There are other important variables to consider in frontier cities such as the de-densification of different zones when booms slow, when armed conflicts (re)emerge, when ecologies ruin, and when density built in anticipation of migrants is not inhabited as planned leaving empty sections, so-called ‘ghost cities’.

Third, frontiers are volatile zones characterised by militarisation and securitisation and prone to periods of crisis. Even during periods of stability, the frontier is always being made and remade. In frontier cities, density is shaped by this volatility. This is evident in zones of military density in barracks and bases and the material and tactical measures to dilute density in public space by keeping flows of people thinned and their movements slow. In response, neighbourhoods thicken into more dense concentrations of people, walls, and narrow entry and exit points, distinguishing residential space from public space and paths of access in-between. Volatility will not always manifest as militarisation. Rather, the point is broader, in frontier cities density pathways can never be entirely disentangled from the violence of frontier making.

Beyond India, the cases above offer us an alternative view of density that goes beyond standard urban forms used in ‘South-led’ theorising. As individual cases, frontier cities vary across Asia and density pathways are likely to be shaped by a range of local factors in any one city. Not all factors are present in the same configurations in every frontier city or urban agglomeration, however, they are also shaped by the general attributes of ‘frontierness’ converging in Asia (Duara, 2019), and by the approaches of colonial and postcolonial states to governing, and attempting to govern, frontiers. Comparison is valuable to develop a deeper understanding of frontier cities as an urban ‘chronotype’ (Murray, 2022). As a chronotype, frontier cities allow us to theorise density, and urbanism generally, from the edges of states, from the edges of governable space. Frontier-led approaches bring density, commonly a metrocentric dynamic, to the centre of analysis in frontier cities themselves, and push us to consider the relationships between unending attempts at control, enrolment, and enclosure of frontier space and fluctuating patterns, values and experiences of density.