Delineating Delhi: Spaces of the Neoliberal Urbanism in Tarun Tejpal’s The Story Of My Assassins

Recent Indo-Anglican literature has also seen a burgeoning of the genre of urban crime fictions set against the backdrop of India’s modernizing metropolises. While explorations of the contemporary Indian city mostly consists of non-fictional, journalistic writings, like Katherine Boo’s Pulitzer winning book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, the genre also includes fictions like Altaf Tyrewala’s critically acclaimed debut novel No God in Sight, Vikram Chandra’s bestseller Sacred Games, Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins, Hrish Sawhney’s volume of short stories Delhi Noir, Atish Tasser’s The Templegoers and others, which deal with the dark underside of the cities. Significantly, as rapid urban growth deepens existing disparities, a distinct rhetoric conflating impoverishment and criminality emerges, further justifying the exclusion of certain sections from the vision of urbanism. This paper looks at the representation of Delhi in Tarun Tejpal’s novel The Story of My Assassins, as a dystopic space riddled with contradictions of.

The Evolution of Urban Planning in Medium-Sized Catalan Cities (1979–2019)

Urban planning, as well as the type of city in which it takes place and is promoted, has changed a lot in Spanish cities since the return to democratically elected municipal governments in 1979. This work seeks to characterise the transformation that urban planning has undergone over the last 40 years. It sets out to do this by studying the cases of two medium-sized Catalan cities, their underlying city models, and the ways in which planning has been defined and managed in Catalonia. All of this was undertaken through a bibliographic and documentary analysis of the approved planning documents, which was accompanied by a study of the population dynamics and building cycles. In Spain, urban planning has been one of the instruments used to catalyse expectations for economic growth based on land consumption through urbanisation. Within this context, planning has progressed from fulfilling an initial requirement to regulate activities and urban growth (1979–1991) to facilitating urban development through a clearly expansive and speculative form of neoliberal urbanism (1993–2007) and, finally, to assuming a form in which these previous tendencies coexist with certain new orientations.