In the 1960s and 1970s, state-operated institutions responded to Mumbai’s exponential growth with what at the time was internationally considered to be the most effective measure against housing shortage: large estates of standardized apartment blocks. Taking up influences from both Maharashtrian and European precedents, these buildings adapted an internationally discussed urban design concept to specific local conditions. Inhabited by the comparably privileged rather than the urban poor, they constitute a pattern of urbanization that is difficult to capture with European or North American concepts of city and suburb. At the same time, they exemplify the evolution of the modernist housing block type that is only apparently similar all over the world.