Re reading Gurgaon: Towards a post-colonial reading of Utopia

Contemporary Indian architecture and urbanism, both theory and practice, finds itself caught, in
Bhabhas eloquent words in a fin die sicle..the moment of transit that is actively producing
complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and
exclusion (The Location of Culture, 1994). If one forgets if only for a moment, the traditional
portrayal of Indian urban landscapes as a binary construction of the opulent and the hungry, the
village and the city.
While practice finds itself as the willing tool of the neo liberal market, contributing towards the
production of a landscapes of exclusion, theory alternates between two conceptual poles. The
first is a utopia of subaltern urbanism, well published and with solid academic credibility that
prioritizes and celebrates the right to the city of subaltern citizens, and involves a blistering
negative critiques of aestheticization, aesthetic imperialism of the disciplines of architecture
and urbanism. The second utopia, an informal one from within the profession of urban design
and architecture is a nostalgia for an authentic incremental Indian urbanism, left over from the
search for identity paradigm of the 80s. It also

Gurgaon is typically portrayed as the classic Indian neo liberal urban landscape of exclusion
and misgovernance.