Stabilization and change under planning and everyday practices – the politics of becoming public space in Dharavi, Mumbai

This study offers an often-invisible narrative of Dharavi’s long-term development history, coupled with Bombay / Mumbai’s urbanization. It scrutinizes how diversely originated forms of ‘public space’ and plural ‘publics’ serve as local reproductions of the exogenous notion of ‘public’. Such scrutiny covers three phases of interactions between planning and everyday practices, characterized by periodic crises and radical transformations. Based on the framework of ‘stabilization, change and becoming’, the analysis underlines various dominant and concurrent processes of socio-spatial becoming and charts the dialectic relationship of stabilization and change. Various processes reveal the gradual (trans)formations, encounters, negotiations, mutual connections, and (re)appropriations of plural public spaces and social collectives. They underscore the reconciliation and interchange between structures and practices, survival and politics, as well as becoming and being. It therefore contributes to decolonizing efforts aimed at studying public space within the context of Southern urbanism.