Much of the discussion on the urban experience in India has been centred on life as experienced in metropolitan cities. Whether we examine the process of production and distribution of the urban space or the emergence of the consumption cultures that have come to characterise urban life, the bulk of the literature explores these themes in terms of ‘megacities’. Despite academic attention towards reworked urban social geographies in studies of gentrification of cities, eviction of slum dwellers and the segmented residential patterns, there are few studies that examine unequal claims over the right to the city along lines of class, caste, gender and ethnicity in non-metropolitan urban settings.

I argue that the discussions on unequal claims to city life can gain from the insight that the unequal positioning of the metropolitan centres and the provincial towns, in material as well as symbolic terms, affects the experiences of city dwellers everywhere. Metropolitan cities are not just centres of employment opportunity but are also to be viewed as centres producing the normative ideal of middle-class practice. With a turn towards neoliberal public policies, a dominant narrative has emerged about the middle-class city dweller as primarily a consumer citizen, whose identity and politics are based on their consumption practice.