Rule By Aesthetics

Abstract This book offers a powerful examination of mass demolition in the world's second largest city of Delhi, India. Using Delhi's millennial effort to become a world-class city, the book shows how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to administer space. This practice of evaluating territory based on its adherence to aesthetic norms—what the text calls "rule by aesthetics"—allowed the state in Delhi to intervene in the once ungovernable space of slums, overcoming its historical reliance on inaccurate maps and statistics. Slums hence were declared illegal because they looked illegal, an arrangement that led to the displacement of a million slum…