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DCR33
In 2018, almost 10 years after the process was initiated in 2009, the development plan of Mumbai was sanctioned. The first draft of the plan, which sought to significantly reform urban planning in Mumbai, was scrapped in 2015. However, contrary to the widespread assumption that the first draft was rejected due to public opposition, this paper argues that a key factor behind the scrapping was to reform one of the central regulations of the 1991 Development Plan of Mumbai, Regulation 33, which provides development rights incentives and planning relaxations to property developers in Mumbai. Through an analysis of Mumbai’s development plan process, this paper offers a glimpse into the divergent values and interests of powerful groups, and how these interests are coordinated and reconciled in the city. The process reveals the extent to which real-estate capital shapes urban space and common sense of urban planning in Mumbai.
The author thanks the anonymous referee for valuable comments and suggestions to an earlier draft of this paper.
Conventional planning ... seemed more and more discredited. Instead, planning turned from regulating urban growth, to encouraging it by any and every possible means. Cities, the new message rang loud and clear, were machines for wealth creation; the first and chief aim of planning must be to oil the machinery. The planner increasingly identified with his traditional adversary, the developer; the gamekeeper turned poacher.
— Peter Hall (2001: 379)
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