For as long as I can remember, Bandra was my entire world. Its four-story buildings, haphazard streets, and warm bungalows once held an inexplicable charm. They were imperfect and human, much like the city itself. But over the past ten years, those familiar corners have been replaced with towering glass skyscrapers. The new faceless skyline is a testament to Mumbai’s shift from chaos to conformity, from vibrancy to sterility.
Mumbai’s essence has always been its unpredictability — a mix of colors, forms, and textures. Recently however, the city has been gradually succumbing to the dreaded spectre of Minimalism. It’s not the conscious Minimalism of Philip Glass’s music or a Mies van der Rohe building — thoughtful and deliberate. This is unconscious minimalism, or what I call "small-m minimalism": a reductive, corporate aesthetic that smooths over Mumbai’s imperfections and leaves behind something uniform and lifeless. From the hand-painted signs that once defined local shops to intricate railway signage, every detail that made Mumbai distinct is slowly being erased.
The danger of this transformation isn’t simply aesthetic. It’s existential. Details — quirks and peculiarities — are what give a city its identity. Without them, Mumbai becomes just another city.
Robert Stephens is an architect with two decades of experience. He's also the founder of Urbs Indis, a studio that narrates lesser-known civic histories. As he puts it, “What has been lost is a sense of scale; the feeling that people are behind everything you see.” Today, when parking spaces occupy the first ten floors of a building, the connection between the city and its people feels severed.
Bandra was once a quaint neighborhood with Portuguese-style bungalows and Catholic enclaves. It’s now a microcosm of Mumbai’s broader shift. Its narrow lanes, filled with the smell of fresh bread from local bakeries, were once an emblem of community living. Now, these spaces are overshadowed by luxury high-rises. A
ashim Tyagi is a multidisciplinary artist who works with photography, graphic design, and text. In his words, “If you squint your eyes in Lower Parel, you could be in Dubai, Singapore, or any other emerging economy.” This sameness extends to Bandra, where cafes serving Norwegian salmon outnumber stalls selling East Indian vindaloo.
Gentrification isn’t just pricing out residents. It’s erasing the cultural markers that made Bandra — and Mumbai — unique. Tyagi’s Street Type Archive captures this shift.
“Signage was once a marker," he explains. "It made neighbourhoods memorable. Now, everything looks like it was designed yesterday and will disappear tomorrow.” What were once visual anchors — like the hand-painted signs of paan shops or the Art Deco lettering of laundry storefronts — have vanished, leaving behind sterile, mass-produced boards.
The rise of small-m minimalism has significant social consequences. As real estate developers prioritize profits over community, public spaces shrink, and cultural capital dissipates. Robert laments, “Every piece of land is acquired by private interests. Everything that doesn’t earn money but gives value in other ways has evaporated.”
This privatisation of space has far-reaching implications. The neighborhood playgrounds where children once gathered to play tag have been replaced by gated parks accessible only to residents of the new redevelopments. The street vendors selling local delicacies have been pushed out by boutique cafes serving overpriced cappuccinos. The sense of community that defined Bandra is fraying, and is being replaced by a transactional culture that prioritizes exclusivity over inclusivity.
As Tyagi observes, “There’s no sense of rootedness anymore. In no way do I feel more at home in Bandra than someone visiting for a weekend.” This alienation is compounded by the fact that most projects prioritize speed and efficiency over thoughtful design. “It’s like the city is being built for tomorrow — but no one asks what that tomorrow will feel like,” Tyagi adds.
This shift towards minimalism has also deeply alienated people, fracturing their engagement with the world around them. The uniformity and sterility of the built environment discourage curiosity and interaction. People stop noticing their surroundings, with their once-vivid neighborhoods now blurred into monotony. It presents a neutral, clean slate which says nothing in its quest to appeal to everyone. When the world becomes uniform, we have a problem — a social drift towards absolute simplification. We close ourselves off to disagreement or dislike, creating a homogenous society that doesn’t engage with the world beyond itself.
Beauty enriches our lives by transforming the ordinary into something meaningful. It gives us a sense of purpose beyond mere functionality or utility. Without it, life risks feeling like a monotonous routine, focused solely on consumption, work, and survival. Surely, we are meant for more than just that?
Even typography — the city’s visual language — is disappearing. Tyagi noted how hand-painted signs, once central to the identity of neighborhoods, have been replaced by bland, mass-produced alternatives. “Earlier signs had personality, whether it was a kirana shop’s hand-painted board or a laundry’s carved wooden letters. These signs were cultural artifacts,” he says. Now, in the era of digital screens and cheap vinyl, Mumbai’s typography is becoming as generic as its skyline.
This loss of detail isn’t just a matter of nostalgia. It’s about losing the markers that make a place feel lived-in and loved. “Typography acts as a city’s memory,” Tyagi explains. “Good signage is like a breadcrumb trail through history. It tells you where you are and where you’ve been.” In a city as layered as Mumbai, these details are essential for preserving its identity.
The problem with small-m minimalism is that it prioritizes functionality over humanity. Robert warns of the generational impact: “When people are exhausted from living two hours away from cultural institutions and parks, it’s not just this week or next week. This will have a cascading effect for generations.” Tyagi echoes this sentiment, describing today’s urban planning as “... a utopian vision from a bad sci-fi novel. Everything feels like it’s from the future, but what future is that?”
Mumbai’s transformation also reflects a broader cultural shift. “There’s this idea that progress means erasing the past,” Robert says. “But what if progress is about building on the past instead?” The relentless march toward redevelopment has created a city that feels increasingly unmoored, its physical structures no longer rooted in the lives and memories of its people.
Yet, even as Mumbai becomes increasingly unrecognizable, there is hope. Cities, like people, are resilient. “Every century, people have said that things were better before,” Robert reminds me. “But the city is a living organism. People are still pushing, still trying to make it better.”
While redevelopment transforms skylines, it often sidelines those who can least afford it. This moment of transformation should serve as a call to action to build a more inclusive Mumbai. Redevelopment projects can — and should — prioritise affordable housing. Mumbai can balance progress with equity by integrating mixed-income housing and preserving public spaces.
Perhaps Mumbai’s spirit isn’t in its structures but in its people — those who refuse to let the city’s identity fade into oblivion. As Tyagi points out, even in this era of sameness, there are pockets of resistance. Projects like his Street Type Archive and Robert Stephens’ Urbs Indis remind us that the details still matter. They tell us that identity, however fragmented, can be preserved.
In a city built on contradictions, there’s still room for the chaotic, the colourful, and the imperfect. Mumbai’s spirit isn’t entirely lost — it’s waiting to be rediscovered, one chaotic, imperfect detail at a time.
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