Indian cities are like that overachieving cousin at family weddings: always introduced as the “engine of growth”, “global hub”, and “world-class”, while quietly leaving unpaid bills and broken things in their wake. In ‘City Limits: The Crisis of Urbanization’, edited by Tikender Panwar, that golden child is gently sat down and told, “Beta, let’s talk.”
What unfolds is less a TED Talk and more a post-mortem: a clear-eyed account of how our style of urbanisation widens inequality, consumes commons, and treats people and places as disposable in the service of prestige.
I come to cities as an anthropological archaeologist, more familiar with trenches and the people who figure out how to cross them when they flood than with traffic jams (though, increasingly, the skills overlap). Yet the method is oddly similar: layer by layer, you uncover decisions, desires, and disasters sedimented into concrete. ‘City Limits’ feels like someone has cut a clean vertical section into contemporary Indian urbanism and handed us the profile — still standing, but already haunted by future ruins.
I met Tikender Panwar recently at the Satat Sammelan at HIPAA, Shimla, where we were both invited to speak. He arrived on a bicycle — because how else does one come to a conference on urban futures? In the lobby, he greeted the staff, spoke with participants, and then went on stage to quietly dismantle the buzzwords of “smart” and “world-class” cities. The man who cycles to his critique of car-centered planning is exactly the editor you want for this book.
On paper, ‘City Limits’ is part of the Rethinking India series and “brings together leading voices”. In practice, it gathers people who have lived inside the mess: municipal officials who understand how tenders actually work, unionists who have negotiated at demolition sites, architects who have watched floor-space indices do gymnastics, and scholars who translate all this into language that remains readable.
Together, they ask a question that polite policy panels often avoid: after three decades of liberalisation, what have Indian cities actually become — or workers, tenants, street vendors, the homeless, and those excluded from gated enclaves? The recurring answer is uncomfortable: Smart Cities, PPPs, mega projects, and digital “solutions” often function less as fixes and more as glossy covers for older habits of exclusion.
The contributors are sharp and grounded. Indu Prakash Singh writes with clarity about homelessness in Delhi; Aravind Unni traces how demolition and displacement have become normalised tools of governance; architect-researchers like Kanishka Prasad and Vertika Chaturvedi show how built form and infrastructure systematically exclude those who sustain the city. It is a chorus of perspectives that differ in approach but converge in their critique of an unjust and unimaginative status quo.
Running through the volume is the idea of the “Right to the City”: the insistence that cities are not real-estate portfolios with incidental populations, but collective habitats where residents deserve a say over land, infrastructure, and resources. As Panwar argued in Shimla, before we install sensors and apps, we must ask whom the city is meant to serve.
The most powerful essays refuse abstraction. Homelessness is not a statistic but a winter night on a pavement. Informal workers are not categories but the people who clean homes, cook meals, and deliver goods — only to be displaced in the name of urban order. After a few chapters, “beautification drive” becomes difficult to hear without asking: for whom, and at whose cost?
The Smart City critiques are particularly effective. They peel back the polished surfaces of dashboards and control centres to show how such systems can centralise decision-making, obscure accountability, and sideline elected bodies. The issue is not technology itself, but its deployment as a political instrument — one that makes exclusion appear efficient and forward-looking.
Equally compelling are the accounts of disappearing commons: lakes converted into plots, wetlands regularised, pavements cleared. These are not nostalgic laments but grounded analyses of competing urban visions — one that sustains ecological and social life, and another that prioritises revenue and control.
One of the book’s strengths is its refusal to soften its politics. There is no performative balance here. The contributors write from lived engagement — with demolition drives, municipal processes, and legal frameworks — and tie policy language directly to material consequences: evictions, rent increases, and new forms of spatial exclusion.
From an anthropological perspective, the book’s attention to materiality is especially compelling. Cities emerge as sedimented ideologies: budgets, bylaws, and contracts translated into glass, concrete, and asphalt. Panwar’s own trajectory, from Shimla’s deputy mayor to critic and educator, allows him to bridge insider knowledge with critical distance.
That said, the collection leaves some questions open. I found myself wanting more on small and medium towns, where urbanisation unfolds in less visible but equally transformative ways. A clearer historical thread linking colonial governance, post-Independence planning, and contemporary neoliberal frameworks would also have deepened the analysis. These, however, feel less like shortcomings and more like invitations for further work.
We are living through a moment when environmental and infrastructural crises — floods, landslides, heatwaves, building collapses — are no longer exceptional. Yet the dominant policy response remains unchanged: more expressways, more vertical expansion, more emphasis on ease of doing business. ‘City Limits’ disrupts this script. It insists that any meaningful urban future must begin with justice, democratic participation, and ecological limits.
For planners, students, activists, lawyers, and architects, the book offers both language and evidence to challenge dominant narratives. For anyone who has sat in traffic and wondered if cities could be designed differently, it provides a framework to think beyond inevitability.
In the end, ‘City Limits’ is not a monument but a carefully excavated trench. It reveals enough of the foundations to make one thing clear: if we continue to build without questioning those foundations, the ruins are already in the making.
— The reviewer is the founder-director of the Himalayan Institute of Cultural & Heritage Studies