ABSTRACT
Generations born after the 2000s will grow up to believe that extended concrete colonnades and flyovers in the centre of the street are ubiquitous features of modern Indian urbanism. Engine, also, because the metaphor ‘engine of economic growth’ is the telos of state-authorised urbanism in bigger Indian cities. Greater economic integration requires better spatial integration. Two broad principles that interweave smoothly in concrete situations can be seen to underlie Mumbai’s spatial transformation since the mid-1990s—rationalisation and integration. The twin imperatives of rationalisation and integration are steadily transforming the spatiality of Mumbai. Half of Mumbai’s population has lived in informal settlements for much of the 20th century. Privatisation is increasingly the principle of governance as well as everyday life. Formal, big, private and networked: these adjectives illuminate key idealised qualities, or values, of the new urban spatiality in multiple scales.
