'Cities provide important public spaces streets, parks, plazas where people stand and sit together, interact and mingle politics critically depends on the existence of spaces and forums to which everyone has access'
"Situated in the quiet but well-developed Wanowrie area, Clover Citadel has been created to be "your fortress"secure walls shutting out the worries of the world. And yet it provides more than just security. Clover Citadel is also a haven of beauty where you can enjoy scenic surroundings. Spacious 1,2 &3 bedroom apartments with the luxurious terrace option at Wanowrie."
The first statement above is by the political scientist IM Young. The second is an advertisement for a housing estate in one of India's fastest growing metropolises, Pune. Which of these two images of urban living rings truer in the context of India, is a moot point. Traditionally, social scientists have had a problem taking the Indian city seriously. India continues to remain a land of villages and fields in the popular imagination. While tomes have been written on the countryside and its toiling masses, the Indian city's self-image remains that of a refugee camp, a halfway house marking a period of struggle for most of its residents. Accompanying this self-image is usually a permanently unfulfilled fantasy of a more rooted existence someplace else. For the privileged with the means of exit, this 'someplace else' is, more often than not, the West. For the poor for whom mobility is either violently imposed or severely restricted, the fantasy revolves around a return to their place of original emigration. At some level, the step-motherly treatment of the Indian city in popular Indian imagination has over the years seeped into academic research also, to the extent that until recently not many good studies of the Indian city existed.
Lately however, researchers in India and elsewhere have been engaged in producing a growing body of excellent work on urban development in India –a recent example being the book 'Slumming India' by Gita Dewan Verma [see Himal, May 2003]. There are today numerous detailed ethnographic portraits of Indian cities, especially Mumbai, highlighting aspects like migration and employment of labour, the nature of the urban remittance economy and the manner in which patterns of land use and urban development have far-reaching consequences for the construction of communal and ethnic identities.