Urban visions and divisions in the global south: Comparing strategies for Mumbai and Cape Town

Abstract

This article analyses the conceptual work of urban strategic visions in two global South cities, Mumbai and Cape Town, in the context of urban inequality and informality. Theoretically, it develops two related conceptual tools: (1) Principles of vision and division: following Pierre Bourdieu's ideas on the predominant symbolic classifications by which we observe and organise our social world, these are classificatory schemes and categories (e.g., racial, religious, ethnic, economic) through which urban strategies “see” the city; (2) Vectors of integration: these are the main development trajectories that strategies promote, encompassing the directionality and content of prioritised urban interventions, and their potential inclusionary or exclusionary effects. Empirically, the article compares two strategic visions: the Concept Plan for Mumbai Metropolitan Region and Cape Town's City Development Strategy–Spatial Development Framework. The comparison reveals that strategies in both cities omit explicit discussion of dominant yet contentious social divisions, replacing them instead with “plannable” spatial distinctions: between city, slums and new suburbs in Mumbai; between formal and informal modes of development in Cape Town. Although the strategies explicitly highlight goals of urban integration through specific tools (i.e., “integrated townships” in Mumbai, “multidirectional accessibility grid” in Cape Town), their directionality and content entail geographical distancing and dislocation from urban centrality for residents living in informality or slums. The comparison thus underlines the inequitable consequences of classificatory schemes of strategic visions, and the uneven effects of direction, distance, density, and design of their long‐term development trajectories. Overall, by applying these twinned concepts – visions of divisions, vectors of integration – in two distinct cases, the article offers a sociologically and spatially insightful critique of contemporary urban strategy‐making in the global South. It also contributes to the wider project of comparative urbanism, demonstrating new possibilities to compare “concepts with difference” across diverse geographical contexts and urban phenomena.