The Improvement Regime: Public Trusts, Real Estates, and India’s Urban Futurities

This article suggests that rather than studying the “failures” of the individual trusts to foster sanitary built environments, we should pay attention to the contingent workings of the city trusts that were constitutively designed for such failures. Using a comparative analysis of the Bombay and Calcutta improvement trusts, this article offers a retelling of the history of twentieth-century Indian urbanism through the inauguration of an “improvement regime.”

Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinion or stand of the University.