ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how cities become visualized and conceptually imagined within contemporary urban theory. It presents eight images of thought that are simultaneously sites of contestation and intellectual exchange among theorists in four broad fields: mainstream/liberal urban studies, radical urban theory, assemblage urbanism and postcolonial theories of cities. The chapter elaborates increasingly complex images of thought that crystallize into a virtual city: Neo Delhi. Neo Delhi is a useful place to deploy an urban depth of field analysis that looks at the inter-temporal space between existing discourses of 'development' and incipient ones of 'globality'. Postcolonial urban theorists shared with assemblage urbanists a desire to pluralize the normative horizons of cities. The politics of the city is manifest in the ongoing mediations between near and far orders in everyday city life, mediations that become visible through an urban depth of field lens in which the depth or distance is both spatial and temporal at once.
