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Abstract:
The disjunctive and incongruous texture and form of Mumbai’s urban fabric suggests that explanations for Mumbai’s fitful growth and transformation might be found somewhere in the offices of city planners. How do imaginaries and boundarymaking practices of city planners relate to the way the ethnographic city is “knit together”? This paper draws on empirical research from two territories that are differently linked up with the city of Mumbai to probe the significance of socio-spatial and temporal proximity (or distance) to the processes of “linkage” (silsila) by means of which territories become part of the fabric of the city. The empirical accounts reveal how concepts and categories borne of planning imaginaries and boundarymaking practices are themselves constitutive of the sociomaterial contradictions that “linkage” practices mediate - practices which attempts to know/represent the city “as a whole” would seek to resolve. The paper thus makes a case for conceptualizing (and engaging) city planners, surveyors and engineers as not as experts who “intervene” or act upon cities as planning objects, but rather as mediators in a world of mediators: socially situated actors working within the social and material complexities and contradictions of always-already mediated urban processes.
