In the last two decades, Mumbai has undergone a dramatic transformation with slum redevelopment providing the underlying currency for new construction across the city. Notified slums, themselves excluded from the MCGM’s development plan, augment real estate development across the city as they are regulated by development control regulations incentivizing private developers to redevelop slums and gain development rights for sale and profit. Slum redevelopment, mega-infrastructure projects and redevelopment of dilapidated buildings are treated essentially as real estate development projects by the government with complex algorithms of benefit sharing yielding a fraction of the social housing required by the city. These projects threaten large numbers of people with displacement but deploy the management of desire, aspiration and capacity to speculate as part of a complex process of converting people into architectural currencies. Not only does rampant redevelopment transform the city into an extensive construction site, it deeply affects ideas of the ‘good city’ attached to physical planning norms as well as bringing in new forms of density and new norms of neighbourliness. In this talk I will explore some of the implications of an urbanism driven by architecture and building. Specifically, I explore the relationship between the volatile environments – both physical and social – generated by the regulatory framework by focusing on a set of practices for building futures in this turbulent city that give form to the quest for social justice in a speculative world.
Vyjayanthi Rao is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New School for Social Research, New York and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge, NYU. Her work focuses on displacement, infrastructure, memory and modernity in South Asia supported by fieldwork in Mumbai and in rural Telangana on large infrastructure projects, forced displacement, built environments, violence, and the role of art and design in critical development practice. Her edited volume, Speculation, Now: Essays and Artworks, produced in partnership with curator Carin Kuoni and graphic designer Prem Krishnamurthi, was recently published by Duke University Press and she is currently finishing her next book titled Speculative City: Infrastructure and Complexity in Global Mumbai, which will be accompanied by a web-based project of mapping and video ethnography, funded by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts.
This is the fifty ninth in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi and Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on issues relating to the development of the city and try to address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society and politics. For further information, please contact: Jayani Bonnerjee at jayani.bonnerjee@csh-delhi.com, Partha Mukhopadhyay at partha@cprindia.org or Marie-Hélène Zerah at marie-helene.zerah@ird.fr
