How
do we read a city that is constantly rewriting itself? Through visionary plans
for what Bombay could have been, or through how spaces are used and transformed
in a changing Mumbai? Uncovering Urban Legacies returns with a
conversation that looks at the layered processes through which Mumbai is
imagined, observed, and inhabited.
This
edition reunites two chroniclers who last came together in 2022. Now, four
years later, they are engaging with Mumbai through different but complementary
lenses. Robert approaches the city through speculative architecture and
historical research, reconstructing unrealised visions. Sunhil observes
the city through long-term immersion and visual storytelling, gaining rare
access to spaces. Together, they will reflect on imagined futures and lived
realities, tracing how parallel trajectories, envisioned and enacted, continue
to shape Mumbai’s identity and the legacies of its future.
Join
us for a city-centric conversational evening that situates Mumbai as both
archive and experiment.
Sunhil Sippy’s accidental foray into photography began as an “aimless” unravelling of a city with which he shared a complex history. Born and raised in London, his relationship with Mumbai has always been that of an outsider visiting a familiar place; a feeling that repeatedly seeps into his work from The Opium of Time to the forthcoming RACEDAY, a documentation of the Mahalakshmi Racecourse and its ecosystem, and the work-in-progress, Eastward based on the Eastern Seaboard of Mumbai. This evolving dialogue with the city, its architecture, and its people has become more deliberate over the years, positioning him as a photographic archivist and a documentarian through projects with Bombaywallah, Film Heritage Foundation and Chatterjee & Lal. His practice extends further to Calcutta, through his long term photographic assignment with designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee. Sunhil lives in Mumbai and continues his explorations balancing his roles as a director, photographer, and flâneur.
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Robert Stephens is an architect who loves to write. In 2007, he left his childhood hometown of Summerville, South Carolina and moved to Mumbai, India where he lived and worked for 16 years. Bombay Imagined, An Illustrated History of the Unbuilt City is his first book, published by his homegrown studio, Urbs Indis. After relocating to Bengaluru in 2023, Robert expanded the creative work of Urbs Indis to include an independent architecture practice. The firm’s first built project, the Urbs Indis Library & Garden, is a home-studio-library where Robert lives with his wife, son, cat and dog. The off-grid space houses more than 1,000 rare books on urban India, with more than 400 publications dedicated to Mumbai. The collection is publicly accessible six days a week, and the space hosts a range of events throughout the year, including architectural walkthroughs, illustrated talks, and most recently, the launch of the Bombay Imagined second edition in December 2025.
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Amrita Shah is the author of four books that explore the history of modern India: the award-winning Ahmedabad: A City in the World (2015), Vikram Sarabhai: A Life (2007), Telly-Guillotined: How Television Changed India (2019) and The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire (2024). She is a former editor of features magazines Elle and Debonair, an ex-contributing editor with the Indian Express, and has worked for the US-based Time-Life News Service. Her early work as a journalist includes a pioneering series of articles on the Mumbai underworld. She has been a fellow with the Fulbright Foundation, the New India Foundation, the Institutes for Advanced Study in Nantes and Johannesburg and the Homi Bhabha Fellowships Council. She has also been a Visiting Fellow and Faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. She lives in Mumbai.
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Cities are never static. They are drafted in blueprints, revised through policy, reshaped by migration, and rewritten by the people who inhabit them. Uncovering Urban Legacies begins with a simple but compelling question: how do we understand a city that is constantly changing? Do we look at the grand visions that once imagined what Bombay might become, or at the lived realities that define Mumbai today?
This forthcoming conversation brings together two distinct yet complementary perspectives. Architect and researcher Robert Stephens approaches the city through speculative design and historical inquiry. His work revisits ambitious plans and architectural proposals that were never realised, reconstructing alternate versions of Bombay that existed only on paper. These unrealised projects reveal more than aesthetic ambition. They reflect political aspirations, economic priorities, and the imagination of a city poised between colonial legacy and modern expansion.
In examining these forgotten schemes, Stephens invites audiences to consider how unrealised architecture still shapes urban identity. Even what is not built leaves a trace. It influences planning debates, design language, and the way future developments are conceived. The city’s history, in this sense, is not only visible in stone and steel but also in drawings, documents, and discarded master plans.
Alongside this archival lens stands photographer Sunhil Sippy, whose long-term engagement with Mumbai offers a different mode of reading the city. Through sustained observation and rare access to private and transitional spaces, Sippy documents how architecture is adapted, repurposed, and inhabited over time. His work captures the subtle negotiations between intention and use, between what a building was designed to be and what it ultimately becomes.
Together, their perspectives create a layered portrait. One reconstructs imagined futures that never materialised; the other records lived realities unfolding in the present. The conversation highlights how these parallel trajectories continue to shape Mumbai’s evolving character. The city emerges not as a fixed entity but as a dynamic interplay of vision and experience.
The evening also resonates with the broader tradition of chronicling Mumbai through words and images, a practice carried forward by writers such as Amrita Shah, whose work reflects on the city’s social and cultural transformations. In this context, Mumbai becomes both archive and experiment. It holds layers of memory while constantly testing new forms of growth and expression.
Hosted in the historic precinct of Fort at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, this city-focused dialogue situates itself within the very environment it seeks to examine. Presented as part of the programming by Avid Learning, the event continues a commitment to public conversations that engage with urban history, design, and storytelling.
Ultimately, Uncovering Urban Legacies invites audiences to look beyond familiar skylines. It asks how imagined plans and everyday adaptations together define Mumbai’s identity. By tracing both the city that was envisioned and the city that is lived, the discussion offers a deeper understanding of how urban futures are shaped not only by architects and planners, but by memory, use, and time itself.
