Project Description
MUMBAI READER 2015
Mumbai Reader’15 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
- Healing Through Public Art And The Environment: The Charkha At The Cross Maidan
- A New Look At Mumbai’s Old Buildings
- The Death And Life Of Heritage
- Heritage Tag: Curse Or Boon
- Keep Off Education
- Island City: Mumbai Then And Now
- Development Must Be Better Planned, More Inclusive
- Slumming India
- Dharavi Redevelopment- Horizontal Vs Vertical
- Fault Lines In The Neoliberal City, Slums And Urban Social Movements
- Migrant Women’s Vulnerability To Reproductive And Sexual Health In Slums Of Mumbai
- UDRI And The Revision Of Mumbai Development Plan Saga 2008 Onwards
- Street Vendors And The Urban Economy
- A City Without Streets
- Mannequins On The Move
- Reflections On The New Middle Class – The Model Flat Phenomenon
- Reading The ‘Muslim Space’ In Bombay Through Cinema
- Farewell, Bhendi Bazaar
- Bar Bar Dance
- Burden Of Being A Bar Dancer
- Campa Cola And Mumbai’s Exposed Fissures
- Revisiting The Real Estate Bill, 2013
- Malls, Fast Cars And The Life Of The Man On The Street
- Urban Development – An NGO Intervention
- Supreme Court Of India – Special Leave Petition (Civil) No.33402 Of 2012
- Planning Once Again For Greater Mumbai – Analysis Of Actor Behaviour In Designing The Previous Development Plan
- Development Plan For Mumbai 2014-34
- Information And Communication Infrastructure
- Geographical Information System
- Tracing Public Spaces
- Engagement With Municipal Schools
- Reinventing Dharavi