ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Delhi's contemporary discursive transformation from a 'developing' to a 'globalizing' urban space. 'Urban mediation' is about the value and intelligibility of the built environment in the context of continual, multi-layered and inter-temporal change. It argues that Delhi does not 'globalize' without first creating an imaginary distance between its 'globalizing' present and its 'developmental' past. The chapter focuses on one dominant way of ordering and valuing the present and various counter-narratives that come to challenge its dominance. It analyses the various specters that interfered with the spectacle of the mega-event, revealing a politicized postcolonial urbanism that confounded the global dreams of the postcolonial nation-state. Urban mediation becomes the site of political struggle in a postcolonial city-state that seeks to project a hegemonic far order onto heterogeneous and 'untimely' urban spaces. Lefebvre's approach to urban mediation must be modified to take into account the distances and proximities uniquely productive of colonial and postcolonial urban life.
