Workshop organised by CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust) and SARAI/Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi on 27-29 December 2006 at the All-India Institute of Local Self-Government, Mumbai

In recent years, there have been numerous attempts to understand and grapple with the transformation of contemporary urban spaces and environments across India. It is now widely recognised across spheres as diverse as academic social science, urban planning and architecture, social work and activism, and the arts and cultural industries that there has been a conceptual vacuum in understanding the city in India since Independence. The estrangement of both urban scholars and practitioners from their object of understanding remains acute.

Recently, both inside and outside institutions, new practices grouped as “urban research” or “emerging urbanism” have renewed the call for new methodological inquiries and collaborative frameworks to understand the changing conditions and landscapes of urban India. The primary sites for this emerging urbanism have been both the urban spaces and built environments in which projects, experiments and interventions have been undertaken, as well as the discursive and conceptual spaces in which new ideas and theories are still being discussed and worked out.

For the past several years, members of CRIT have been involved in intensive field studies of inner-city neighbourhoods, industrial landscapes, suburban and peripheral communities, informal settlements, and new enterprises and organisations in contemporary Mumbai. Our varied projects have demonstrated, at various levels, the conceptual vacuum in understanding the practices through which the city is inhabited. Most studies of cities in India have either been narrowly empirical, with a bias towards problem-solving, or they have been overly generalised into universal categories of “colonial”, “industrial” or “global” cities (with “pre-” or “post-” affixed as appropriate). Descriptions of Mumbai display astonishing numbers and statistics to represent urban conditions as “crises” requiring urgent intervention — the problem of housing, the crisis of over congestion, the collapse of infrastructure, etc. The sensational use of numbers to describe complex conditions has similarly been reflected in the abstract use of unitary concepts by academics such as “functional urban region”, “mosaic of culture”, “melting pot of communities”, “metaphor of modernity”, “network of interest”, “contested terrain”, “native metropolis”, and “global city”.

While these concepts are inadequate for capturing changed conditions, they become dangerous in formulations such as “world class city”, “Slumbay”, “encroached public spaces”, “deteriorating environment”, “make Mumbai Shanghai”, “mee Mumbaikar” etc. Such concepts guide interventions which respond to generalised conditions, repressing the various ways of understanding and inhabiting the urban environment. Further, these empiricisms and generalisations fall flat in complex conditions of multiple tenancies, interstitial spaces, mixed land uses, informal and illegal commerce, and the tactical negotiations of the street, which characterise the contemporary Indian metropolis. In these urban conditions, Systems, Organisations, and Space are rendered amorphous, and accounts of the global city that assimilate historical difference into a universal narrative, are disrupted. We require a fresh theoretical language to analyse and critique the concepts, practices and formations of the emerging urbanism in India.

Last Modified: Monday, July 28th, 2008 @ 06:18