Navi Mumbai Workshop

UTOPIAN PLANS, PLANNING AND GOVERNANCE

Indian cities are at the centre of intense debates and discussions on the pathways of trajectories of urbanisation. Competing utopian visions clash with each other to exert their influence on how to imagine, shape and therefore develop cities. Often, these imaginations or visions of a utopian city are top down and exclude many groups of actually existing citizen groups. But we argue, grassroots imaginations and articulations continually rework, reshape and reassemble utopian visions of the city which are conceived in a top down, rational manner. However, many such voices of citizens are deliberately excluded, ridiculed, bypassed, ignored or even silenced in the plan making, planning and governing of cities and yet, they provide rich, diverse, alternative imaginations of our cities.

This workshop explores the contesting imaginations of urban utopias – past and present, top down and bottom up, that speak to how the city of…