Mumbai Futures
PUKAR’s second annual lecture, “Mumbai Futures” event, on August 3 and 4, brought together academics, policymakers, and activists from around the world for an innovative dialogue on the issues facing the city. Consisting of an evening panel discussion, followed by a full day of presentations and response, the guests included Arjun Appadurai, Shirish Patel, Joel Towers, Michael Cohen, Sheela Patel, V. K. Phatak, Pankaj Joshi, Darryl D’Monte, and Vyjayanthi Rao.
Though the event was conceived months prior, discussions at the event focused on the governance issues arising from the devastating monsoon floods in Mumbai on 26th July, a few days before the event. By exploring the usage and meaning of the terms ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’ and ‘normalcy,’ Arjun Appadurai’s opening statements on the first night of the conference framed the discussion around issues of mismanagement and city planning.
While echoing the general concerns about the management of the city, planner Shirish Patel discussed the city’s housing dilemma, asking “How do we reconcile notions of the legality of owning property with the fact that we need low-income workers, while there is no land on which they can live?” After citing alarming statistics on the number of police inspectors and constables currently living in slums, Mr. Patel shifted attention to the problems being created by redevelopment schemes based on increased FSI and tradable development rights. The conception of TDR in the redevelopment scheme, according to Mr. Patel, amounts to a sort of currency exclusively for the socio-economic elite.
In a parallel analysis of the inequalities created by development policies, Vyjayanthi Rao addressed the social and cultural costs of the new, vertical mutations in the built fabric of the city. The urban poor, according to Rao, represent both the very object of de facto planning processes and an overt indictment of these same processes. Continuing, Rao cited the “politics of verticality” within the newly built fabric of the city as representative of a social hierarchy of exclusion and dispossession.
