India continues to develop at breakneck speed, and it is not suffering excessively from the current global financial crisis, at least not in the field of architecture. In India as a whole, the same number of architects and urban planners are active as in Berlin alone. They are never short of work, and young architects and architectural students from Europe are in demand! In many cities, the visitor's first impression is that of new expressways (often with multilingual signage), new railway tracks, and countless construction sites for new water mains: all evidence of the gigantic upheavals prevailing here. Half of New Delhi is being excavated for new metro lines. Why don´t we see anything of this in the German media? A mystery! Deemed worthy of the occasional newspaper article is at most the construction of a new museum containing spectacular collections of contemporary Indian art, or a social critical view of life in the slums. At a recent Congress of Berlin entitled 'Beyond Multiculturalism,' Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai observed that we are often simultaneously too close and yet too far away from events occurring around the world: 'Although in the fall we watched the terrorist attacks in Bombay on television virtually in real time, no one seems to be interested in the positive changes occurring in India over the past few years.' The exhibition project 'What Makes India Urban? Challenges Towards Mobility, Infrastructure, Energy and Perpetual Change' initiated by Aedes and currently being implemented in India - will provide insights into the new urban India and into the complex utilizations of the new spaces being engendered there. The programmatic kickoff to the project was a symposium held in Ahmedabad/India in early May, a forum for architects, city planners, artists, filmmakers, lawyers, and theoreticians to discuss the question: What really constitutes contemporary urban India?