Environmentalism otherwise? The need for a more-than-indigenous fisher commoning in Mumbai’s wetlands
537 Heller Hall (ICGC) and live stream option
Discussant: Malay Kotal, Department of Geography, Environment & Society
Mumbai’s east coast, housing port industries and raced, classed and indigenous populations, has long been produced as a toxic industrial waterway for furthering British imperial and Indian nationalist ambitions. Recent neoliberal interventions intensify port, oil and logistics industries while including ‘green’ options of real estate development and ecotourism. Coastal planning is founded on capitalist projects of colonization that forget its watery history. They also erase those who inhabit the coast differently, such as the indigenous fishing community of Kolis. This talk foregrounds fisher place making or commoning that has substantively contributed to making Mumbai’s eastern fringes an incipient urban, coastal commons but that has been erased as fishing villages have often been at odds with the (colonial) state’s paradigm of drying/draining the city and engineering hard boundaries between land and water. Might we read this commoning as a form ofhitherto unrecognized and provisional environmental stewardship that is built up from the muddy grounds on which racialized capitalist violence is enacted? And what might this competing notion of environmentalism offer to expert planning scholarship and practice in a time of global climate crises?
About the Speaker
Lalitha Kamath is trained as an urban planner and policy analyst. She teaches in the Centre for Urban Policy & Governance, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her research interests centre on questions of urbanization, urban governance and planning, urban politics, and informality. As an urbanist, she has written on the politics and uneven impacts of urban governance and infrastructure projects. She has also engaged with questions of public participation and citizen collective action in governance and urban planning in her writing and through membership in different city collectives. Her first book was a co-edited volume titled Participolis: Consent and Contention in Neoliberal Urban Governance that focused on a critical exploration of emerging discourses and practices of “citizen participation” that have become part of urban governance reforms and infrastructure projects in India. She has developed this theme by studying dominant forms of urban transformations in the Global South – both the structural violence of spatial transformation and processes of slow violence to urban environments. She employs a ‘more than neoliberalism’ framework to examine both structural/slow violence and the specific kinds of displacements it enacts that break and dissolve notions of ‘community’ but also the new forms of politics and urban subjectivities that emerge from this interplay. Since 2017, she has been engaged in ethnographic work in fishing communities on Mumbai's east coast to understand changing conceptions of urban climates, habitation, labour and value at the water's edge.