How is India Planning (or not) its Human Settlements?

By Sanjeev Vidyarthi, Associate Professor, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois, Chicago
When: June 17, 2016, 4 to 6pm
Where: Clifford Manshardt Hall, Academic building 2, TISS, Mumbai

This two-part presentation explores how contemporary India is planning its human settlements. The first part describes the changing views of spatial plans within the planning academe. Plans, for example, are no longer seen as precise and predictive in character but incremental and provisional by nature. There is a growing recognition that a diverse range of actors (homeowners, squatters, developers, politicians etc.) make different kind of plans (informal, tacit, spontaneous, incremental and more) as they anticipate and prepare for an uncertain future in an increasingly urbanized world. The second part of presentation will illustrate how the post-liberalization dynamic in India has led to the contemporary situation in which a wide variety of existing and emergent social actors and their plans are beginning to shape Indian urban regions in unprecedented ways.

The presentation is based on Sanjeev Vidyarthi's ongoing research. Dr Vidyarthi is an Associate Professor in the department of Urban Planning and Policy, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago. His research investigates the development of planning thought and spatial planning practices in independent India and his scholarly interests include ideas and actions in the fields of city-building, urban theory and design, and globalization and development studies.

BOOK LAUNCH: In the Public's Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi

By Gautam Bhan
When: March 8, 2016, 4 to 6pm
Where: Clifford Manshardt Hall, Academic building 2, TISS, Mumbai

Contemporary Delhi is a city scarred by the evictions of 'Bastis'—urban settlements that house the city’s poorest of the poor. Many of these evictions were ordered by the Indian Judiciary in Public Interest Litigations, which was a tool introduced to enable the poor to access justice. How did a judicial innovation introduced precisely to enable the marginalised to seek justice become an instrument of their exclusion? Drawing on an archive of court cases that resulted in evictions in Delhi from 1990 to 2007 as well as ethnographic research with basti residents and social movements resisting eviction, In the Public’s Interest shows how evictions have been fundamental to how urban space is been structured and produced, and asks what they tell us about the contemporary Indian city.

Gautam Bhan teaches and works on issues of poverty, inequality and cities at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. He writes as part of Kafila.org, and is also co-editor of Because I have a Voice: Queer Politics in India.

Speculating on Development Provincial and Transnational Circuits of Accumulation in Andhra's New Capital Region

By Carol Upadhyay
When: October 14, 2015, 4 to 6pm
Where: Room 908, M S Gore Building, Nowroji Campus, TISS, Mumbai

In the months leading up and following the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh in 2014, circulating rumours about the possible location for a new state capital led to intense speculative activity in land, driving up prices to unprecedented levels around key coastal towns. After the state government finally announced its decision to build a ‘greenfield’ city along right bank of the Krishna River in Guntur District, together with a land pooling scheme to acquire 35,000 acres of prime agricultural land, the real estate market in the region became even more volatile. Although Andhra provincial capital has long engaged in speculative practices, this pattern has been reinforced and complicated by the growing entanglement of local real estate markets with transnational circuits of capital. The logic of speculative accumulation is also reflected in Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu’s ambition to create a ‘world-class’ capital city by sourcing expertise and capital from Singapore and other Asian countries, and in the land pooling scheme itself. In this presentation, I draw on the unfolding story of the Amaravathi ‘world city’ project to raise larger questions about the trajectory of urbanisation and the nature of capital and the state in post-liberalisation India.

Carol Upadhya, a social anthropologist, is Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, India.

Exploring Changes and Impacts of the Navi Mumbai Airport Influence Notified Area (NAINA) Using Slow Journalism

By Rahul Bhatia
When: September 11, 2015, 4 to 6pm
Where: Clifford Manshardt Hall, Academic building 2

Right until the end, the greatest stories of our times wash over us so slowly that we barely feel them. These stories call out to be heard, and heeded. And then, finally, these stories become what we call current events and breaking news. This has happened with climate change, migration, inequality, erosion of liberty, to name a few subjects. Almost as if in response to the quick-fire nature of news-gathering and publishing, a movement to document these changes has risen. The movement is called slow journalism. This kind of reportage requires time, and so there are few people who pursue it. The focus of this talk will be about slow journalism and NAINA, the planned city in western India that will rise over nearly 600 square kilometres around Panvel. The author has covered the gradual formation of the city for Peepli.org, using the techniques of slow journalism. While newspapers largely publish reports about developments at an administrative level, such as a new development plan for the region, or new concessions made to villagers, slow journalism goes deep into the subject, revealing something else entirely. Going deep has allowed us to discover life on the cusp of change in the villages notified for NAINA. We see what people on the ground are fighting for, what a large number of locals value, and what their precise problems with the development plan are.

Slow journalism has an important role to play in the conversation about development in India (among other subjects). This talk will discuss the benefits and challenges of slow journalism at a larger level, and specifically within the framework of the new city of NAINA, and the people most likely to be affected by it.

Rahul Bhatia is a co-founder of the Peepli Project (peepli.org), a slow journalism platform that explores development, water, and wildlife issues in India today. He is presently writing about NAINA, a city marked for creation outside Mumbai, the Navi Mumbai Airport, and the people affected by both projects.

State-led Urbanisation in China: Skyscrapers, Land Revenue, and Concentrated Villager's Living

By Lynette Ong, Associate professor of political science at the Munk School of Global Affairs, the University of Toronto.
When: June 26, 2015
Where: Clifford Manshardt Hall, Academic building 2, TISS, Mumbai

This paper examines the rationale behind municipal and local government’s pursuance of urbanisation, and the political-economic and social implications of removing villagers from their farmland into apartment blocks in a policy called “concentrated villagers’ living.” It provides evidence of increasing reliance by municipal and local governments on land revenue and the financing of urban infrastructure by the governments’ land-leasing income. After relocation, villagers complain that their incomes have fallen and their expenditures have risen. Additionally, they have ceded rights to the use of their farmland to the government but have not gained access to state provided social welfare. The compensation is usually inadequate to sustain them, as a result displaced peasants are emerging as a disadvantaged societal group deprived of the long-term security of either farmland or social welfare.