Puri reconstructs Koolhaas’s “Generic City” as a theoretical diagnosis of urbanisation under global capitalism rather than a simple endorsement of placelessness. The iconic proposition under examination is that identity, historical continuity and contextual specificity may be replaced by flexible infrastructures, airports, towers and consumable images. The theoretical contribution lies in testing the generic against competing accounts of globalisation, modernity and urban identity, thereby separating rhetorical provocation from analytical validity. Methodologically, Puri decomposes Koolhaas’s text into recurring themes and compares them with urban cases and other theorists. The conceptual operation is specification through critique: the generic becomes legible not as universal sameness but as a differentiated process whose apparent neutrality is institutionally and economically produced. The wider bridge reaches urban sociology, architectural theory, globalisation studies and discourse analysis. The thesis clarifies that genericity is not the absence of form; it is a form of governance and development that converts replaceability, circulation and weak attachment into urban assets.
