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Opposing certain dominant perspectives within urban studies, which give prominence to the role of capital in determining social space and urban social processes, there has been an emerging trend among scholars to develop Foucault's idea of heterotopia. This idea has been appropriated to explain spaces that have several levels or tiers of significance, meaning and relationships to other physical places and social spaces. This paper draws upon studies of and fieldwork from the Indian urban context and its evolution, linking these to larger processes of democratisation, social conflicts, and emancipatory struggles. It employs the idea of heterotopia to denote greater agency to class and non-class actors, groups and institutions, in the definition of urban visions and in the determination of urban spatial processes and spatially linked social processes. Various agentive groups and individual actors use the city and develop it for different social, political and economic purposes. For each of them, the city is an event that occurs (or is made to occur) in the specific evolutionary trajectory of their struggles for mobility and social emancipation, or possibly in their rise to dominance. Based on field research in the Indian city of Mumbai, this paper outlines the ways in which the study of this temporal dimension can provide key insights into the spatial, cultural, political and social implications of globalisation in Asian cities. At the same time, it further addresses rural-urban connections, networks and how these interact and intersect with global flows. To this effect, it maps the politics of rural-urban transitions and traces how they in turn give shape to the social agency of marginalised groups and classes in ways that are expressed in these groups’ uses of public space.
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