"We Are Visioning It": Aspirational Planning and the Material Landscapes of Delhi's Metro (original) (raw)

The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure

University of California Press, 2022

My ethnography of Delhi's Metro system, an analysis of the social and infrastructural impact of the system on the city, is now out with the University of California Press. You can read the first part of the Intro here. A South Asian version of the book has been published by Roli Books with the title: Metronama: Scenes from the Delhi Metro. The back cover blurb: The Moving City is a rich and intimate account of urban transformation told through the story of Delhi's Metro, a massive infrastructure project that is reshaping the city's social and urban landscapes. Ethnographic vignettes introduce the feel and form of the Metro and let readers experience the city, scene by scene, stop by stop, as if they, too, have come along for the ride. Laying bare the radical possibilities and concretized inequalities of the Metro, and how people live with and through its built environment, this is a story of women and men on the move, the nature of Indian aspiration, and what it takes morally and materially to sustain urban life. Through exquisite prose, Rashmi Sadana transports the reader to a city shaped by both its Metro and those who depend on it, revealing a perspective on Delhi unlike any other.

On the Metro: Re-imagining Intimacies and Desires in India

Queer Potli: Memories, Imaginations and (Re)imaginations of Urban Queer Spaces in India, 2019

As the city rapidly gentrifies, more and more physical spaces of cruising disappear. What happens when a mode of public transport becomes a zone of cruising? What kind of queer politics does it engender as well as foreclose?

Urban Transport and the Politics of Sensation in Delhi

Roadsides, 2021

This multimedia essay explores how the Delhi Metro has created a new sensory ecology of mobility that reflects and reforms the hierarchies of mobility in the city. The essay illustrates how infrastructure serves as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion from “sensory modernity” by immersing readers in the sounds, sights and feel of the high-speed Metro. In the process new relationships between self and technology emerge between the lines of belonging and nonbelonging in the city.

Public History: The Infrastructural Utopia of Metropa

Technology and Culture, 2024

Metropa, an "art and peace project" by artist and musician Stefan Frankenberger, envisions a future European railroad network through the visual metaphor of an urban subway map, offering both an infrastructural and a political proposal for the future of the European continent. This essay explores Frankenberger's vision from a historical perspective, tracing the origins of the its visual language, its relationship with past trans-European railway projects, and its political implications. The article concludes that, although metropa's technical and political ambitions are deeply connected to the present, its visual appeal and references to historical precedents enhance its affective and political impact.