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Every million-plus city in India boasts of a history that spans 500 years on an average. The forms of the cities have seen more than historians could ever document fully or completely. Indian cities have witnessed social struggles, changing governance systems and powers, disasters, economic booms and recessions for centuries before attaining their current shape and form. What makes them different from one another are the embedded historical struggles, the organic evolution, the vernacular growth, the social sciences that reside within the cities. In scenarios where urban spaces appear cyclical, dynamic, and alterable, informed by technological modifications more than historical changes, setting a prototype definition of ‘global cities’, the cities lose their individuality. What we get in processes like these are mass-produced, factory-made products where one formula fits all. The millennial urban India aspires for cities made up of repetitive patterns of grids, glazed windows, and the business consultancy a white-collar workforce, existing as an island within the local city, exhibiting the pressures of Indian urbanisation. A denial of the existing urban paradox demonstrated happy, thriving, prosperous spaces blooming in the most unsanitary, inhuman and degrading working and living places. A city without the narration of its pressures, struggles and essentially its social sciences would be a space but not a place, wherein the beautiful heterogeneity of romanticised urban chaos will get reduced to the homogeneity of urban order. Even a set of theories remaining relevant only to the social sciences and ignoring other governing aspects such as environment, resources, economics and technological developments would also not be fully justified. If social lenses are required to understand a city or an urbanscape from a humane perspective, then other things such as resources and environment are equally relevant and are required to keep the system going. Is there then scope for a model where social sciences are formed as a derivative of the scientific process, where both the lenses can act interchangeably rather than challenging the authenticity of one another? Every million-plus city in India boasts of a history that spans 500 years on an average. The forms of the cities have seen more than historians could ever document fully or completely. Indian cities have witnessed social struggles, changing governance systems and powers, disasters, economic booms and recessions for centuries before attaining their current shape and form. What makes them different from one another are the embedded historical struggles, the organic evolution, the vernacular growth, the social sciences that reside within the cities. In scenarios where urban spaces appear cyclical, dynamic, and alterable, informed by technological modifications more than historical changes, setting a prototype definition of ‘global cities’, the cities lose their individuality. What we get in processes like these are

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