mumbai plans
a synopsis of sorts …
The city is a space in need of a planning trajectory. Over the period of last 10 years several agencies, starting with the McKinsey Report, have tried to publish a vision for the city in various capacities. Aspirations have looked at other cities as sources of inspiration but somewhere there has to be an indigenously prescribed solution to the stated condition that is Mumbai. The planning exercise now in its third edition is in the process of laying out a variation of ideas towards a new and improved development of the city. Mandated by law this vision calls for a Competitive, Inclusive and Sustainable City. Between the two points of the formal reports an influx of independent exercises have clamored for either individually or in collective collaboration to critique the various plans advertised. This is therefore an observation and a review of several voices that have both stated their respective aspirations of what they want their version of the city to be. In a democratic and open theatre of discussion no one is wrong and every voice valid, the point of contention thus is on whose voice is heard and why. Mumbai Plans is a strategy to catalogue all this various voices and compile them into one single Visions Monograph that gives the pulse of what the city wants to be now. Introducing this is a group of texts that extrapolates from this bibliography of visions to work in an interpretation to the various stages in question.
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geography of participation _ The forefront of the peoples movement could be positioned between the four organisations of UDRI, YUVA, TISS and KRVIA to engage with the Municipal Corporation and its consultants in bringing the demands of informal systems in the city. Comparing their views in respect to mutual associations and extended partnerships earmarks a distribution of how the city is imagined in relation to the directives of the a citizen’s collective as a whole and individually on what their respective institutional aims and objectives are. Plotting the collective to the city geography would then present the conditions under which comments to the planning agency is submitted as. Location of the people voices is the aim of the exercise.
planning proposals of recent memory _ Right from commissioned technical reports to quasi mythical proposals there has been a flurry of city visions. Mostly they address to the popular problems of the lack of affordable housing to open spaces. There is also the comparison and aspiration with forms of other Asian cities. All these ideas are reference points to either build off or reject and suggest a bit modified iteration of what should be. A parallel case in the city is for a prolonged intervention by architects and designers who have in bits staged their views on different areas. From Backbay to Gilbert Hill and Open Spaces to Waterfront Redevelopment, the new city development plan could be just a compilation of these disjunct views for the city of Mumbai.
plans 01 and 02 _ To plan for the city every 20 years is a mandate by the law. The Maharashtra Regional and Town Planning Act of 1967 under section 38 stipulates its revision. Plan in effect for the city was completed in 1991 and sanctioned 3 years later by 1994. Prior to this plan is the first official city plan of 1967. Both the plans DP 1967 and DP 1991 have been submitted based on assumed futures relative to their receptive periods. Both to a degree have failed to achieve the goals set out. To demarcate the various factors such as earlier attempts, laws, acts and committees to try and firstly envision the two versions of the regulatory instrument is of preview. Plans of the city thus would relate to methods as enforced by factors of its envisioning and the regional plan, which it has to confirm in principle.
strategies/ ideals for development _ Discussions and conversations in the development plan workshops held [January 15th to February 5th 2014] by the Municipal Commission with citizen groups could be broadly summarised as discussions on the city’s Development Control Regulations (DCR) 1991, Urban Development Plans Formulation and Implementation (UDPFI) Guidelines 1996 and Peoples Visions for the city. The DCR’s accompanies the development plan to assist implementation, UDPFI is a set of national ideals to direct urbanisation for the country and a collective of demands by the participants at large from the peoples vision. Assembling the set while framing an analysis sketches out the possibilities and limitations of planning.
data and the plan _ What is the information required to plan the city? and with the city given a vision or trajectory how can the same process be transferred down to ward level and planning sectors. To establish first would be what are the institutions and agencies that have a stake in the city as a whole. The result to which is their responsibilities as to be addressed at the neighbourhood level. Improved planning proposals are made viable with access to greater projection scenarios. Spatial planning has been considered as a tool to project growth policies for various sectors. With the plan now being promised to be available online and several of government agencies making their data incrementally available how can a neighbourhood move out from purely manicuring their greens to possibly bringing in businesses and services previously inaccessible to their localities?
a method for planning _ Consultancy work for the Revision of the Development Plan was awarded to Group SCE (I) Ltd. in consortium with Memoris and the work stated in May 2011. Tasks leading up to the plan as per the Consultancy assignment are to be as follows -
- inception report,
- existing landuse survey and submission of elu maps and reports,
- existing situation analysis report,
- report on growth scenarios,
- report of objectives of the development plan,
- preliminary report on proposed landuse and development control regulations,
- consultative workshop with stakeholders,
- report on phasing of plan, implementation, estimates of cost implementation and finance,
- report on monitoring and evaluation,
- consolidated report of plans and draft dp,
- submission of final report on draft dp for publication and inviting suggestion and objections,
Last of the exercises the paper is a review of the processes that have given the city its new development plan. It tried to collate all disseminated stages of to the planning processes with the appropriate rebuttals to have led as well as critiqued every stage of the stipulated list. A timeline of sorts, the goals are to capture the formal vs the informal space to planning that this exercise has resulted in.
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Mumbai Plans is a part of the MumbaiOpenData Project. Developed from as the iterative phase of the KRVIA Fellowship Research 2011-‘12, the work has been an attempt to theorise an urban information archive. Hence elaborating on the findings and staging a possibilly larger model, mumbaiopendata.org is a working idea of an online repository, which is to be positioned as a central source of information & data categorized as #Mumbai. For its inception stage, in the role of a repository the site maps out the online geography of information/ data available on the city in addition to enabling adding new material. Built on a wiki platform, every source is considered as a record demarcated and by a page. Guidelines of content and page templates is to be formulated iteratively based on information type/ format received.