Session Description: Over the last decade Mumbai has become far more prominent within international coverage of contemporary urbanism. This greater focus on Mumbai has been a welcome rejoinder to a continued predominance of North American and European cities within urban research. Yet, in accounting for urban change in Mumbai, there has been a tendency to uncritically adopt Eurocentric models and terminology. This session seeks to explore some of the ways that Mumbai disrupts and contradicts existing categories and narratives of urban analysis. The aim is not to isolate Mumbai as an exceptional form of contemporary urbanism nor to confer paradigmatic status on Mumbai, but to show how a city such as Mumbai can be used to generate new theoretical dialogue and open up new channels of urban policy formation. This task has become all the more urgent in a world increasingly dominated by standardised models of 'global city' creation and neoliberal governance. The session seeks to question some of the institutional frameworks for urban research and a tendency for debates about the future of cities to be initiated and directed by experts and practitioners based in the global North. It will attempt to assess why Mumbai has recently assumed significance as an urban archetype, and examine ways urbanists can help facilitate scholarship in cities such as Mumbai, develop new progressive forms of learning and support new research and activist collectives.
