found 03 - manifesto united mumbai  

At the end of six weeks of looking at specific areas through the Meet in the Middle series, select participants from previous discussions will return to frame a manifesto for Mumbai and bring suggestions to the table. Will disparate groups and agencies offer to cooperate with each other? The winner, we hope, will be Mumbai.

Program series initiated by Lab Team Member Neville Mars. Hosted and facilitated by Naresh Fernandes and Sourav Biswas.

Participants: Amita Bhide, Chairperson, Center for Urban Policy and Governance, TISS; P.K. Das, Founder, Architect-Planner, Open Mumbai; Tasneem Mehta, Managing Trustee and Honorary Director, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum; Madhav Pai, Director, EMBARQ; Anita Patil-Deshmukh, Executive Director, PUKAR; Brinda Somaya, MD, Somaya and Kalappa Associates; Narinder Nayar, Founder, Mumbai First; Sheela Patel, Director, SPARC; Vidyadhar Phatak, Planner, former Chief Planner MMRDA.

Manifesto United Mumbai is a set of six principles formulated to guide action towards a more efficient, liveable and sustainable city. These principles are the result of in-depth research and extensive expert and stakeholder meetings aimed to pinpoint caveats and obstacles in current planning and define workable solutions. Goal: Guiding spatial and socioeconomic integration to improve the overall cohesion of the city and ultimately arrive at a United Mumbai.

1. MEET IN THE MIDDLE
   
   United Mumbai will be the result of collaborative planning. The first principle demands for each United Mumbai project stakeholders and representative from community, NGOs or private entities and government representatives in an equal capacity. Goal: Creating platforms to nurture public – private partnerships and new models of collaboration within the unlevelled playing field of Mumbai.

2. BRIDGING THE GAP
   
   United Mumbai projects must operate at the intermediary scale, bridging the gaps between conditions on the ground and top down planning projects – as reflected in the discrepancies between public investment and demographic representations. This demands detailed mapping of existing conditions and should foster a stronger role for the Ward Sabhas. Goal: Initiating community driven projects that can be scaled up to impact on a citywide level.

3. COMPRESSING MUMBAI’S TIME SPACE CONTINUUM
   
   Accessibility is the main criterion to quantify and evaluate United Mumbai proposals. However, evaluation can no longer occur merely from an engineering perspective, but must incorporate the social and individual perspectives. Time scarcity and space scarcity are two measures that proposals will be compared with, bridging the technocratic and human centric approach. Goal: Promoting solutions that increase access to public facilities, housing, mass transit, public space, and governance.

4. HOMEGROWN URBANISM
   
   Western notions of planning have proven inadequate within the harshly fragmented urban context of Mumbai. United Mumbai projects acknowledge the resilience and richness of organic urban fabric and embrace home grown solutions as viable urban strategies. Goals: Promote projects that nourish localized efforts into sustainable settlements as the seeds of citywide sustainability.

5. VALUE DRIVEN PLANNING
   
   The MiM workshops have underscored a concern for the practice of post planning, which leaves Mumbai perpetually catching up with reality. United Mumbai aims for future proof solutions and underscores the importance of long-term, ambitious and visionary objectives. Goal: Promoting vision based projects and scenario based planning to achieve a value driven development plan.

6. PARALLEL PATHS OF PROTOTYPES AND POLICIES
   
   Initiatives that are solely policy driven have proven to be toothless within the pragmatic context of Mumbai. United Mumbai calls for parallel multidisciplinary collaborations around producing strategic prototypes at neighbourhood levels. The pilot projects lay the groundwork for policy level proposals. Goal: Testing viability of policies by implementing tangible proposals through public private partnerships.

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KEY CONCEPTS FROM MEET IN THE MIDDLE

1. ACCESS
   
   City is split on socioeconomic divides defined by lack of access to water, sanitation, housing and governance | Define basic necessities that every Mumbaikar should have access to | Build self-sufficient settlements around 247 water supply and sanitation | Design neighbourhoods around walkable access to mass transit | Mandate development plans and new developments around affordable housing for the bottom 40% | Access to credit | Democratic open spaces | Inclusive governance

2. HOMEGROWN URBANISM
   
   Embrace home-grown typologies and adopt incremental development solutions | Work with hyper local networks and labour | Surgical development based on grassroots mapping | Encourage community funded initiatives through inclusive financial tools | Improve grassroots innovations from the home scale to neighbourhood scale through incremental design | Explore ways to nourish locally organized efforts into sustainable urban systems – for water, sanitation, housing, energy, and transport

3. WARD SABHAS/ AREA SABHAS
   
   Lower levels of government are more in touch with ground reality | Form citizen committees under the political power granted by the 74th Amendment | Participatory mapping | Push for an inclusive, value driven development plan | Connect with the local corporator to implement specifics of development plan at the Ward level.

4. PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS
   
   Community involvement is key to success of public private partnerships | Encourage micro entrepreneurs to meet local needs | New models of collaborations involving non-profit, market based, community based organizations for public infrastructures | Incentivize private entities to invest in public infrastructures at strategic scales

5. VALUE BASED PLANNING
   
   Planning around shared values | Investments reflecting true density and needs | Plan around increasing access | Consolidated vision for development scenarios of Mumbai’s metropolitan region | Align public mandate and private incentives towards sustainable growth

6. MEET IN THE MIDDLE COLLABORATIONS
   
   Engage with government at all levels | Common platform for grassroots voices | Open multidisciplinary process involving stakeholders from different sectors across scales | Build public private partnerships based on community principles | Curate multidisciplinary collaborations around designing retrofits and prototypes at neighbourhood levels

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   Text sourced from Anitra Baliga, Mars Architects