"A gorgeous, brilliant piece of writing, The Industrial Ephemeral rethinks architecture and design through an ethnographic exploration of the intimate encounters, sights, sounds, and motion of construction sites. In this remarkable book, Namita Vijay Dharia exposes the surprising ephemerality of the built environment and the labor, love, and exploitation involved in creating it."--Christine J. Walley, author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago

"The Industrial Ephemeral is a compelling chronicle of the fast pace of urban development in India from a seemingly inconspicuous and forgotten angle: the unique ins and outs of the transient construction sites that dot the landscape and soundscape of most large cities in the Global South. This is the kind of book that needs to be written for every large city as an indispensable companion to critical urban theory. It amply demonstrates why Dharia is one of the most farsighted architectural and anthropological analysts of urban worlds at present."--Arturo Escobar, author of Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds

Namita Vijay Dharia is an architect and anthropologist specializing in urban South Asia. She is an Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the Rhode Island School of Design.