| solomon benjamin on Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:39:14 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
| <nettime> Whose Planning and on whose behalf and the slums that save us! |
[originally to: <[email protected]> and others] Dear all, a consideration of the plans that surround us. First, an excerpt from an email sent to me (despite its dualism): New Orleans vs. Mumbai Inches of rain in new orleans due to hurricane katrina... 18" mumbai (July 27th).... 37.1" population of new orleans... 484,674 population of mumbai.... 12,622,500 deaths in new orleans within 48 hours of katrina...100 deaths in mumbai within 48hours of rain.. 37. number of people to be evacuated in new orleans...entire city..wohh number of people evacuated in mumbai...10,000 Cases of shooting and violence in new orleans...Countless Cases of shooting and violence in mumbai.. NONE Time taken for US army to reach new orleans... 48hours Time taken for Indian army and navy to reach mumbai...12hours status 48hours later...new Orleans is still waiting for relief, army and electricity status 48hours later. Mumbai is back on its feet and is business is as usual USA ...world's most developed nation India ...third world country *************** SB: I was reminded in a comment in Sukuntu Mehta's book Maximum City that if the same population density of Mumbai lived more commonly in the US, systems including 'law and order' would break down -- or something like that. And one needs to read even more vivid description of daily city life in 'Shantaram' (Gregory Roberts) to suggest that perhaps the wonderful thing about cities is the way economic, political, legality, and social space gets redefined -- a fluidness far benond the moral positioning by planners -- espicially those arguing for 'participatory planning'. Moving beyond the moralistic and into systems of control, the point in the comparasion with New Orleans is the way cities and towns in the US and UK are located in a system of stringent control made possible by planning. One only has to read accounts in books like 'Black Corona' about participatory planning in NYC and its politics, or then the experience of urban renewal in Boston of the 1960s and 70s, or accounts of Madhu Sarin's Chandigarh, or Fedric Thomas's Calcutta, to appreciate that what really works in Mehta's and Shantaram's Bombay is that it is slummified so well! I refer to here not a debate of the 74th, CA and if the participatory process is linked to that or not. Instead I am pointing to the centrality of politics, the value of anachism, of fluidity, of un-predictability, which planners and administrators find great unease. More recently, they are joined by donors, organizations like HDFC, ICICI, FICCI, CII, or CEOs like Kiran Mazumdar Shah (Biocon) or Philips' CEO Bob Hoeskatra -- all seeking to make our cities globally competitive. Why is it for instance, that the recent book by Jagmohan reads so much like the essays of Kalpana Sharma, or that the manifesto of the bangalore Social Forum like that of the FICCI and CII (except for two points of inc. FDI, and land acquistion!)? What is the conceptual value of having fuzzy categories like Civil Soceity, decentralization, participation, planning, 'the law', good governance, 'balancing needs and resources in equitable and efficient ways', when all these essentially refer processes of politics? well, more later Solly <....> commons-law mailing list [email protected] https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]