Book review: Surajit Chakravarty and Rohit Negi. Space, Planning and Everyday Contestations in Delhi/

This edited book with 12 chapters organized in four parts is part of a Springer series ‘Exploring Urban Change in South Asia’. Part I deals with Dis/Locating Bodies, Part II with Claims at the Urban Frontier, Part III with Informalization and Investment and Part IV with Gendered Mobility. This book is thus a broad-based one on Delhi and is discussing about planning in physical, economic, political and social realms. The editors have attempted to present a wide canvass of issues of development in Delhi, which, according to them, although aspiring to be a ‘world city’, is still at best a regional node. Anyone presenting any Indian city cannot escape the reality of wide inequalities, diversities and situated aspirations of such diverse populations in any city. Such pieces cannot capture the whole and rightly so, this book touches upon multiple dimensions of ongoing dynamics within Delhi.