A+| A| A-
Incomplete Visions and Riven Realities in the Indian City
.
We, at EPW, would like to thank the members of the external editorial advisory group of the Review of Urban Affairs, Partha Mukhopadhyay, Anant Maringanti, Karen Coelho, Ashima Sood, Gopa Samanta and Ratoola Kundu for putting together this issue.
Agglomeration is the engine that drives cities (Benjamin 1991). In the Indian city, however, it is a motor that often seems in peril of collapse. The hard-wired differences of caste, class, language, community and gender push apart what economic linkages might bring together. As and perhaps more powerful than clustering, the centrifugal logics of socio-spatial differentiation and separation appear to render combustible the evident advantages of proximity. This may be why Indian cities so often seem like unworkable machines, held together only by the dubious patchwork of jugaad. “Get along with thy neighbour” may be the first common-sensical principle of human settlement, but as a wave of recent scholarship in this issue and elsewhere shows (Jha et al 2021), it is a precept honoured more often in the violation.
Twelve Years of a Review
Dear Reader,
Or
To gain instant access to this article (download).
(Readers in India)
(Readers outside India)
