Urbanisation is profoundly going to shape our politics. Again we know historically that forms of communal violence are shaped, to a certain degree, by the characteristics of cities. If the delimitation of constituencies is notified our politics is going to be transformed. Though precisely how remains to be determined. And finally, there has always been a deep connection between aesthetics and politics. How citizens feel is in many ways a function of the way the aesthetics of their built environment. In his own way Lutyens understood that truth.

The list could go on. But the simple proposition is that there is no significant policy challenge that can be met without confronting the challenge of urbanisation: growth, sustainability, governance, patters of violence, the relations between classes, and even the possibilities of aesthetic and social expression. Yet the shape of our cities does not fire up our imaginations. This is so for a variety of reasons: collective action around cities seems difficult; cities marked by social inequality find it hard to hold onto the idea of cities as a shared space; the governance architecture of most cities is not conducive to the city acquiring an identity as a city; the influential middle class is seceding from the idea of the “public” with great rapidity. But there has also been a spectacular failure of our intellectual, moral, social and artistic imagination. In this field, as in so many others, we are paying the price of a decrepit academic system, which simply has no capacity for a rigorous, yet imaginative engagement with these issues. Our citizens often creatively compensate for the follies of the state. But it is an uphill task. No wonder what passes for urban discourse in India is a series of land scams, ill thought projects, and idiotic attempts like Raj Thackeray’s to give cities an identity in a perverse kind of way.

... contd.