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IT TAKES SO MUCH FOR A CITY TO HAPPEN – Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty

Published on 7 August, 2015 on e-flux

Workers supervise an embroidery unit at a textile mill in Dharavi, Mumbai.

Cities are formally complex, experientially intense, and have logics that are incoherent. They fold spaces, practices, and relationships together to create an enormous, perpetually transforming morph. This morph is characterized by unclear geographies, absurd lives, unstable forms, and the coexistence of sharp contradictions within it. The formulations around grand narratives of globalization, corporate capitalism, neoliberalism, informalization, and so forth; or deficiency-stories of housing and infrastructure shortage, environmental decay, and corrupt governance are inadequate to comprehend how this morph works. What keeps it in a state of perpetual transformation? What are the sources of its energies? These stories from Mumbai offer an agile framework to discuss the complexities, intensities, and incoherence of the morph.

IT TAKES SO MUCH FOR A CITY TO HAPPEN – Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty