For example, pre-first world war Vienna and 90s Mumbai are in many ways worlds apart but both cities share experiences of rapid growth, chronic housing shortages and struggles with ethnic conflict and national identity. In both, an individualistic introspection and sexual assertion comes into conflict with traditional social conventions. Mumbai is an appropriate city for the exhibition to end on, because it represents the future. Rajadhyaksha fears that in the polarising inequality, what has been lost is a safe public sphere in the city. You can no longer assume safety as a public good provided by the state, you have to buy your own through bodyguards, security gates and several locks on doors.
Security is the biggest growth industry in the world.
All of this is exactly what London needs to be thinking about. Rogers adds that the neglect of our cities by policymakers is borne out by the survey in which one in four people believe their urban neighbourhoods have got worse. Only in the past few years, after nearly 30 years of neglect, have we begun to think and debate a vision of what our cities should be like, and as Rogers points out, it will take decades to repair the damage. In the 70s the state withdrew, and the market exploited the vacuum, to the impoverishment of public space. The Sun, a fascinating account of the political idealism that informed urban planning for the first two-thirds of the 20th century.