Speaker
Description
The way in which urban planning deals with the question of land in Mumbai is invariably tied to how it imagines urban water—in its various forms and flows—in relation to land. In a city where land-use planning is dominated by real estate imperatives, the everyday life of Mumbai’s inhabitants is caught in the struggle to anticipate and adapt to how water will flow and flood the city, altering and affecting their socio-spatial experiences, particularly during the monsoon every year. This paper attempts to understand how infrastructural planning practices for storm water drainage shape everyday spatial experiences in the city, focussing on water-related ‘events’ such as floods, landslides and infrastructural collapses. Through an in-depth case study, the paper investigates into the event of the infrastructural wall collapse that took place in Malad, Mumbai during the monsoon of 2019. It uses the extended case study method to historicise and expand the findings of the wall collapse event for tracing the evolution of storm water infrastructure and drainage in Mumbai’s planning. By conducting a transect study of the Malad wall collapse site and situating it within a broader geographical and political-economic context of the city-region, the papers explores the relation between everyday adaptive practices of vulnerable residents and the environmental transformations brought about by regional planning. It develops the transect as an ‘analytical tool’, grounded in a political ecology framework, to uncover the linkages between everyday adaptation practices and the multi-scalar visions of infrastructural planning that have reconfigured land-water relations in the city-region over time. The paper argues that everyday adaptation practices emerge as a critical response to the inadequacies of institutional planning in addressing storm water management, revealing the intersection of local and regional planning processes. It theorises the ‘everyday’ as a site where planning failures and environmental injustices are negotiated, highlighting the historical spatial inequalities and systemic vulnerabilities that exacerbate water-related disasters in cities of the global South. It underscores the urgency of addressing environmental and climate justice within the framework of everyday adaptation practices and calls for reimagining institutional planning by prioritising the needs of marginalised communities in cities of the global South.
References
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| Keywords | urban water; everyday adaptation; stormwater infrastructure; infrastructural planning; environmental justice |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
