Introduction
If there is one pervading aspect of The Urban Imagination, it is the regular practice of associating intangible concepts – be they of the historical, cultural, or purely aesthetic variety – with physical spaces in the city. As such, in an analysis of our last major city, of Mumbai, we turn to the academic potential of maps as a theme of discovery. Maps bridge the realms of material and theoretical in that they are often designed to be immediately practical as a tool of navigation or organizer of data, but also carry innate value as an artifact of some society, detailing its environment or ethos. Such are the qualities of contemporary Mumbai that can be salvaged from a look at a map retrieved from the Pusey Collection in the Harvard College Library – one that was created in 2003 as part of a promotional advertisement of the petroleum utility company HP Gas. By scrutinizing over this item in its entirety – the map and the supportive information – a deeper understanding of modern Mumbai’s character is obtained regarding, in particular, the remnants of an imperial British presence, the status of the city on the global scale and how such a position has affected its infrastructure and community, and, above all, how significant capitalism is to life in the twenty-first century.
___
by Brandon Buell