Hey pal! How do I get to town from here?
And he said: Well just take a right where
they're going to build that new shopping mall,
go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway,
take a left at what's going to be the new sports center,
and keep going until you hit the place where
they're thinking of building that drive-in bank.
You can't miss it. And I said: This must be the place.
Ooo coo coo. Golden cities. Golden towns…
– Laurie Anderson
Which city is that? Bombay? Karachi? Seoul? Sao Paolo? Tokyo? Tehran? Metropolises are the settlements in the making, the works in progress. Large and long-necked yellow-coloured cranes have come to be the signifying skyline of a city that is aspiring to be a metropolis, much as the rotating gloves of cement-mixing cars that dot the traffic lines. Construct, demolish, reconstruct, renovate and so on. Phrases such as demolition squad, construction site, redevelopment have become intrinsic parts of the global urban lingo. If these are not part of your social vocabulary, then you must live in a place where the real estate is not going to appreciate. In turn, this means you are not in the upwardly mobile circuit.