editing discrepancies
Post is a compilation of extracts and document sets of the city manifesto, which has been the outcome of a conference held at the bicentennial anniversary of the Asiatic Society. The conference on its onset anticipated to deliberate on the urban conservation process dealing with the reordering and regeneration of the urban fabric both in terms of the physical and metaphysical. Case here tries to document, for that matter display missing postulates of the manifesto ideally displaced during the transcribe editing exercise. Today after almost a decade from when the event was organised case for a city manifesto has been introduced, the goal is to take stock towards conceiving a progress of ideas the urban landscape has seen. If a new version for the document has to be updated, how does one go about proposing a revision?
_
Quote from the conference program schedule
… aims at re-introducing Mumbai through its various socio-economic patterns and changes, various alternative histories and geographies and several cultures. The conference aims at presenting several cultural practices in negotiating the landscapes of Mumbai. The conference would culminate with a deliberation on a vision statement, A Manifesto for Sustainable Development of Mumbai.
_
The List.
Published as a reporting in the Times of India on March 5th 2005 _
‘Mumbai Manifesto’
A Comprehensive Cultural Policy
A Datasystem to generate information on the city’s economy
Greater Transparency
Five Year participatory review of development plans
A Mumbai Museum
Tenure for slum dwellers
An underground Churchgate - CST rail loop
Modification of the rent act
_
Printed transcripts of the conference, a collection of its papers/ presentations edited by Vimal Shah & Pankaj Joshi
‘re-visioning mumbai step by step, manifesto’
- Declare the principles that will govern the process of urban planning and against which all urban policies and programs will be evaluated and judged.
- Modify the rent act so that it does not apply to new tenancies created hereafter, whether in new buildings or old.
- Pass a law that enables speedy repossession of premises where the occupant has defaulted on mortgage or rental payments.
- Give a tenure to slum dwellers and allow them to chose from a variety of options as to how, if all, they would like to take up reconstruction.
- Modify the design and implementation of all resettlement projects to include a real process of participation by the affected people in decision-making.
- Have the BMC take up redevelopment of areas under section 33 of the BMC Act, with participation by the affected people.
- Have all government agencies, such as MHADA, BMC and others provide full and detailed information and baseline data, plot by plot, on a publicly accessible website, so as to minimize transparency in the granting of permissions and decision-making by these bodies.
- To improve public transport, implement the underground link between Churchgate and VT, with the object of reducing the headway time between trains from the present three minutes to 90 seconds on both the Western and Central Railway tracks.
- Remove the multiplicity of authorities with planning responsibility for different parts of Greater Bombay and place all responsibility for urban planning and the granting of permissions for construction and reconstruction with a single agency, the BMC.
Improved Planning
- Increase the pace of change in the economic profiles of Mumbai, 20-year physical plan has proved to be inadequate.
- There have to be improved data systems that effectively consider Mumbai’s economy, employment structures and their physical manifestations in buildings and their uses.
- Every five years the 20-year master plan, along with a Capital improvement Plan and its financing, should be reviewed in a participatory fashion.
- Land, particularly publicly owned land, has to be brought into use to further public interest.
- Mumbai’s rich biodiversity has to be preserved including its mangroves and coastline.
_
To observe from the versions of the manifesto are the shifts in priorities the that have evolved over time. The case of culture that took up almost 1/5th of the first edited list has been left out from the supposed final transcribed publication. This omission would question the concept of a role of culture in the cities sustainable development. If not then the assumption could be proposed that culture isn’t all that lucrative right now to be relevant than it was in 2005 and thus the version in 2010. Both these premonitions should have mandated a city definition of principles of sustainability that ideally override academic biases that impact city policy making and its respective discussion. A broader base of grounding principles that oversee principles of governance and its implementation.