In urban India, motorways were built not only to facilitate national mobility and global connectivity to trade networks, but the flyover’s incredible scale and grandeur was particularly appropriated as a representation of the modern - completed flyovers were celebrated in the media as an exciting sign of progress in the vein of the megaprojects in desirable world cities such as Dubai and Shanghai and its success judged in terms of its image. A massive boom in construction resulted in hundreds of flyovers now ubiquitous in the urban fabric, forming a dominating characteristic of the Indian city.

 

In reality, the space beneath the flyover acts as a threshold between infrastructure and street, and is inhabitable. It is a vehicle for an intricate set of uses, with the form of its concrete supports and highway cover drastically transforming temperature, acoustics, levels of light and thereby generating unique and dynamic spatial conditions in the city. These variable environments created by the flyover stand in contrast with the more singular and top-down ways in which the flyover is conceived in its planning stages - here, maps remain a primary method of analysing and planning a city, but tend to obscure the stratifying effects of building tall or covering over.

 

In many ways, the flyover has exacerbated socio-economic disparity in the city as an instrument of capital that benefits the business bourgeoisie and does not trickle down to a vast majority of the population. In doing so, the spaces it creates has also privileged elite groups of car-owners and very physically created an underclass below – meanwhile all looks well from aerial views of the world-class city.