Second Annual PUKAR Lecture

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.

Two outside comparisons were brought by Michael Cohen and Joel Towers. Focusing on environmental issues, Mr. Towers analyzed the monsoon flooding against a background of global warming and the increasing incidence of the “100 year storm.” Comparing New York and Mumbai, Towers emphasized the need for resilience in infrastructure and a greater consideration of the environmental impact of the built form in urban planning. Citing an innovative plan to clean a toxic area around the New Town Creek in New York City, Mr. Towers challenged Mumbaikars to look at the complex social, infrastructural, and ecological connections for resilient solutions.

Recognizing the possibility that the increase in the built-up area of the city exacerbated the flood by inhibiting drainage, respondent Darryl D’Monte concurred with Mr. Towers’ call for greater attention to the environmental and ecological impacts of development. “Ecology is about connecting things,” said Mr. D’Monte, calling attention to the city’s reliance on private transport at the expense of public transportation, and the roughly equivalent space needed for cars and slums.

Michael Cohen chose Buenos Aires for his comparison, citing the city as one of rising inequality where a disaster led to greater municipal accountability, with the hope that 2005 July’s monsoon floods would produce a similar positive response in Mumbai. Mr. Cohen urged that in municipal decision making processes one must always ask oneself “would this increase or reduce socio-economic differences?”

Additionally, Mr. Cohen addressed the problematic gap that often exists between “official” and “common” knowledge. Based on the deceptively simple notion that a public that is educated and privy to information about something will value and take a greater stake in that thing, Mr. Cohen relayed an anecdote on how an exhibition on heritage architecture in Buenos Aires led to greater reinvestment in such sites. In the closing moments of the conference, Mr. Cohen reiterated this sentiment, suggesting options such as a housing information project to disseminate information such as history, policies, maintenance costs, financing, credit access, contact information of housing activists as well as government offices and ministers, in hopes of fostering housing policies more responsive to public needs.

Similarly, Mr. Cohen stressed the importance of addressing the city’s problems in a holistic manner, recognizing the linkages between problems. In this regard, he asked, “what if all the people living in slums got sick one day? which is to say, what is the relation between that particular population and the population and productivity of the whole city?” “Is it possible,” he asked, “to solve the problems of the slum-dwellers without solving the problems of the city? I think not.” The current conference, however, focused on issues of inequality and distribution—a shift from absolute poverty to urban social justice.

To this end, the conference closed with a resolution by the guests to continue the fruitful dialogues of the past two days, incorporating the progress made in the discussions into a collaborative set of recommendations for policymakers, citizens, and other stakeholders. Arjun Appadurai cautioned that in the search for “quick wins”—which produce direct results in the near future—issues such reinvestment in education, intelligent research capabilities, and recreating public politics—“slow wins”—are not forgotten.

Overall, the conference represented a step forward in conceptualizing the direction of the city, leaving participants with new ways of conceiving existing issues and innovative visions for the future.

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