Politics of Urban Planning

This book offers an interdisciplinary and dynamic account of the politicization of urban planning in Mumbai, India. It presents a unique perspective on the tensions and conflicts pervading the development and regulation of contemporary cities in the wider context of global urbanization, and broadens readers’ understanding of urban planning, chiefly focusing on the interplay between grassroots movements, experts’ involvement, and sociotechnical questions. As the respective chapters of the book show, the various controversies surrounding the Mumbai Development Plan (MDP) have called into question the social and political effects of reshaping the city, the exclusion, and inequalities it has produced, but also the role it confers on the state and the market, and its impacts on the environment. After carefully describing these controversies, the book tackles the fundamental democratic question of who gets to define the future of a city. Given its scope, the book is of interest to researchers, students, and teachers of city planning, urban development, and urban studies, as well as policymakers.

• School of Architecture, Laboratory of Urban Sociology, Lausanne, Switzerland

  Luca Pattaroni

• School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Deonar, Mumbai, India

  Amita Bhide

• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland

  Christine Lutringer

Luca Pattaroni holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from EHESS (Paris). He is Maitre d’Enseignement de Recherche at the Laboratory of Urban Sociology of the EPFL where he leads the research group “Urban (In)hospitalities”. He has been Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Visiting Scholar at the University of Columbia.  Investigating urban conflicts, counterculture and radical housing, subaltern migration or yet the impact of social acceleration on everyday life, his work explore the renewed forms of emancipation and oppression and more broadly the contentious articulation between the expression of differences and commoning in contemporary cities.  In 2009, he was co-awarded the APERO prize for the best article in urban planning.

Amita Bhide is Professor and Dean, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She has been teaching and researching at the Institute for over twenty years. She has been deeply involved in issues of urban poverty, livelihoods, and advocacy linked to the same in Mumbai and in other cities in India. She has contributed to social movements and to various committees of the state government on the subjects of housing and poverty. Her recent work at the School of Habitat Studies has been on urban governance reforms, housing, and land issues with a focus on small and medium towns and urban violence.

Christine Lutringer is Executive Director and Senior Researcher at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. She is also affiliated with the Universities of Basel and Edinburgh for the Swiss National Science Foundation project “Reversing the Gaze: Towards Post-Comparative Area Studies”. Her work explores democratic practices in the context of the mobilization of new social and political actors. In particular, it examines social movements and their influence on democratic politics and policy-making at the local level.

• Book Title: Politics of Urban Planning

• Book Subtitle: The Making and Unmaking of the Mumbai Development Plan 2014–2034

• Editors: Luca Pattaroni, Amita Bhide, Christine Lutringer

• Series Title: Exploring Urban Change in South Asia

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8671-9

• Publisher: Springer Singapore

• eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)

• Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022

• Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-16-8670-2Published: 30 March 2022

• Softcover ISBN: 978-981-16-8673-3Published: 31 March 2023

• eBook ISBN: 978-981-16-8671-9Published: 29 March 2022

• Series ISSN: 2367-0045

• Series E-ISSN: 2367-0053

• Edition Number: 1

• Number of Pages: XVII, 184

• Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour

• Topics: Urban Studies/Sociology, Human Geography, Development Studies, Urban Geography / Urbanism (inc. megacities, cities, towns)