CITY VISIONS AND EVICTIONS IN MUMBAI

The discourse of “world class city” has been used in Mumbai to support a political agenda which has favored the real estate industry and the private sector, while harming the poor and the marginal. The widening inequality resulting from this agenda is likely to lead to the most dramatic consequences in countries of the global South, where social safety nets are lacking. “Vision Mumbai” has become the ideological weapon launched to secure the right to the city to the elites and the powerful. Slum redevelopment further limits the ability of ordinary people to define urban life on their own terms and to shape their own environments. Mumbai is a highly specific example of a neoliberal agenda within an emerging market economy. The use of pro-developer mechanisms such as TDRs leads to increasing marginalization of the poor in an increasingly segregated urban space, while corporate rehabilitation schemes transfer delivery of rights to profit-driven private actors.