Loophole Planning & Infrastructure Making in Mumbai

At the Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago, Vyjayanthi Rao presents her ethnographic work looking at the planning process and its implications for understanding relationships between land use planning and politics as it unfolds in contemporary Mumbai. She draws on years of fieldwork to examine citizens’ confrontation with new developments, resulting from a series of policy loopholes that changed the definition of development and the way social and material infrastructure are increasingly linked to practices of speculation.

The talk situates the relationship between planning, citizen-driven, iterative infrastructure making and new forms of political engagement in an age that demands a creative embrace of uncertainty.

For more details about the event, check out Institute for the Humanities' event page.

Dwellings and the Forming of Domestic Networks

Harvard Design Magazine's "Family Planning" issue features Vyjayanthi Rao's newest essay, "Building Stories: Unsettling Family in Mumbai." This piece explores domestic networks forming within Mumbai's three major housing types. For more about her article and the issue (41) at large, check out Harvard Design Magazine's website.

City Service: Making Homes Permanent, No Longer Provisional

Terreform responds to the notion that the current refugee crisis is a temporary one, and in fact, looks to the length and permanence at which people have been displaced and unsettled. Through their new project City Service, Terreform and its partners jump into the tumultuous actions and critical discussions on the use of temporary, mid-term, and semipermanent placements in camps.

"Our goal is to provide ideas and expertise to help mobilize the human resources of refugee populations, to make productive use of the environments in which they find themselves, and to marshal contributions from both relevant governments and NGOs and from private enterprises that directly produce the resources necessary to build and sustain the physical city."

Read more on the project at City Service.