Mediating Mumbai: ethnographic explorations of urban linkage

ABSTRACT

This paper delves into one of the key aspects of mega-conurbations: linkages. We ask how imaginaries and boundary-making practices of city planners relate to the way ethnographic city is ‘knit’ or ‘linked’ together? The disjunctive and incongruous texture and form of Mumbai’s urban fabric suggests that explanations for Mumbai’s fitful growth and transformation might be found somewhere in the offices of city planners. Drawing on empirical research from two territories that are differently linked up with the city of Mumbai we probe the significance of socio-spatial and temporal proximity (or distance) to the processes of ‘linkage’ (silsila) by means of which territories become part of the fabric of the city. The empirical accounts reveal how concepts and categories borne of planning practices are themselves constitutive of the sociomaterial contradictions that ‘linkage’ practices mediate – practices that attempt to know/represent the city ‘as a whole’ would seek to resolve. The paper thus makes a case for conceptualizing (and engaging) city planners, surveyors and engineers as not as experts who ‘intervene’ or act upon cities as planning objects, but rather as mediators in a world of mediators: socially situated actors working within the complexities and contradictions of always-already mediated urban processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban studies
• urban anthropology
• Mumbai
• conurbation
• planning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See discussion in Fainstein (2005).

2. The mediator idea emerged in response to leftists critiques of rational planning models that questioned the presumption in rational planning models that modern science and economics can neutrally be enlisted to achieve urban improvement. In line with a broader ‘communicative turn’ in the humanities and social sciences since the 1970s that built on the Habermasean notion of discursive rationality comprising a liberal public sphere (Foucault 1991) planning theorists sought to relocate and re-institutionalize rationality in the domain of intersubjective communication.

3. Planners and planning theorists have a separate line of critique of the communicative paradigm, reflecting on their own role in forging the material linkages and connections that make up cities. In an influential formulation, Flyvbjerg (1987) characterizes city planners not as neutral mediators but rather as ‘interested negotiators’ (1987, 437) who wield crucial knowledge regarding possibilities and limits afforded by policies, as points of access to urban resources, and as empowered actors who work within and among power imbalances. Planners are strategists, Forester maintains, who take on an interventionist role with specific outcomes in mind (Flyvbjerg 1987; see also Farias and Bender 2002; Friedman’s 1998). Needless to say, postcolonial critiques call into question the origins and normative presumptions of such goals. More recently, materially attuned planning theorists (e.g., Bhan 2012; Lieto and Beauregard 2018) have called attention to the agentive capacities of non-human things, and for the need for planners to ‘to recognize the heterogeneity of the assemblage’ in planning practice. Attending to the agentive properties of the material landscape calls into question as well received planning orthodoxy insisting that ‘formal institutions and practices are the key to bringing about the imagined world of planners and their supporters’ (Lieto and Beauregard 2013, 18–19). These insights from within the profession of planning suggest that the viability of ‘planning’s transformative project’ (2018, 19) requires that the representational practices of planning must attend to the agency of material objects. We are largely supportive and sympathetic with this ‘material turn’ in planning theory and practice. Yet the ethnographically interesting question concerns the recursive relationship between the material world and its representations.

4. See next section for discussion of the planning concept ‘village.’

5. Name changed.

6. Name changed.

7. A government circular in 2012 addressed this problem by allowing transfer of ownership of slum structures.

8. At the time of writing Rasheed’s case is still pending.

9. Björkman.