DOWNLOAD Tactical City: Tenali Rama and Other Stories of Mumbai’s Urbanism by Rupali Gupte (Flash)

This graphic novel is a fictitious history of Mumbai. The thesis sees the city as a playground of TACTICS and further formulates a manifesto of urban practice for architects and planners as one that learns from these tactics and in the process becomes TACTICAL/OPPORTUNISTIC.

The contention of the thesis is that conditions in most third world cities have gone beyond the means of any rational positivist planning. All through (Mumbai’s) political and economic history pervading elite power structures have ensured a lopsided distribution of resources. Through new structural adjustments and sometimes blind inheritance of the tools of the earlier modes of operation both in administrative structures as well as architectural/planning practices, this has carried forward with renewed vigor to the contemporary global context.

Contemporary global cities now face escalating problems of environmental deterioration, burdening of infrastructure, lack of housing, growing informalisation of labour coupled with declining bargaining capacity, and unemployment that go hand in hand with increasing polarization of economy, the spatialised imprints of which one sees in the burgeoning lifestyle stores, malls and gated communities housing the new global elite. With lack of access to wealth and power an increasing section of the city’s population is fighting a loosing battle over resources and urban space and is being rendered invisible. The Nehruvian developmental model has failed to address this subaltern mass and largely so has the Left. The sheer scale and extent of the problems now requires new EYES to see the present conditions and new TOOLS and perhaps a new IMAGINATION to operate in these contexts.

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