Connections and Disconnections: The Making of Bombay/Mumbai as India’s “Global City”

Abstract

Scholarly literature on “global cities” has been criticized for ignoring the long-term historical context within which cities articulate the relationship between the global and the local. Employing a longue durée globalization perspective, this paper historicizes the unequal and uneven nature of contemporary urban development in Mumbai, India’s “global city.” The paper uses two analytical frames: the “port city” and the “colonial city” to highlight two essential dimensions of Mumbai’s contemporary transformation of interconnectedness and segmentation based on unequal power. “I will not claim to possess the prophetic insight to foresee what is in store for Bombay. But as it has adopted the happy motto of Urbs prima in Indis, it may be hoped that this will prove of good augury, and that among other privileges Bombay will own that of priority among the Indian cities for longevity in undecaying prosperity” (da Cunha, [1900] 2004, p. 6). “Urban landscapes come to refract various layers of sedimentation—of past uses and organization—as well as to embody a range of possible meanings and actions falling outside the shifting levels of specification brought to bear on these landscapes by the prevailing and.... often fragmentary apparatuses of control” (Simone, 2004, p. 14).