Emerging Morphologies

In the nineties we have seen a completely new and unprecedented urban landscape emerging. A product of the new economy, the new morphologies and city forms emerge in the landscapes of call centres, luxury townships, corporate parks, slum rehabilitation sites, special economic zones (SEZs), and mega-infrastructure sites. In the globalised economy, these processes of urbanisation include mega-city formation and mega-infrastructure drives, deindustrialisation and informalisation of labour, integration of financial and information networks, widespread transformation of land uses and reorganistion of land markets. New morphologies are further manifested through micro-processes, ranging from new forms of land assembly to new occupancy patterns, and formal architectural responses that are generative of new morphologies and articulate new urban forms. The discussion will undertake a survey the emergent morphologies of the new economy and their processes of generation and proliferation.

Politics of Occupancy

Large metropolitan environments generate complex practices through which space is claimed and appropriated by their inhabitants. The failure of most urban economies in the former Third World to absorb migrants into formal market structures has generated severe gaps in the demand and supply of spaces for work and living. In turn, popular and tactical ways of occupying space have challenged formal regimes of property, creating new forms of occupation and complex social relations of ownership. These forms cannot be understood in the conventional language of property and ownership, and come in direct conflict with linear visions of modernisation and development, which refuse to recognise them as legitimate. The disbanding and demolition of “informal settlements” in the name of urban renewal is paralleled in our cognitive failure to understand the new configurations of occupation which the majority of urban populations inhabit. The discussion will attempt to map various forms of occupancy that slip out of the mainstream understandings of habitat, and will document attempts to claim space by various communities, when faced with violent displacement

Organisations of Civil Society

Many of today’s “NGOs” emerged in the 70s and 80s after the upsurge of the social movements protesting Emergency. Through the 80s and 90s, with the decline of the organised Left and trade unions, the urban NGO sector came into its own with diverse non-party organisations and coalitions undertaking research, training, and social work on housing rights, environmental protection, combating communalism, and other issue-based agendas. The 90s witnessed the further proliferation of NGOs amongst assertive urban middle classes seeking to reassert their local authority over neighbourhood spaces, civic agencies, and urban infrastructure in the name of the “public”. More recently, new coalitions have been formed between the previously estranged organisations representing the urban poor and the middle classes, in the context of litigation on public spaces, urban renewal, and environmental protection, as well as the corporate vision of making Mumbai a “world class city” by sweeping reforms of planning and governance. What is an NGO, and how do we understand their role in urban politics? The celebratory rhetoric of “civil society” flattens the complexity in understanding these organisations, which have on the one hand evolved into private agencies that speak in the name of the public, and on the other hand become unrepresentative appendages of the state in the name of “participation” and “empowerment”. The discussion will undertake mapping of “civil society” organisations, the networks and links between them.

Urban Peripheries

In thinking about the fringe conditions of cities, the dominant concepts remain in the centre-periphery binary. The state planners treat these fringes either as dormitories/backyards or opportunities for new economic generators for the centre. In these imaginations, the cultural conditions of the fringes including patterns of living, working and consuming are considered peripheral to the central city’s cultural conditions. Policies/Plans that get drawn talk about new economic/social conditions. Mainstream conceptualization and subsequent intervention result in upheavals amongst residing groups. Here again the binary is operative where the city is seen as an opportunistic encroacher, eating up the resources of the fringes. Over the past years, CRIT has been working on the fringes of Mumbai. New questions have surfaced in the dealings: For whom is the backyard/economic generator planned when these places have become areas of private speculation? What is the local cultural condition when aspirations of consumption amongst the people of the fringes are similar to those in the centre? Which groups exactly qualify as the local community in a situation where everyday more houses are being built and more families move into these areas? Is it a part of the same city / Is it a different area / Is it opportunistic to think about the region / How is the region conceptualized?

New Entrepreneurship

By now we are familiar with the grand narratives of transition through which the new urban economy is made sense of by researchers, policy-makers and the public — liberalisation, deindustrialisation, informalisation, decentralisation and commodification. However these narratives remain inadequate to conceptualising the actual forms and patterns of enterprise, and processes of transition in this dynamic and complex new economy. Similarly, concepts such as small and medium enterprises (SMEs) attempt to address the scale of these new activities, while treating their forms as statistical abstractions. New entrepreneurship has been a subject of recent ethnographic inquires by members of CRIT. The people and enterprises that comprise this new field of urban entrepreneurship include: organising material and labour and providing the cheapest bid for production; creating demand and selling; facilitating resources and managing crises; and brokering knowledge and skills. This area of research will explore questions of the new economy and entrepreneurship through tracing new networks and strategies of trade, production and consumption.

Mapping, Archiving, Publishing

The discussion will explore the emerging fields of digital archiving, publishing and mapping, and the use of these new tools in urban research. The widespread dissemination of networked media and information technologies has posed serious questions around organisation and practice of research, which for generations have been sponsored by large centralised structures, such as academic institutions and state bureaucracies. These institutions are now confronted with discursive spaces such as mailing lists, blogs and wikis, and other networked forms of publishing by freelance writers and self-taught scholars interacting online. While previously isolated communities of independent researchers have become increasingly connected, the digitisation of previously inaccessible archives, libraries, and collections promises to further lower the barriers to online pedagogy and collaborative research outside of formal institutions. While the crisis posed to disciplinary hierarchies by open source models of mapping, publishing and archiving is apparent, we are still articulating the institutional forms appropriate to the new research practices and communities forming today. These forms include the structures of collaboration in the era of large distributed databases; the connection between navigation and management of archives with new techniques of online pedagogy and self-education; and the role of research groups and institutions in sharing and exchanging data.