I knew nothing about the city of Gurgaon, India before watching this…. its current building boom…
Nonetheless, this video is a clear example of how worldwide discourses of ‘globalization’ often lack nuance. Notions of growth (w/o development) are largely unproblematized (they lead with talk of multinationals coming to the city)–as painted by interviews with urban planners, discussions of infrastructure, the problems with predatory developers, etc. the city comes across as a thing (the bourgeois project of modernity) instead of a complex organism (a la Jane Jacobs) or a human lived space (Lefebvre) (a panel member–Prof & Environmental Planner Darshini Mahadeva–voices this complaint in other words around minute 14:00-15:15).
urbanculturalstudies 