Shanghai Dreams: Urban Restructuring in Globalizing Mumbai

Abstract

This dissertation examines a faltering state project to remake Mumbai into a "world-class" city and an international financial center by 2013, inspired by Shanghai's comprehensive urban renewal during the 1990s. Despite support by the state and corporate elite, Mumbai's project of growth-oriented strategic planning, infrastructure building, urban renewal, governance and policy reforms has made little progress. Why have Mumbai's transformation efforts remained stymied? Through my ethnographic study of urban restructuring in Mumbai, I propose that the answer lies in the nature of the sub-national state.

Using the Shanghai model as a lens to analyze Mumbai, I argue that the sub-national state is central to the project of "globalizing" cities like Mumbai and Shanghai. Globally-oriented urban restructuring is a complex and multi-dimensional process in which the sub-national state is the central actor. The role of the state is critical in emerging cities seeking to "leap-frog" their position in global networks, to put in place the infrastructural and policy elements required to make cities key nodes in the architecture of globalization. The sub-national state plays an extensive role in urban planning and coordination, land acquisition, infrastructure investment, conflict management, displacement and rehabilitation. Consequently, state capacity is critical to the success of urban restructuring projects.

I demonstrate the ways in Mumbai's global integration reshapes state policy and transforms urban governance. Contrary to accounts that suggest that the forces of globalization weaken states, I show that the city's corporate elite seek to re-direct and re-shape state intervention rather than dismantle it, in order to make Mumbai a globally-competitive destination for capital and talent. I then relate state capacity and the shifting dynamics of the state's relationship to social forces to Mumbai's development outcomes. The state in Mumbai, I show, is organizationally fragmented and its relationship with corporate business is tenuous.

I develop an empirically grounded concept, the "jugaad state" to describe the state in Mumbai. The "jugaad state" is shaped by the need to govern a city in which a substantive share of economic activity occurs on the margins of state legal and regulatory frameworks. Its modes of governance, of necessity, are decentralized, negotiated and improvised, although its legal and regulatory frameworks are that of a centralized, high-modernist bureaucracy. I propose that Mumbai's hybrid and internally-fragmented sub-national state is ill-equipped to carry out a complex, multi-dimensional program of urban restructuring, unlike the centralized, cohesive and downward-reaching municipal state in Shanghai. "Jugaad" forms of governance enable Mumbai's informal poor to participate in the urban economy as well as enable the state to govern a largely informal city like Mumbai. I illustrate the workings of the "jugaad" state through an analysis of two-contrasting modes of market-based slum redevelopment that differ in the scale and extent of state intervention and coordination.

Finally, I show that urban governance in Mumbai is an arena for contestation between elite civil society, which includes the city's corporate lobbies and middle-class residents associations, and "political society", which is the space of the city's informal poor. While civil society has allies within the state's upper-bureaucracy, the state's lower rungs are deeply embedded in political society, forming an informal governance structure in Mumbai's slums and informal spaces. As a result of Mumbai's fragmented and hybrid state structure, what obtains in globalizing Mumbai is not a whole-scale planned transformation into a "world-class" city, like its model Shanghai, but a piecemeal, protracted, unplanned and contested process of redevelopment.