In Search of Habitat explores the fringes of metropolitan India; places of construction, deterioration and places where landscape and urban development intersect. The photographs were taken during two months of fieldwork in late 2010, covering nine different cities across the country. Both the photographs and the essay examine the haphazard and often contradictory urban growth, and together they offer a glimpse of India’s present and future cities, and as such, the very frame within which the lives of more than 400 million people currently take place.

Lars Rolfsted Mortensen is an architect and photographer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. His photographic works are indebted to the New Topographics and revolves around subjects such as urban transformation, infrastructure and the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ as witnessed in the geographically diverse trajectories of modern urban development.