The idea of a "mental landscape" is associated with a spatial understanding of modernity that has long been central to the scholarship on cities and to urban ethnography. In this essay, the focus on space is threefold and includes: (1) the new cultural geography that is created by the physical imposition of the metro edifice on Delhi's landscape; (2) the spaces created within the metro itself (on trains and in stations) and the practices associated with those new spaces; and (3) the spatial imaginaries experienced by individual riders.
