It will soon be half a century since the idea of 'a community without nations' began to take shape on a barren patch of land near Puducherry (Pondicherry), the former French colonial enclave on India's tropical south-east coast. Conceived in the context of escalating region- alist tensions within the post-colonial Indian nation-state and the draconian geopolitics of the Cold War, the vision for Auroville was nothing less than transcendental. It was to be a radically new form of urban settlement, projected for a population of 50,000 inhabitants, that would question and reconfigure the very nature of the city, and citizenship itself, as the building blocks of a new world order.
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