Mumbai: Social Research & Urban Projections

Featuring new, largely unpublished work, this one-day conference sets up a dialogue between designers and social scientists. By connecting fine-grained micro studies with broader imaginations for the metropolitan region, we intend to open up new scalar possibilities for Mumbai.

Please register for the event here.

Schedule

9:00 am Registration and coffee

9:30 am Symposium Introduction and Morning Session Framing: Sai Balakrishnan, Eve Blau, Erik M. Ghenoiu

Morning Session: Urban Involution: Contemporary Critical Research on Mumbai

10:00 am Panel 1: The Production of Informality

1. Sapana Doshi, “The Redevelopmental State: Remaking Spaces of Rule, Inclusion, and Dispossession in Mumbai”
2. Vinit Mukhija, “A Quarter Century of Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai: What Has Happened and What Is Likely to Happen”
3. Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, “Generative Conflict: Hawkers, Evictions and Public Space in Mumbai”

11:15 am Coffee Break

11:30 am Panel 2: From the Granular to the Regional

1. Nikhil Anand, “Breakdown as Beginning: on Maintenance and Invisibility in the Hydraulic City”
2. Nikhil Rao, “From ‘Improvement’ to ‘Rehabilitation.’  Urban Expansion and the Fates of Cooperative Housing”
3. Ramya Ramanath, “Women Negotiating Place”

12:45 pm Lunch Break

Afternoon Session: Regional Imaginaries: Speculations for Mumbai

1:45 pm Afternoon Session Framing

1. Peter Rowe, “The Mumbai Metropolitan Region and the Matter of Urban Form”
2. Rahul Mehrotra, Kate Cahill, “Learning from Mumbai”

2:30 pm Panel 3: The Politics of Location

1. Lisa Björkman, “Infrastructural Afterlives: Dwelling in World-Class Ruins at Mumbai’s urban edge”
2. Vineet Diwadkar, “50 Ways to Game a City: Loophole Planning in Contemporary Mumbai”

3:30 pm Coffee Break

3:45 pm Panel 4: Mapping the Mumbai Metropolitan Region

1. Sai Balakrishnan, “Seeing Mumbai through Its Hinterland: Infrastructure and Land Politics Across the Urban-Rural Divide
2. Emilie Edelblutte, “Landscape and Political Ecology Approach for Long-Term Conservation of Leopards (Panthera pardus) in a Human-Dominated Landscape, India”

4:45 pm Closing Discussion moderated by Rahul Mehrotra and Peter Rowe

Free admission. Please register for the event here