Cities evolve like living organisms, growing through layers of culture, migration, and memory. Heirloom Cities is a collective documenting these living archives by exploring urban life through food, neighbourhoods, and everyday rituals. Their debut book, Mumbai: A Journey Through Its Kitchens, Streets, and Stories, combines essays, photography, and recipes to capture the city’s cultural ecosystems. With future volumes planned for other cities, the project aims to build a library of urban stories rooted in cuisine, community, and heritage.
Cities are regenerative, constantly breaking and growing every day — one shoot withering while another sprouts in its place, quietly spreading its roots across the landscape. Like living organisms, they are never static. These roots do not all grow in the same way. Together, they form a tangled network beneath the surface of the city. What makes cities remarkable is that these roots grow in different shapes, textures, and colours. The result? A constantly evolving tapestry, overtime, turning into an archive of both lived, and living memory.
In an attempt to document this, Heirloom Cities, a collective that is travelling across India city by city, capturing them as something to not just drive or pass through but pass down. Heirloom Cities started as a way to view cities as something beyond architecture and skyline, beyond its skin and bones, and really get to the pith behind them, their very core. Their culture. Their work explores how cities are experienced at the level of kitchens, street stalls, neighbourhood markets, and dining tables, revealing the ways food and culture become a bearer of identity.
The project’s debut publication, Mumbai: A Journey Through Its Kitchens, Streets, and Stories, sets the tone for this approach. Conceived by Sri Bodanapu, the book combines essays, photography, recipes, and design to create a layered portrait of the city. Rather than simply cataloguing restaurants or dishes, it dives into the social and cultural ecosystems that shape how people cook, eat, sleep, and dream in Mumbai.
The book traces the city through its diverse culinary influences, from street-side vada pav stalls to contemporary restaurants, while also highlighting the communities that have shaped its food culture over centuries. Recipes and stories reflect the layered migrations that built Mumbai: Sindhi families displaced by Partition, Parsi communities with roots in Persia, Maharashtrian home kitchens, and countless other cultural threads that intersect in the city’s everyday meals.
Visually, the project also places strong emphasis on design and photography. Large-format imagery captures corners of the city, while essays by local writers add personal perspectives to the narrative, leading to something that sits somewhere between an art book, a cultural archive, and a culinary document. One of my personal favourite parts of Heirloom Cities is the curated playlist for each city that can be found on their website here.
Importantly, Heirloom Cities is not conceived as a single publication but as an ongoing series. Mumbai is the first in a planned collection that will explore other cities through similar lenses, with future volumes expected to focus on places like Lucknow and Kolkata. The ambition behind the collective is to build a global library of cities told through their foodways and cultural rituals.
Heirloom Cities continuously asks one question: how do you tell the story of a place?https://www.instagram.com/p/DU_G7sqlOmv/
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