The descriptive catalog below represents the initial empirical exploration of Mumbai’s urban landscape that catalyzed this entire project. By systematically mapping the physical remnants of colonial infrastructure—from Portuguese ecclesiastical holdings to East India Company fortifications—I isolated the spatial anomalies and institutional regime shifts that define the city’s built environment. This historical base serves as the raw qualitative canvas for the analytical papers that follow, where I formally evaluate these spaces using frameworks of spatial economics, path dependency, and transaction cost theory.
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Gateway of India
In 1911, when King George V and Queen Mary visited Bombay — becoming the first British monarchs to visit India — they were greeted by an archway built especially for them: the Gateway of India. The Gateway standing there today is not the same structure that welcomed the monarchs. During their visit, a relatively small…
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Oval Maidan
The Oval Maidan Art Deco Precinct in Mumbai developed primarily during the 1930s and 1940s on reclaimed land. It remains one of the largest and most coherent collections of Art Deco architecture in the world, with Mumbai possessing the second-largest collection of Art Deco buildings globally. The precinct, flanking the western side of the Oval…
A Little Bit of Existence 