A century after the British built New Delhi as the capital of India, it is in the middle of furious sometimes haphazard, growth in a race against time to become a ‘world-class’ city. As the metropolis is re-imagined, dug up and built upon, the lives of its twenty million inhabitants, and the ways in which they negotiate the sprawling city, are also changing. Finding Delhi examines the nature of this transformation: what kind of spaces and opportunities are becoming available to some of the twenty million, and how much is being taken away from others.
This volume brings together voices that offer a kaleidoscope view of the morphing, knotted city even as it is simultaneously experienced. Fourteen full-and- part-time residents of Delhi, ranging from urban planners to informal-sector workers, write about issues as urgent and diverse as public transport, the state of Yamuna, women and the megacity, housing rights for the poor, recycling and recyclers, shopping malls and the officially sanctioned campaign against street vendors and the homeless ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
Finding Delhi is an unprecedented chronicling of contemporary Delhi—the nature of contemporary its reinvention and the effects of this personality shift on those who experience it. It is an examination relevant to all urban spaces being re-engineered on the road to ‘world-classness’.
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