Bazaar City
April 2008
Let’s imagine a city. Not any particular city but rather a mix of cities; a messy collage of Mumbai, Goa, Tokyo, Barcelona, Mexico City, New York, and a few others. An endlessly sprawling global village where everything is distributed evenly in “small granules or pavilions across the landscape in a continuous network”.
In typical Postmodern fashion, this city is composed of disparate architectural elements: an art-deco hotel, a tourist resort, an electronic billboard, a neon sign, a delirious cathedral, mass housing, sun-breaking office towers, and so on. These archetypes majestically come together to produce the skyline of our imaginary city. Spreading over and under, within and between, even spilling outside, the “continuous network” is everywhere. Formless more than informal, it is the glue tying urban elements together. This is what we could call the ‘Bazaar City’ – the city in its raw form.
Lead essay published in Art India Magazine, Mumbai, April 2008