LITERATURE REVIEW With research within the pages of this thesis seeking to take a multi-faceted approach to address the marginalization and tension in Mumbai’s urban peripheries, it was important to source information presented by a range of lenses through which the urban space can be visited.
approaches to name a few. The list by itself is not one that claims to be all encompassing. Short remarks under each source summarizes their relative importance to my focus.
In the following list are is this very range. These sources probe the issues in question with social, cultural, environmental, economic and political
Mathur, Anuradha, and Dilip da. Cunha. Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary. New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2009. A text which provides insight in to ways in which one can begin juxtapose the physical constructs of Mumbai today and the natural terrain and its flows that we have forgotten. It speaks on the importance of the idea of impermanence through “places of wet theory and urban generativity.” Mathur and Cunha are critical of the historical practices that did shape Mumbai from the aqueous terrain of the past, while simultaneously mapping the traces of these in the contemporary urban fabric. SOAK emphasizes the vitality of speculating on the intersections of our lives with water and its ecologies and our relationship with these. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2007. Davis brings a global perspective to my understanding of informal settlements (slums). He has detailed, through examples social, economic and political mechanisms which lead to the development of slums and contemporary policies, or lack there of which allow for their spatial expansion but qualitative deterioration. The adeptness with which the fragility of the urban poor in many of the world’s metropolis, Mumbai being one of the them is portrayed has allowed me to acquire a scalar understanding of these spaces, as well as the forces of urbanization which marginalize these demographies.
6 | Peripheral Mechanisms
