Unfolding plans: Projections, time, and political possibilities in Mumbai

This paper explores how plans unfold over time, shaped by urgency, waiting, and tactical foresight. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Mumbai, it follows the revision of the city’s urban plan to show how plans operate simultaneously as images and as documents, moving through different stages and lifespans—from initial sketches to official drafts, public reviews, and eventual implementation or expiration. 

These shifting forms give plans different powers at different moments, making temporality a key lens for understanding how planning shapes the world. The paper traces how the city’s fisher community engages with this slippery nature of plans, timing their political actions to intervene in the bureaucratic apparatus. 

These documents often exist in anticipation—ready to be activated when opportunities arise—and are used to assert presence, negotiate rights, or resist displacement. Ultimately, Chitra argues that the temporalities of planning—when something is drawn, submitted, or displayed—can be just as significant as what the plan contains, revealing planning as a space where time, power, and possibility intersect.

V. Chitra is an anthropologist and visual artist based at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. Her research intersects environmental studies, science and technology studies, and the visual arts. Chitra's recent book, Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell University Press, 2024) looks at how technical images such as weather infographics, surveys, and plans remake Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures.
 

Zoom: link

https://anu.zoom.us/j/85293466550?pwd=aHRXMVFZMUM4T1o2U0pNYWhkWjFJZz09

Meeting ID: 852 9346 6550

Password: 0000