Project Description
MUMBAI READER 2018
Mumbai Reader’18 is available for reference and purchase at UDRI Resource Centre.
PREFACE
The difficulty in representing Mumbai is that such representations often 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
- Compounding the Error
- Of Milestones, Urban Histories and Central Bombay Heritage
- Coastal Ecology and Fishing Community in Mumbai
- Mumbai: traffic bottlenecks refuse to go, no solution in sight
- A Case Study for Parking
- How the BEST Bus Undertaking Has Been Driven into a Crisis
- Neglected, Starved and Sold: the uncertain future of our public transport
- Property is Expensive and Life is Cheap on Elphinstone Road
- The Missed Opportunity to Reimagine Mumbai
- Why Mumbai’s Rail Commute is (Only) a Sentimental Spectacle
- The Elphinstone Stampede: why the story of Elphinstone is the story of Mumbai
- From Bullet Trail to Bullet Train
- Mumbai Swamp, Comparing July 2005 to August 2017
- A State made Disaster: how Mumbai’s civic body let the rain swallow the city (yet again)
- Storm Water Drainage in Mumbai
- Satellite Photos Reveal How Mumbai Killed its Rivers and Mangrove Forests to Risk Epic Floods
- A Problem We Can’t Flush Away A Problem We Can’t Throw Out of the Window
- Mumbai Dumps 2100 Million Litres of Human Waste in the Sea Daily
- New Development Plan: Throwing Baby with the Bathwater
- We Don’t Have Enough Homes for Everyone, but Can Our Cities Still be Inclusive?
- Colonising the Slum: changing trajectories of state–market violence in Mumbai
- Reinventing Dharavi
- Reinventing Dharavi
- Slum Upgradation Policy: An Alternative Approach
- Work Conducted by UDRI in 2017 by the Mumbai Studio, Public Forum, Publications and Research
- Muslim Women and the Challenge of Religion in Contemporary Mumbai
- The Gist of GST
- #Notebandi Frontlines: Small Stores Struggle to Survive, but Many Support Modi
- Impact of Demonetization on Dharavi’s Informal Businesses
- First Define ‘Privacy’
- Tree at the Corner
- Walk Like a Woman
- Journeys Beyond the City
- Right to Privacy Judgement
- Maharashtra Real Estate Regulatory Authority
- Haji Ali Judgement