Mediating Mumbai: ethnographic explorations of urban linkage

This paper delves into one of the key aspects of mega-conurbations: linkages. We ask how imaginaries and boundary-making practices of city planners relate to the way ethnographic city is ‘knit’ or ‘linked’ together? The disjunctive and incongruous texture and form of Mumbai’s urban fabric suggests that explanations for Mumbai’s fitful growth and transformation might be found somewhere in the offices of city planners. Drawing on empirical research from two territories that are differently linked up with the city of Mumbai we probe the significance of socio-spatial and temporal proximity (or distance) to the processes of ‘linkage’ (silsila) by means of which territories become part of the fabric of the city. The empirical accounts reveal how concepts and categories borne of planning practices are themselves constitutive of the sociomaterial contradictions that ‘linkage’ practices mediate – practices that attempt to know/represent the city ‘as a whole’ would seek to resolve. The paper thus makes a case for conceptualizing (and engaging) city planners, surveyors and engineers as not as experts who ‘intervene’ or act upon cities as planning objects, but rather as mediators in a world of mediators: socially situated actors working within the complexities and contradictions of always-already mediated urban processes.