DELHI WITHOUT BORDERS

2018-2020, Delhi Metropolitan Region

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In the 1960s, through a FORD Foundation funded masterplan, a new planning modernity was planned with Delhi at its centre. A modernity that would help India break away from the shackles of the past as Nehru put it. The idea of the masterplan was institute a Delhi without Borders, a Delhi that could continually expand into the fertile and well irrigated hinterland that enveloped it on all sides. 

Until the 1990s this vision instituted a functional region around it with a network of secondary towns and and connections. However, since the financialization of planning and urban development in the 1990s, spatial fixes of all kinds have attached themselves onto this vision of a 'Delhi without borders' in order to operationalize its logics of infinite and exponential urban expansion for accumulation. 

This effort to reimagine and infrastruct a vast territory is not without conflicts. Delhi without borders is both a call for seeing the exponential expansion and appropriation of land, resources, biopower, and ecologies for wealth accumulation by Delhi's upper and middle classes, but also a call for action to reform and reconfigure the trajectory of urbanization of this extended metropolis.