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Introduction: the historical legacy of suburbs in South Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2012

SWATI CHATTOPADHYAY
SWATI CHATTOPADHYAY*
Affiliation:
History of Art and Architecture, University of California Santa Barbara, Ellison Hall 2834, California 93106–7080, USA
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Extract

The edges of Indian cities have become nebulous, their morphology uncertain. They appear to extend for miles in Mumbai and Kolkata as an ‘assorted chaos’ of middle-class residences, slums and bazaars, blurring into smaller provincial towns. The latter seem to distinguish themselves through the sameness of their ‘taste for strident politics, violent films, ostentatious architecture, lewd music, rumour-mongering newspapers and overcooked food’. The stretch between Delhi and Gurgaon is a series of real estate fictions of spurious capital and inadequate infrastructure. Spurred by the liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s and supported by state policies that have lifted many of the restrictions on rent and land use, the structural transformation of Indian metropolises manifests itself on the edges of the city as a struggle between vast slums and corporate developers’ vision of up-scale real estate, between landscapes of rice and wheat fields and expanding airports and golfing greens.

Type
Indian suburbs
Information
Urban History , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 51 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Mishra, P., Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (London, 2006), xviiGoogle Scholar.

2 See Chattopadhyay, S., ‘“Bourgeois utopias”? The rhetoric of globality in the contemporary suburban landscape of Calcutta’, Working Papers in Contemporary Asian Studies, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden (2009)Google Scholar.

3 These papers were first presented in the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Meeting in Pasadena in 2009.

4 The scholarship on Indian suburbia in historical perspective is few and far between. Apart from Stephen's Blake's discussion in Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639–1739 (Cambridge, 1993), they include Archer, J., ‘Colonial suburbs in South Asia, 1700–1850’, in Silverstone, R. (ed.), Visions of Suburbia (London, 1997)Google Scholar; Chattopadhyay, S., ‘Bourgeois utopias’ and ‘The other face of primitive accumulation: the garden house in colonial Bengal’, in Scriver, P. and Prakash, V. (eds.), Colonial Modernities (London, 2007)Google Scholar.

5 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 57.

6 See Chattopadhyay, ‘Other face of primitive accumulation’.

7 See Fishman, R., Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Boyer, M.C., Planning the Rational City (Cambridge, MA, 1988)Google Scholar.

8 India Vision 2020, Planning Commission, Government of India (New Delhi, 2002), 93.

9 Bayly, C.A., ‘The small town and Islamic gentry in North India: the case of Kara’, in Ballhatchet, K. and Harrison, J. (eds.), The City in South Asia: Pre-Modern and Modern (London, 1980), 20Google Scholar.

10 See William Glover's article in this volume.

11 India Vision 2020.

12 Ballhatchet and Harrison, The City in South Asia.