Urban Environmental Imaginaries and Aesthetic Sensibilities in Mumbai, India

Abstract

Urban environmental aesthetics form a cornerstone in neoliberal development discourse in Mumbai, India. Formulated primarily on visual metrics, such as those of green lawns and modern architecture, these aesthetic sensibilities set up the horizon of what is seeable and sayable, serving to legitimize planning schemes while obscuring their social and environmental harms. This is evident in the city’s elite Hiranandani Gardens township, a project heavily contested on legal, humanistic, and environmental grounds. Beginning from “waste,” or spaces and perspectives that lack value in dominant discourses, I analyze how the production of developmentalist “value” relies on environmental aesthetics as well as the limits of such formulations. By way of three frames—empty buildings, an abandoned quarry, and remembered wilderness—I illustrate power structures that facilitate the conversion of waste into value, the contradictions and limits in dominant sustainability discourses, and the messy terrain of contestations that they face. The article contributes to critical development scholarship by emphasizing the significance of aesthetics in unveiling power relations entrained in the making of urban landscapes. I also extend creative engagements in geography by incorporating sensory engagements beyond the visual to interrupt dominant aesthetic sensibilities and open critical and creative ways of knowing urban nature.

城市环境美学是叙述印度孟买新自由主义开发的基石。这些美感主要基于视觉指标(绿色草坪和现代建筑), 建立了可看可说的视野, 有助于使规划方案合法化, 同时掩饰了对社会和环境的危害。这一点在孟买的Hiranandani Gardens镇很明显, 该项目在法律、人文和环境方面存在着激烈争议。本文首先讨论了“废物”——主导叙事认为缺乏价值的空间和观点, 分析了开发主义“价值”生产如何依赖于环境美学、这些表述的局限性。本文通过三个框架——空荡荡的建筑物、废弃的采石场和记忆中的原野, 展示了促使废物转化为价值的权力结构、可持续性主导叙事中的矛盾和局限、混乱的竞争环境。本文强调了美学在揭示城市景观创作中权力关系的重要性, 为批判性开发研究做出贡献。本文还扩展了地理学的创造性参与, 融入了视觉之外的感官参与, 质疑了占主导地位的审美情感, 开创了理解城市自然的批判性和创造性方式。

La estética ambiental urbana constituye una piedra angular en el discurso neoliberal sobre el desarrollo en Mumbai, India. Primariamente formuladas desde métricas visuales, como las de los prados verdes y la arquitectura moderna, estas sensibilidades estéticas ponen el horizonte de lo visible y de lo que se puede decir, sirviendo para legitimar los esquemas de planificación, al tiempo que ocultan sus daños sociales y ambientales. Esto es evidente en la urbanización de élite de los Hiranandani Gardens de la ciudad, un proyecto que ha sido altamente cuestionado por razones legales, humanísticas y ambientales. Empezando con los “residuos”, o espacios y perspectivas que carecen de valor en los discursos dominantes, analizo cómo la producción de “valor” desarrollista descansa sobre la estética ambiental, así como los límites de esas formulaciones. A través de un trío de marcos –edificaciones desocupadas, una cantera abandonada y un área silvestre recordada– ilustro las estructuras de poder que facilitan la conversión del residuo en valor, las contradicciones y límites en discursos dominantes de sustentabilidad, y el abstruso terreno de las impugnaciones a las que se enfrentan. El artículo contribuye al desarrollo de la erudición crítica al enfatizar la significancia de la estética para descorrer las relaciones de poder implícitas en la construcción de los paisajes urbanos. Amplío también los compromisos de la geografía al incorporar el involucramiento sensorial, más allá de lo visual, para cortar las sensibilidades estéticas dominantes y los medios críticos y creativos abiertos para conocer la naturaleza urbana.

Key Words:

• aesthetics
• creative methods
• South Asia
• urban environments

关键词:

• 美学
• 创作性方法
• 南亚
• 城市环境

Palabras clave:

• Asia Meridional
• entornos urbanos
• estética
• métodos creatvos

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for feedback from the South Asian Urban Climates workshop, Political Ecology Remote Collective, and the Discard Studies conference. A special thanks to Nida Rehman and Karen Paiva Henrique for their support and inputs throughout the process.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Notes

1 I draw Nate Gabriel’s (2014) notion of urban environmental imaginaries as “conceptual framings and systems of meaning related to urban environments, including assumptions about the nature of the city and the nature of nature” (39).

