Mumbai
Mumbai over the past decade and a half has seen a shift within urban studies. It has moved from a relatively marginal position to becoming increasingly central in theory, practice, and imagination. This rise can be attributed to Mumbai’s size and demographic growth, its increasing connections to global circuits of capital and cultural exchange, as well as new theoretical and policy interest in the “slum” and cities of the “Global South.” Mumbai has been a part of the incipient “Southern turn” in urban studies in which mega-cities of the Global South have come to be recognized as incubators of future urbanism and as places at the leading edge of processes of globalizing modernity. Important in-depth scholarship on Mumbai has circulated widely in international urban research, triggered especially by the coverage provided by the three-volume Oxford University Press series published between 1995 and 2003. These works, among others, have allowed greater sensitivity to Mumbai’s range of distinctive urban spaces, cultural idioms, and lived experiences as well as their often chaotic and unknowable characteristics. Recent changes in the socio-spatial landscape of Mumbai have further opened up important new and alternative ways both of understanding, theorizing, and planning contemporary cities and of investigating urban life in the context of globalization.