Do Buildings Have Agency?

Galleries of Life boldly opens a space for more studies of the wide and porous continuum of housing practices in Mumbai, which include chawls, flats, wadis, slums, and coastal villages (see Housing Typo­logies in Mumbai). If urban housing has subjectivity, then a genealogy of chawls has as much to tell us about social mobility and spatial practices.

So asks Shekhar Krishnan, in a recent review of The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life, edited by Neera Adarkar. While the book does practice what Krishnan calls a "“strategic essentialism" it fundamentally, opens up new horizons in the study of urban housing in Mumbai and India.