Notes on urban visions, the newer sites for discursive struggles: Mumbai 2034

Abstract

The paper analyses the visioning of the Greater Mumbai-2034 Development Plan (DP-2034) and its content. Our results suggest that visioning practice is essentially a discursive intervention embedded in interpretive struggles. The paper outlines the role of two key planning instruments, Floor Space Index-FSI and No Development Zone-NDZ, which materialised as discursive elements while Mumbai’s urban vision along a de-regulated and market-determined rationale is formulated. Also, to uphold its core view, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (civic body) exercised its discursive agency through various strategic practices that revolve around framing, rationalisation, scientification efforts and re-designating territorial boundaries. Simultaneously, visioning created a strategic impulse amongst citizens and civil society actors to realise their agency for change, alter their discursive power and emerge as a stronger discursive agent through forming alliances, engaging in independent surveys, imparting planning literacy, peer learning, shadow visioning and canvassing with media. As a result, MCGM was forced to alter its proposals partially. The empirical case argues that visioning exercises present novel openings for actors to negotiate their pre-given subject position, demand participatory forms of urban governance and acquire discursive agency to exercise the right to change.