Project Description
MUMBAI READER 2017
Mumbai Reader’17 is available for reference and purchase at UDRI Resource Centre.
PREFACE
The difficulty in representing Mumbai now is that there is always a feeling that such representations may fall into one of the several limitations of reading the city linearly. These limitations of linearity include making gross generalisations, or getting lost in seductive micro-narratives, or constructing incredible scenarios through meticulous empiricisms. While the generalisations strip the complexities of the city from the readings, the micro narratives are often myopic. Similarly, the approaches of using empiricisms are driven by preconceived agendas for problem solving.
Individually, the generalisations, micro narrations and the empiricisms are unable to capture the complexity of Systems, Organisations, and Space in the city. This impossibility of conceptualising the city warrants the need to read the city in multiple ways that simultaneously include an almost palimpsest like reading of all the approaches. To talk about the city then, would be to talk simultaneously in multiple disparate ways, in multiple languages and with multiple perspectives. The Mumbai Reader is an attempt to undertake a representation of the city that enables innumerable readings through a simultaneous and non-linear compilation of multiple voices in the city. The contents include some of the most recent perspectives on culture, economy, geography and history of the city. While it records the routine mainstream labour history and planning discourse types of writings; it also overlaps these with some of the current debates on absurdities that the city is faced with the issues relating to bar-dancers, changing of street names etc. The perspectives include voices from the bureaucracy, civil society organisations, academics, industry, judiciary, media, professionals, artists and many others. The Reader does not claim to be a comprehensive or an exhaustive compilation of readings on the city. It is rather an attempt to provide a glimpse of the complex dynamics of the city of Mumbai. The process of making this compilation was initiated through a call for papers made to a varied set of individuals in order to ensure an array of perspectives that would present to a reader diverse possibility of perceiving the city.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- The Impatience of Genius
- Mumbai in the Dock
- Life, Death, and Displacement on Mumbai’s Docks
- A Peek at Government Plan to redevelop Mumbai’s 1,800-acre Docklands
- As Government decides future of Mumbai and its Docklands, citizen voices go unheard
- Mumbai Port Waterfront & Port Land Development Report
- Letter on Coastal Road
- That Sinking Feeling
- A tale of two cities : The similar story of Mumbai & Chennai floods
- Chennai floods a grim reminder of what fate awaits Mumbai
- Soon, new construction rules for flood-free Mumbai
- Urban Rivers as ecological corridors in the city : Case of Mumbai city
- Material visions – Mumbai Development Plan 2034 and The Unfolding City
- Fixing Mumbai: Beyond the DP / Sense and the City
- Smart Cities and the way we treat the poor
- Of no fixed address: Mumbai’s street-dwellers are neither beggars nor destitute
- No place for the poor
- Draft Housing Policy – 1,2,3
- No takers for over 1.5 lakh houses in Mumbai
- ‘Achhe Din’ for builders of luxury towers in Mumbai
- Now, SRA moots FSI bonanza for city builders
- Right to Housing
- Changes in slum population and living conditions of slum dwellers in Mumbai
- Water PIL Petition by Pani Haq Samiti & Ors.
- What I did with my 0.99 sq.m of Mumbai
- Breathless in Mumbai
- Kemp’s Corner flyover at 50
- Mumbai’s Underworld: Urban life beneath transport infrastructure
- A city built of Data and the Networked Metropolis
- Killing us softly?
- One Last Swirl
- Public Education in Mumbai
- The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India
- UDRI Section