Shanghai Dreams: Urban Restructuring in Globalizing Mumbai

Shahana Chattaraj, PhDUniversity of Pennsylvania

Shanghai: Mumbai’s Rival and Aspiration

“When we talk of a resurgent Asia, people think of the great changes that have come about in Shanghai. I share this aspiration with the Chief Minister and senior Congress leaders to transform Mumbai in the next five years in such a manner that people would forget about Shanghai and Mumbai will become a talking point.”

Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of IndiaMumbai, 2004

Where do they stand today?

Where do they stand today?

What about human development?

Why hasn’t Mumbai become more like Shanghai?

Why did Mumbai and Shanghai, with similar goals - to build “world-class” cities, attractive to global capital and national and international talent – and a similar set of strategies, end up with such divergent outcomes?

My argument:

The critical variable that explains differences in outcomes is local state capacity

A strong, effective and cohesive state is essential to large-scale urban restructuring

“Jugaad” state in Mumbai; effective in governing informality; ineffective in implementing planned urban transfromation

What are Globalizing Cities?

Globalizing cities are cities that aspire to become “global” cities

Globalizing cities integrate into the network and compete to acquire “global city” functions

Disconnect between parts and functions of city oriented towards the global economy and the rest of the city

What is at stake?

Cities are engines of growth and innovation – “humankinds greatest invention”

Globally-oriented urban restructuring adopted by cities in advanced and emerging economies but not all succeed

Complicates dichotomies of states vs markets; global forces vs communities; spaces of flows vs spaces of places

Methodology

Six-month ethnography of Bombay First Six months of semi-structured interviews with

key actors in different levels of government, the private sector, media, non-governmental organizations

Attended public and closed-door meetings related to urban planning and governance

Urban Planning as a Lens

“Urban Planning/Policy” as a focus of inquiry

o spatial re-structuring through large-scale state-supported redevelopment and infrastructure projects.

o changes in urban governance and planning arrangements

Findings

Pro-business state that has embraced business as a ruling ally in governance and planning; but

At best a tenuous and ineffective partnership- there is no “Growth Coalition” in Mumbai

Findings

A strong business sector is unable to effect transformative change without an effective, cohesive state partner

The state in Mumbai is internally fragmented, with a managerial-bureaucratic elite aligned with corporate civil society and its lower-rungs embedded in the “informal” city

Key Findings: The Jugaad state in Mumbai

The “jugaad” state is an outcome of the contradiction between the legal and regulatory frameworks of a centralized, high-modernist bureaucracy and the need to govern a city where a large proportion of economic activities take place on the margins of state regulations

Findings

“Jugaad” governance works – it allows the city to function and enables the state to govern a largely informal city - 65% residents live in slums; 75% of workforce in “informal” sector and growing

Urban restructuring in Mumbai is thus sporadic, piecemeal, uncoordinated and contested, rather than a whole-scale planned redevelopment

An Illustration: Slum Redevelopment/Urban Renewal

The SRS approach features minimal state coordination and relies on informal governance structures – it’s a “jugaad” state innovation that has become the predominant mode of slum renewal in Mumbai

The Dharavi redevelopment project attempts to centralize, plan and coordinate redevelopment – remains in limbo

My research demonstrates:

States are being qualitatively transformed. not dismantled by globalization

Sub-national states matter more than they did before; weak local state capacity in Indian cities has wide-reaching consequences

Informality fundamentally shapes the nature of urban governance in Indian cities

Conclusions

Given what we know about state capacity in Mumbai, Shanghai is an unsuitable model

Urban Policy and governance approaches should be cognizant of existing political realities

Mumbai needs more rather less local democracy

More research needed to understand the urban political economy in India