Everyday urban experience in India is fundamentally violent. This violence is not physical or direct, but structural. It is embedded in the very infrastructures that promise to deliver modern urban life. Infrastructure systems create layered urbanities, where different populations experience radically different cities across space, gender, class and time. What emerges is not a collective urban space, but multiple, overlapping urbanities that are never coherent in experience and access. Infrastructures here are not just material entities, commonly understood as roads, bridges and transport networks, but also the socio-technological systems that are practiced and relational. 

According to Roy & Ong (2011), Indian cities are an example of “performative modernity”, where a complex interplay of enabling, constraining and redistributive systems hide behind a common visual of what it means to be modern. The argument provides a useful departure point, but for the majority, Indian urban experience is actually a collage of all these systems functioning simultaneously. Everyday navigation of urban life is enabled by a few public infrastructures that work, supplemented by private infrastructures if affordable and severely constrained by infrastructures that are unaffordable, broken or absent. This is not the “splintering of urbanism”, as Graham & Marvin (2001) theorize. Indian cities never achieved integrated infrastructure networks in a neo-liberal world. This is a “patchwork of infrastructural landscapes” that fragment urban space, a by-product of historical inequalities, developmental failures, marketization of resources, and political neglect of urban issues.

Everyday intimacies of urban life reveal how cities are unevenly experienced through their infrastructures. Consider four everyday scenarios in an Indian city.

Santosh studies engineering and works as a part time ‘picker’ in a ‘dark store’ for one of the new age startups that claims to home deliver daily essentials in just 10 minutes. Running around the store for twelve hours a day, climbing racks and colliding with his co-workers to ensure timely delivery, he earns a meager ₹360, at the rate of ₹0.50 per product. Today, his device froze mid order, causing a delay and a ₹12 penalty. 

Mubeen, a ‘delivery partner’ for the same company, picks up the order and rushes towards his rented bike. He has to deliver the goods at a location five kilometers away, in under eight minutes. Navigating pot holes, rush hour traffic, and pollution, he reaches a compounded residential society where he is stopped by a security guard. After getting confirmation from the resident, he is asked to park outside, walk to the farthest wing and take the staircase to the fifth floor. The ‘service elevator’ is under maintenance and he is strictly asked not to use the ‘owner’s elevator’.

Shivani, a senior designer at a global IT company, waits impatiently in her apartment for the delivery. Mubeen rings the doorbell, hands over the groceries and requests for a ‘five star rating’. Since he was five minutes late, Shivani hastily gives him ‘three stars’ as she too is running late for work. She takes the elevator to the basement and zooms out into her brand new SUV. Google Maps notifies heavy traffic and shows a 55 minute drive to work, which would otherwise take her 20 minutes. On the way, she stops for a ‘coffee to go’ and is reminded by a message to pay the monthly installment of her home loan. 

Kabir is an intern in the same IT company. He too is running late today. The auto rickshaw union is on strike, so he is walking to the metro station. While juggling between roadside vendors and fellow pedestrians, he hurries on the road against the rush hour traffic. Someone pushes him from behind onto a puddle filled with last night’s rain. Ignoring the ruined shoes and trousers, he now jogs towards the metro station. After managing to squeeze himself inside the over-crowded train, Kabir notices his trousers. He is surely going to get some stares today at the office.

While coming from very different realities, all four individuals might claim to belong to the middle class. In absence of an accepted definition, class is an act of self identification. To be middle class, is to feel middle class. The story of Indian urbanization in the post-liberization era is the story of its rising and consolidating middle class (Singh, 2024). In contemporary India, this middle class is both the beneficiary and a victim of “infrastructural patchwork”. While the poor are criminalised for their presence, the elite often leverage networks, finance and influence. The rapidly growing middle class on the other hand experience urbanity through their diverse aspirations, anxieties and consumption practices. While you can get food in thirty minutes, traffic may keep you on the road forever. While you can afford a luxury car, you must abandon it mid-journey if it rains heavily. Paying a premium for a top floor apartment may still mean keeping windows shut to avoid toxic air. Your urban experience depends not only on gender, class, religion or age, but also on how deeply you internalize these contradictions. 

Basic civic infrastructure such as schools, parks, pedestrian spaces, etc. are the bedrock of urban citizenship. Yet, their provision is profoundly uneven in Indian cities. Delhi NCR’s metro network has expanded to 389 kilometers, and yet safe pedestrian infrastructure is absent in the entire city. In absence of reliable supply, over 4000 private tankers ply around the entire city of Bangalore, delivering water to the largest startup ecosystem. The financial capital of Mumbai turns into a pothole capital come monsoon. The city is perpetually dug, with never ending construction. Obviously, tier 2 & tier 3 cities are much worse. 

Consumption based infrastructure reveals another dimension of this fragmentation. Emerging ‘gig economy’ platforms, a form of hyper-efficient private infrastructure, promise convenience at the door step. The delivery worker, while racing through the traffic, breathing in the toxic air for over twelve hours a day, climbs five floors to deliver a parcel, and yet is at the mercy of ‘star ratings’ while earning less than minimum income. This new age infrastructure with embodied labour, runs on unfair practices, algorithmic management and no rights or protection. Bodies, in their racialised, classed, gendered and aged forms act as infrastructures (Andueza & Davies, 2021) to fill the gaps in our urban systems.

When the public realm fails so comprehensively, private solutions emerge. The middle class embodies this contradiction, navigating between public infrastructures and private escapes. Gated communities emerge as a quintessential exit strategy, with highly privatized services and infrastructures. Today, about 32% of households in India’s top 50 cities live in gated communities, with a projection of 51% by 2031 (Redseer, 2021). Every time a resident opts for a society club house over a public park, the fragmentation is reinforced. 

The result is a city that functions perfectly for those who can afford to exit its public systems and poorly for everyone else, which is nearly everyone else. A decent urban life does not require private solutions for the privileged but functional, accessible, dignified public infrastructures for everyone. Santosh, Mubeen, Shivani, and Kabir will never have identical everyday experiences, but at least they should be able to inhabit the same urbanity.

Bibliography

Andueza, Luis, and Archie Davies. “The Body as Infrastructure.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, vol. 4, no. 3, 2021, pp. 799-817

Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. Routledge, 2001

Patel, Surendra Kumar, and Manas R. Pradhan. “Inequalities in Urban Exposure to Infrastructure, Services, and Environment in Million-Plus Cities of India.” Indian Journal of Population Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2020, pp. 16–29

Redseer Strategy Consultants. Gated Community Report. Redseer, 2021.

Roy, Ananya, and Aihwa Ong, editors. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Short, John Rennie, and Lina Martínez. “The Urban Effects of the Emerging Middle Class in the Global South.” Geography Compass, vol. 14, no. 4, 2020

Singh, Smriti. The Middle Class in Neo-Urban India: Space, Class and Distinction. Routledge India, 2024.