1 - Geography and Demography: Mapping the Metropolis

Summary

Delhi is one of the urban giants of the world. Like Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Jakarta, and Manila, Delhi is veritably a colossus of the modern world, a new type of metropolitan being without historic precedent. The urban transformation of this region is increasingly of interest to activists and academics who raise questions about the effects of the rapid recent growth. For example: What are its causes and effects (on issues such as planning, inequality, and social change)? Has the physical transformation into something that could be called a Global City improved the lives of Delhi's inhabitants? While these questions are interesting and important (and are addressed in several chapters in this volume), I offer a spatial perspective on urban transformation in this chapter. The intent is to provide a multi-method narrative of the growth of the National Capital Territory (NCT) and the National Capital Region (NCR). I identify some of the key drivers of urbanization, especially at the regional scale, beyond the confines of the political boundaries of the NCT, and certainly far beyond the Delhi of Mirza Ghalib and William Dalrymple.

There are two reasons for taking this approach. First, it is widely agreed that the extent of urbanization has physically surpassed whatever administrative have been conceptualized over time (such as the NCT now). Second, while the literature on Delhi has largely focused on the NCT (for good reasons), it is necessary now to go beyond it to try to comprehend the NCR as a whole. A series of motifs—such as that of Purani Dilli and Lutyens’ Delhi, the milieu of jhuggi jhopri clusters and camp slums, the kothis of old Delhi, and the gated communities of Gurgaon and Noida—are suggestive of the extent of diversity (and fragmentation) in this large space. Thus, to truly understand the transformation of Delhi into a colossal metropolis, the spatial enquiry needs to take in the entire urban framework of concrete structures, industrial zones, untreated landscapes, planned and unplanned communities, and colonial and postcolonial architectural ambition.

I discuss the geography of space, place, and people of the NCR through a critical examination of archival data, plans, and maps. Mapping offers several advantages for understanding the NCR.