Bombay/Mumbai’s built form reflects the social and spatial uneven-ness of (colonial) capital, while its distinctive urbanity is the product of the everyday lives and aspirations of those who inhabit it.
When was Bombay?
Bombay’s transformation from an early-modern port city to British India’s commercial and manufacturing hub (and now, megacity) is linked with global economic forces: the city experienced meteoric rise in the aftermath of the American Civil War due to a booming cotton economy. New technologies for rationalizing production and accelerating the circulation of Bombay cotton soon followed. Meanwhile, the plague of 1897 provided planners and government officials with an alibi for mass demolitions, and enabled them to undertake extensive experiments in urban governance and industrial housing. Bombay’s famed cosmopolitanism is thus a vestige of social practices and cultural experiences produced by the contradictory forces of colonial capital: spatial regulation, together with social emancipation.
How do we approach Bombay/Mumbai in this seminar?
Scholarship on Bombay either focuses on the colonial city, or on Mumbai’s status as an icon of postcolonial urbanity. While the former seeks to disaggregate local practice and community formation from the authoritarianism of colonial policy, the latter focuses on a post-1993 Bombay scarred by vicious anti-Muslim violence, and neoliberal strategies of re-territorialization. Instead, this seminar asks how we might bring questions of built form, capital flows, and social life and inhabitation to bear on a history of the city across the colonial/postcolonial divide. By so doing, we will attempt to think about Bombay comparatively together with cities of the global South, while asking, simultaneously, about how Bombay’s distinctive urbanity might force us to alter our approaches to the city; approaches that are largely drawn from modular Euro-American paradigms for understanding urbanization as coeval with modernity, as well as industrialization. We do so in this seminar by focusing on people and practices—subaltern urbanity (and on those whose labor produced the modern city), as well as spatial orders—the informal or unintended city—to ask the question, “what makes and unmakes a city?”
Seeing the City
In order to answer some of these questions, this course includes a spatial mapping component. You will learn to use teachniques of visibilizing the city, and get comfortable with basic (digital) mapping tools and techniques. In order to do so, you will work in small groups of three to four students starting Week 3. You will work through basic tutorials that will enable you to complete a set of spatial mapping exercises in a collaborative context, and then complete a final project for the course in consultation with the instructor.
