ABSTRACT
As a young scholar in urban studies and architecture, M. Sorabjee was at that time based in the United States, but through her articles, website and especially through her award-winning essay she also helped to increase the visibility and interest in the loitering movement beyond India and South Asia. Accordingly, the accelerated sociospatial segmentation and segregation of metropolitan or megacities in India can be traced both in the materiality of the new urban architecture and in the visual representation and imagination of the new “global” or “world-class city,” especially in city- or place-branding campaigns. The aspired inclusion into public everyday life is therefore actually anticipated through the performative practice and theorizing of it. In sum, cities in India just like in other regions of the so-called Global South continue to experience an elite-oriented urban transformation, growing social inequality as well as intersectional immobility/mobility – but simultaneously the articulation of dissent and protest against these ongoing processes.
