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Loophole Planning and Infrastructure Making in Contemporary Mumbai
March 3, 2016 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm CST
FreeThe URBANISM ACROSS PLACES, SPACES, DISCIPLINES working group
and the UIC Institute for the Humanities
present
Vyjayanthi Venturupalli Rao
Director of Terreform Center for Advanced Urban Research
March 3, 2016 at 3 PM
Institute for the Humanities, 701 South Morgan, Lower Level Stevenson Hall
“Loophole Planning and Infrastructure Making in Contemporary Mumbai”
As Mumbai prepares for its third DP, a fierce debate has broken out over the nature of development and of planning. Galvanized by civic activists, ordinary citizens are asking for specific information about land use reservations and plans for their own neighborhoods as well as raising questions that pertain to the city’s ecological health as a whole. In meetings organized by civic groups in the early months of 2014, concerned citizens asked questions about the relationship between the DP and issues as widely distributed as gender, healthcare, and digital access, along with other more familiar infrastructural issues. Remarkably, these meetings were hosted by the MCGM (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai) itself, the body responsible for preparing the plan and finally led to a comprehensive revision of the plan.
In this talk I present an ethnography of the planning process and its implications for understanding an emergent relationship between land use planning and politics as it is unfolding in contemporary Mumbai. While earlier development plans had largely remained technocratic documents with little public participation, citizens now find themselves in a city in which thousands of square feet of new development has been added through various ad hoc, loophole measures. These measures completely bypassed the goals and vision of the previous development plans, mixing good intentions for increasing affordable housing and legal casuistry in strange cocktails and schizophrenic urban landscapes. Between 1991 and 2013 when the city’s development plan came up for its third iteration, such loophole planning ushered in a new definition of development, connecting the concept of development inextricably to rent-seeking from land development and construction. In the context of the rise of market-oriented governance, ‘informal’ methods of making social and material infrastructure are increasingly linked to varied forms and practices of speculation – not only the speculative development of fixed assets but also new forms of practice and usage, which assume the unpredictable, unexpected and nonlinear unfolding of existing systems that guide the experience of the city and of citizenship. This talk situates the relationship between planning, citizen-driven, iterative infrastructure making and new forms of political engagement in an age that demands a creative embrace of uncertainty.
Vyjayanthi V. Rao, Ph.D. is the Director of Terreform Center for Advanced Urban Research in New York. Prior to her appointment at Terreform, she taught anthropology and international affairs at The New School for Social Research and at The University of Chicago where she received her Ph.D. in anthropology. Other professional positions include Research Director of The Center for Cities and Globalization at Yale University and Co-Director of Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research (PUKAR), an innovative urban laboratory in Mumbai, India.
She works on cities after globalization, specifically on the intersections of urban planning, design, art, violence, and speculation in the articulation of the contemporary global city. She is the author of numerous articles on these topics, which have appeared in Public Culture, New Literary History, Perspecta and Editoriale Lotus. Her edited volume,Speculation, Now: Essays and Artworks, produced in partnership with Carin Kuoni, Director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and graphic designer Prem Krishnamurthy was published by Duke University Press in 2015 and she is completing an ethnography of Mumbai’s spatial transformation titled “Speculative City: Infrastructure and Complexity in Global Mumbai.”
This lecture is free and open to the public.
Working group organizers:
Tarini Bedi, Anthropology
Sultan Tepe, Political Science
Rachel Weber, Urban Planning and Policy
