The politics of space and infrastructure in Southasian cities

IN 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a 17-kilometre bicycle lane was laid along Bengaluru’s Outer Ring Road to serve commuters in the city’s IT corridor. Within two years, the plastic bollards demarcating the track were removed, and by 2023 much of the lane had been dug up to make way for a new metro line. Only a fading “Cycles Only” signboard marked its brief existence. Meanwhile, the Bengaluru Metro, the expansion of which consumed the cycling track, has become India’s most expensive mass transit system, pricing out low-income communities even as it claims to ease congestion. Two decades of unfinished construction have left rubble, felled trees, fractured public spaces and recurring protests in their wake. 

Cycling tracks and metro lines are not just transport solutions but sites of urban politics, offering vantage points from which to examine how cities are produced, contested and lived. Four recent works on Mumbai, Delhi, Lahore and neo-urban India illustrate this through different modes of mobility and spatial experience. Taken together, they ask what mobility as practice, infrastructure and embodied experience reveals about the making of Southasian cities today. How does walking in gated enclaves, cycling through busy heterogeneous streets, or riding the Delhi or Lahore Metro expose who belongs, who is excluded, and how gender and class shape the ways people inhabit the city amid shifting infrastructures of movement?