2 The field-based research was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the Pennsylvania State University.

3 I prepared digital drawings using the Adobe software suite, primarily Photoshop. I have obtained these software skills over multiple years starting from my undergraduate training in architecture. I have used hand drawings and digital drawings to map Mumbai’s built environment across multiple projects.

4 The Urban Land Ceiling Act required developers to hand over land more than 500 m² to the government. The state of Maharashtra subsequently repealed this Act in 2007, claiming that it was not fulfilling its stated purpose (Jamwal 2007).

5 Activists in India have increasingly relied on judiciary mechanisms to make claims. Although this has had success, judicial urban governance has also led to devastating losses of land and livelihood for poor populations through rulings entailing large-scale evictions (Bhan 2016).

6 Stakeholders within this network challenged these complaints, and as a result the Anti-Corruption Bureau in charge closed the case without producing an investigation report. Santosh Daundkar challenged this closure, filing a petition seeking the report that concluded the investigation. In response to this petition, in 2014 the court rebuked the closure, and ordered an investigation of allegations not only against the developers, but also against the additional chief secretary, and the urban development department for a land scam estimated at $7.2 billion.

7 See Woodworth (2020) for a complementary articulation of the intrinsic links between the future and the ruin in the photography of China’s “ghost” landscapes by Lam.

8 The government introduced SEZs in the year 2000. These replaced an earlier regime of export processing zones (EPZs). There were important differences between the two, though, with EPZs restricted mainly to the manufacturing sector, typically smaller in size than SEZs, and with significantly lesser tax breaks.

9 Although SEZs are typically large business complexes hundreds of hectares in area, the state has made several exemptions to facilitate their introduction in smaller urban pockets including a minimum footprint criterion. The state has altered minimum land requirements to facilitate the introduction of SEZs within cities. For multiproduct SEZs, the land requirement has been reduced from 1,000 to 250 hectares for multiproduct SEZs and from 100 to 40 hectares for sector-specific units. The 10-hectare minimum land requirement criterion for SEZs in the IT sector has been entirely removed. The state has also changed the exit policy, allowing companies to sell an SEZ once it has been developed (Mookerji and Mukherjee 2012). This provision was a huge boost for companies—particularly multinationals—as it allowed them to set up shop and move freely to another city or country without meeting any of the time-based obligations earlier required in exchange for tax-free land.

10 The municipal government has designated certain areas of the city as “no-development zones” primarily based on their environmental vulnerability. The definition, extent, and allowable activities in these areas are set up through Development Control Regulations (Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority 2016). These change over time and have been the subject of much contestation.

11 A corporator is an elected member who oversees the ward, an administrative subunit of the municipal corporation that is responsible for governance of urban areas that have a population exceeding 1 million people.

12 Such probes have occurred time and again; in June 2000, residents of Hiranandani Gardens reported the illegal activities of quarrying to the collector, who claimed it would be stopped. Although quarrying did come to a temporary halt, it resumed after just a few weeks. In 2005, residents complained to the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board, which contended that, due to its ill effects, quarrying here was illegal. Subsequently, the Bombay high court called a halt to illegal quarrying and stone crushing in the Powai-Vikhroli area (TNN 2006).

13 I asked several security guards what company or real estate development oversaw construction in and around quarries, but they did not answer my questions, and said I was not allowed to take photographs.

14 This appeal presumably draws on the popularization of Switzerland through Bollywood, which often represents the Alps as an idyllic getaway.

15 The first wave of residents in this settlement consisted of migrants who worked in one of Mumbai’s numerous mills that did not provide living quarters for laborers (Lewis 2011). Subsequently, Parksite also witnessed growth from a wave of rural-to-urban migration in the 1970s and 1980s, following the reduced need for agricultural labor as an outcome of increased mechanization.

16 Dacoit is a South Asian term for armed robbers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aparna Parikh

APARNA PARIKH is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research focuses on gendered dimensions of urban environmental belonging in South Asian cities.