Love in the South Asian city
Discussions on urbanity tend to be focused primarily on the materiality of lived experience: conditions of housing, access to livelihood opportunities and basic services, concerns on ecological commons, and so on. Cities are often imagined in terms of their economic value to regions and societies, as growth engines, as sites of consumption and production, or as regenerative nodes in the wider relay of transnational capital. With humanity turning urban at an unprecedented scale, it is common now to frame conversations on urbanisation in terms of challenges and opportunities, problems and solutions, irredeemable and transformational amidst a widening matrix of actants and stakeholders.