Mumbai’s differential verticalisation: The dialectic of sovereign and technical planning rationalities

Abstract

Heeding Harris’ call to study diverse verticalisms, I discuss four distinct planning-induced verticalisations in Mumbai by interrelating issues of power, volume and intentionality. Through a novel conceptual framework illuminating the politics of planning, I show how a dialectical tension between (political–bureaucratic) ‘sovereign’ and ‘technical’ rationalities of planning shapes each of the four pathways of verticalisation. Mumbai reveals that verticalisation can be unintended – (a) planning can fail to cognise volume (and the vertical as a dimension of significance), and also (b) lack any purposive agenda related to it. Yet, the differential treatment of social groups through sovereign planning exceptions that shape verticalisation also reveals a politics of verticality. This politics illuminates planners’ conception of the public and connects it to both the amenities and violence of the vertical life that sovereign planning’s exceptions have led to. Overall, a differentiated pattern of exceptionality emerges out of the dialectic of sovereign and technical rationality in planning practice. Sovereign (and in one case, technical) exceptions deflect, suspend and displace technical rationality at different moments along each planning pathway of verticalisation. They selectively benefit businesses and elite groups sometimes by withdrawing the very health protections for the poor that lend legitimacy to planning.