Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbais Other WorldClass Histories

Drawing On A Decade Of Ethnographic Research In The Indian City Of Mumbai, Waiting Town Is An Unconventional Little BookExperimental In FormAbout How We Come To Know The Worlds About Which We Write. The Narrative Follows The AuthorS Fieldnotes Diaries As They Wend Their Way Through A Series Of Ethnographic Puzzles That Emerge In The Wake Of A HighProfile MegaInfrastructure Project That Became An Internationally Celebrated Prototype And Model. Waiting Town Complicates This Celebratory Narrative By Revealing The Conflicting Temporalities And Procedural Pretentions Of World Class Developmentalism. On One Level, Waiting Town Is A Book About MumbaiAbout Housing Schemes And Scams, About Duplicate Documents (And Duplicate Duplicates), And About The Material Wreckage Wrought By The CityS WorldClass Ambitions. And At The Same Time, It Has A Larger Story To Tell About Truth And Falsehood, Time And MemoryAnd About The Promises And Pitfalls Of Knowledge Production, Interpretation And Representation More Generally. Lisa Bjrkman Is Currently A Senior Research Associate At The Max Planck Institute For Social Anthropology In Germany And An Associate Professor Of Urban Affairs At The University Of Louisville In The United States. She Is The Author Of Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures Of Millennial Mumbai (2015) And Most Recently She Edited A Collaborative Book Titled Bombay Brokers (2021).