Conceiving and living infrastructure: Flyovers and lived citizenship in Mumbai

Keywords: Infrastructure, lived infrastructure, citizenship, planning, Mumbai
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 14

Abstract

Infrastructure materialises the relationship between people and ‘otherwise abstract
state and supra-state authorities’ (Dalakoglou 2016) with political, poetic, and affective implications (Larkin 2013, Knox 2017). I will focus on a particular facet of this materialisation, namely the tensions within and across imaginaries driving the state’s production of road
infrastructure, and citizens’ affective experience of it. Qualitative, mixed-methods research
(including photographic documentation) into the planning and reception of a program of over
fifty flyovers (overpasses) built in Mumbai from the late 1990s reveals interesting tensions
across and within each side of this relationship. Tensions within the technocratic imaginaries
at play in the project urge closer attention to the contradiction between ‘sovereign’ and
‘technical’ planning in a fragmentary planning establishment (Krishnankutty 2018).
Meanwhile, the (continuing) transformation of the cityscape by the flyover construction
program has forced experiential privations on pedestrians and those living near flyovers,
while offering unanticipated affordances for relief and pleasure in mobility to pedestrian and
car driver alike. While insights into the diverse and contradictory aesthetics of lived
infrastructural space are intrinsically interesting, they also open new questions about
lived citizenship in Mumbai, especially the way it is shaped under the rule of abstract
(infrastructural) space in Lefebvre’s account (1991). Further, the misalignments and
contradictions within each domain - official imaginary and popular lived experience, respectively - complicate the conceived space-lived space dialectic that yields
Lefebvre’s abstract space in the first place, opening new theoretical possibilities for infrastructural space in the global south.