Beyond the ‘desire of the city’ urban boundaries & inequality

Abstract

Cities are born, and grow throughout ages; they deform under the assaults of life - an evolution more or less serene is disturbed by the repercussion of successive political-social–economic invasions. Urban processes, spatial transformations, urbanization, segregation, deterioration into slums, gentrification, pollution, and human migratory movements indicate upon the social issues facing us today. The depiction of different urban zones, local areas or neighborhoods is rarely a matter of drawing lines on a page: it now creates social categories, sets apart communal groups, and demarcates public problems to what David Harvey (1973) refers to as-the systematic 'urbanization of injustice'. Cities’ depicting these diversities is not only an urban fact but also a principal urban value. The question of how physical places with imbalanced distribution of civic resources and prejudiced land holdings pullulate often appears in urban analysis. How do cities as diverse, distended and desecrated expect safety, survival and future coherence for long? The author tries to focus in brief on the transformation of space in a city approached with problem of urban migration. Medium sized cities in India are perpetuating vulnerable spaces in wrath of boundaries and inequality. Most crucial to understand of urban equation today is ‘not that cities contain a lot of people and pack them in tightly but that cities need to rethink-revive and organize the differences between them for their future sustenance.’