Instead of the imaginative, integrated development plan drawn up by Charles Correa, the renowned Mumbai-based architect, the former mill-hub of Lalbaug-Parel is a soulless cram of skyscrapers, mall-to-mall carpeting and snarled traffic clashing with the tenements housing the dispossessed worker families.
"The politicians are ruining our towns and our villages, we are being buried in corruption," says Margita Hinova, an elegantly-dressed retired accountant from Sofia's hillside Lozenets neighbourhood, overlooking the city's concrete tenements and Orthodox domes.
This is a place where corporate death and rebirth is happening in real time; where derelict factories and workers' tenements are being demolished to make way for trading floors and media outfits with ping-pong tables in their lobbies.The family firm isn't dying in this environment, it is thriving.
The buildings are a mixture of bland tenements, glassy high-rises and mosques, and the late afternoon sun is bathing everything in a warm, comforting light.
The tenements become more colourful, and more precariously perched and constructed.
The unprepared visitor to Glasgow looks in vain for teeming tenements blackened still by grime and soot, and searches an empty skyline for the thicket of cranes that rimmed the cacophonous shipyards.
On the outskirts, many of the old grey tenements have given way to new colonies of tower blocks.
But he thought this would take time and feared that at first house-buyers from the tenements of inner cities, and from the shanty towns and tobacco roads of rural America, would not know how to behave themselves.
Property-owners demanded outrageous prices for the flophouses, whorehouses and tenements that PRR had to acquire to build its railway station in the Satan's Circus quarter of New York.
Mr Gatrell does a fine job of tracing how the scurrilous behaviour of London's residents often inspired some of the finest works of art and literature.He evokes a Covent Garden of coffee houses, tenements, artist studios, taverns and brothels.
Unfortunately, similar mistakes are being repeated in the fast-growing cities of Africa and Asia, where the stock of old buildings is often smaller.Shanghai has allowed block upon block of distinctive red-brick tenements to be demolished, just as Beijing has let developers destroy the courtyard houses of its hutong neighbourhoods.
