Envisioning the Indian City: Spaces of Encounter in Goa, Calcutta, Pondicherry and Chandigarh

Envisioning the Indian City offers a set of new, ground-breaking studies of Indian cities as sites of physical, cultural and historical encounter. It places three colonial cities – Goa, Calcutta/Kolkata and Pondicherry/Puducherry – side by side with the postcolonial city of Chandigarh, created by the independent Indian state, to examine the specificities of cross-cultural exchanges, physical settings, urban flows, social imaginaries and built spaces, as developed over time and experienced by a variety of urban actors. If the city is, as Henri Lefebvre described it, a space of ‘encounter, assembly, simultaneity,’ colonial cities demonstrated the encounter of European imperialism and capitalism with the non-European populations and cultures they sought to subjugate. Equally, they were ‘global pivots’ of change, resistance and renewal, constituting important new additions to the global order – just as Chandigarh was for independent India a space for new departures in architecture, politics and urban structure. Each of the case studies here bears witness to the capacity of the Indian city to mediate both global imperatives and regional identities. Envisioning the Indian City represents the best of both established and emerging international scholarship on the complex fabric of the city in India.