Urban deprivation in a global south city-a neighborhood scale study of Kolkata, India

Urban deprivation is an epistemic tool to study the geographic concentration of deprivation in different neighborhoods of a city. Studies have long associated with neighborhood research and have viewed it from multiple perspectives. Most of these researches look into ways how other factors affect a neighborhood or how a neighborhood affects other factors, commonly using global statistical measures to make inferences that only give a summation of local variations. However, in tune with Lewis Mumford' contention, this article proposes a local measure based index of deprivation that not only gives a neighborhood level results but also takes neighboring effects into consideration. Neighboring effects maintain that a locality seldom exists as a discrete entity rather its characteristic is made up as an amalgamation of multiple characteristics of the contiguous localities. Thus, in this study, an Index of deprivation is devised for the municipal wards of Kolkata city using Geographically Weighted Principal Component Analysis (GWPCA) loadings and compared to that devised from Principal Component Analysis (PCA) loadings. It is found that GWPCA accounts effectively for local variations and neighboring effects at the neighborhood scale. However, both the Indices have pinpointed particular wards that are at the extreme end of the urban deprivation scale irrespective of the measure used.