Art Deco Bombay: The Radical Re-imagination of the City through its Aesthetics

Art Deco Bombay: The Radical Re-imagination of the City through its Aesthetics

Book Chapter published in Radical City: Imagining Possibilities for the Indian City, Pithamber Polsani, editor, Sage/ Yoda Press, 2021

In the next few decades a billion people will be urbanised. There will be over 40 megacities—more than 10 million inhabitants—most of which will be located in the ‘global south’, especially China and India. Cities already stretched to the seams will explode. The accelerated global warming and extreme weather events will only make the situation worse resulting in unimaginable consequences. Radical City: Imagining Possibilities for the Indian City argues that we should urgently reflect on the question raised by the luminaries of Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) nearly a century back, ‘Should our cities survive?’, because the Functional City—a conglomeration with differentiated zones of activity and transportation of people and materials between the zones—invented by CIAM has outlived its usefulness. Rethinking the city, therefore, cannot be the province of planners and technocrats alone. Instead, this book brings together artists, architects, writers, poets, designers, urban planners, social scientists, humanists and others to think about the city and its possibilities.