On 24 February 2015, the draft of the 2014-2034 Development Plan for Mumbai (MDP 2034) was released for public consultation. An unprecedented public outcry and a deluge of complaints, both by experts and by civil society, forced Maharashtra’s chief minister, on 21 April, to scrap the plan and order a four-month overhaul and screening of all objections. This controversy appears as an exemplary politisation of urban planning highly representative of the tensions and conflicts pervading the development and regulation of contemporary cities, along the transformation of the tools of urban planning.
In this conference, Luca Pattaroni will attempt to highlight this politicisation of urban planning through a broader reflection on what he proposes to call the “politics of planetary urbanisation”. Rooted in Lefebvre's work, the thesis of a “planetary urbanisation” postulates the obsolescence of the classical conceptualisations of “cities” unable to account of the vast territorial transformations due to the expansion of capital accumulation (Brenner & Scmid, 2015). He will argue that even if this thesis offers a stimulating account of contemporary urban transformations, it partly misses the political dimension of urban transformations as shown in the MDP controversies. Hence, “city” might be the name one can give to the political attempts to tackle the effects of planetary urbanisation and build up a common world.
About the Speaker
Luca Pattaroni holds a PhD in Sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He is Maître d’Enseignement et de Recherche at the Laboratory of Urban Sociology of the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he leads the research group « City, Habitat and Collective Action ». He has been visiting professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and visiting scholar at the University of Columbia. He is a board member of the Swiss Journal of Sociology and of Articulo, The Journal of Urban Research. He is also President of the artist and culture cooperative Ressources Urbaines and member of the Consultary Cultural Council of the Canton of Geneva.
His work is concerned with the expression of differences and the making of the common in contemporary capitalist cities through a critical study of urban policies and assemblages. His research tackles, among others, housing issues, public spaces, cultural and urban movements. His latest publications include “Urban Misunderstandings of the Art Worlds. Spatial Politics of the Creative City” (with M. Piraud), in Resende J., Martins A., Challenges of Communication in a Context of Crisis, Cambridge Scholar Publisher, 178-199; and "An expatriate's ethnoscape: the impact of the United Nations Office on urban settings and space in Geneva" (with Hossam Adly), Terceiro Millenio : Revista Critica de Sociologia e Politica, 17 (1), 117-137.