High-rise havens: socio-spatial boundaries in the designs of new luxury high-rise condominiums in neo-liberal India

© 2018 Dr Dhara Ramesh PatelThe built environment in India has been continuously reshaped by various social, political and economic factors. Processes like colonisation, the Independence movement, the resurgence of regionalist ideas, and economic liberalisation have caused periodic shifts in the nature and character of the built environment and the architectural profession in India. Since 1990, due to neo-liberal economic and social transformations specific types of architecture have risen to prominence and luxury condominiums, in particular, have emerged as the desired and preferred residential type for new elites. This new building type evokes a new generation of urban elites who aspire to new modes of consumption, bringing into focus the complexities of the identities projected through this new architecture. It redefine the norms of elite associations, aspirations and obligations in transnational and transcultural terms. The salience of this model as expression of social mobility denotes the critical role played by this new housing type as one of many socio-cultural and material transformations that advance India’s cosmopolitan landscape. This thesis analyses luxury condominiums as complex phenomena reflective of the changing desires and identities attached to utopian living, aspiring cosmopolitanism, social mobility and new elite formation fostered by broader processes of globalisation. Empirical investigations of five luxury condominium projects in and around the global nodes of Mumbai and Pune are conducted to understand the role they play in staging the new elite identities. The investigation attempts to understand how the physical transformation of these environments reflect changing social values. The neo-liberal model of gated condominiums in India re-creates socio-spatial hierarchies, otherwise flattened in their western counterparts. This hierarchy of social and spatial spaces are examined in a research design investigating the complexity of these gated environments. It focuses not on the contained spaces alone but also on spatial progression from space to space across a series of thresholds. The first half of the research analyses the socio-spatial boundaries in design, delivery and occupation of luxury condominiums in India and investigates how this new architecture is exploited for identity projection by the empirical investigation of the occupied condominium projects. The investigation attempts to understand patterns of post occupation inhabitation by using several forms of spatial analyses, and to study user aspirations and interpretations associated with luxury condominiums through interviews and participant observation. In the second half of the thesis, the five case studies represent the chronological order of evolution of the type and provide a window to understand how the concept of exclusivity and creation of the emergent elite (new cosmopolitan Indian) is further advanced as the type itself evolves. Spatial analysis, interviews and perusal of marketing material were employed for this investigation. The second half of the thesis also analyses perspectives of those who design deliver and occupy luxury condominiums to understand the push and pull between forces of indigenisation and homogenisation manifested in contemporary Indian architecture. It centres on the role played by the media, marketing teams and developers in the process of conceiving this concept of exclusivity and projecting it through new architectural developments. Through these two stages of threshold analysis of luxury condominiums in India, the thesis reveals how anticipated social relationships are becoming contrived and even though the type is a product of globalisation and should be reflective of liberal notions of living, it is in fact contrary. Study of social and spatial thresholds in this thesis demonstrates in which architecture of condominiums plays a role in globalisation and elite formation in India. It also reveals how architecture is instrumentalised in particular kinds of socially divisive ways of elite formation