I agree with the arguments and position taken by Ruchika Lall (2022) in this chapter: that the temporalities of informal settlements are not considered in state narratives that seek to provide alternate formal housing solutions; and that formal housing solutions can lead to precarity, with their own temporalities. Rather than critiquing the chapter, I place the author's arguments in a wider frame of the aspiring global city and its planning modalities. This lens emerges naturally from my involvement in the intense debates that are currently taking place on the draft proposals of the Delhi Master Plan 2041 (Delhi Development Authority, 2021), which is likely to reinforce the exclusionary nature of the present plan (the Delhi Master Plan 2021 [Delhi Development Authority, 2007]) and further enhance the housing precarities of the poor.

Contrary to the incremental processes of building and consolidating housing, livelihoods and lives that are inherent in informal settlements, the temporalities of urban planning are based on altruistic visions for the future, articulated for citizens by their political representatives or rulers, and translated by city planners into master plans (Banerjee, forthcoming). The vision for the current Delhi Master Plan 2021 is ‘to make Delhi a global metropolis and a world-class city’ (Delhi Development Authority, 2007: 2). According to Ghertner (2015: 10): ‘Like other utopian projects, world-class city making is oriented toward not progressive improvement, but an already known conclusion. It thereby sketches the interim as but a medium for reaching the anticipated future.’ This is very different from the jagged everyday trajectories of informal building, brick by brick, which is intensely aspirational but determined by the temporalities of the here and now rather than a futuristic temporality of metropolitan scale.