[Reader-list] fourth posting: tactical city

[Rupali Gupte]

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Hello all,

Here is my fourth posting.  

A Tactical History of Bombay’s Urbanism

How you SEE a certain situation will influence how you intervene in it. History becomes a LENS that helps one SEE. History is by and large then a fabrication, a fiction and a product of the LENS used to see the situation.
Tactical City as a fictitious history of Bombay’s urbanism plays with the fact that history is fiction. It inserts itself in the gaps between history as fact and history as fiction. 

Prasad Shetty classifies the present literature on the history of Bombay’s Urbanism in terms of the various FRAMEWORKS they employ and the INTERESTS behind the particular fictions that these narratives build. To quote, “Mumbai city’s history is predominantly classified into eras. The conventional chronological history of the State gazetteer puts together a classification of the ancient, medieval, Muhammedan, Colonial and Modern eras (Chaudhari, 86). A more ambitious history by Mehrotra and Dwivedi (2001) puts together it’s classification based on chronological physical development in the city. A recent endeavour by an architectural academy (Design Cell, 2001) in history writing classifies the city as changes in the economy; its classifications: agrarian, mercantile, industrial, socialist and global city. 
All three histories undertake a periodising task. These watertight compartments of history then become a basis for understanding decisions of the people. One can co-relate ‘the ancient’ in the city gazetteer with the ‘fisherman’s village’ in Mehrotra and Dwivedi and the ‘agrarian economy’ of the Design Cell, where the native population is seen to be settling in certain parts near the sea and building their landscapes. These histories set a basis to conceptualise decisions made in development, decisions made by people. They, through their nomenclature of the Ancient, the Core, the Modern, and the Global etc. set a dominant mode or “the mainstream” along which all decisions could be classified and understood. Hence the slums and closing of the mills in Mumbai discussed earlier becomes the product of the Global Exploding city. At the level of the city, these conceptualisations become the basis to plan.”

Tactical City on the basis of these frameworks becomes an attempt at reconceptualising the history of Bombay’s urbanism. The Tactical as a position recognizes that other frameworks of history are not neutral and benign. Tactical position too stirs away from being neutral and benign. It names its enemy and gets ready to vanquish it. A tactical History of Bombays Urbanism, in the light of this traces power structures through the city’s history and focuses on the TOOLS used by the power structures to maintain their status quo. Since the Tactical per se has no form of its own and in De Certeau’s words, “has no a proper site, discourse or language of its own and insinuates itself into the other’s place, adorns itself in the other’s garb and speaks through the other’s language” it needs to understand the tools employed by the power structures in order to tweak them for their own purposes.  The TACTIC is this new TOOL. 

The following is an attempt to read a history of Bombay’s urbanism through such a  lens. A time line of Bombay’s Urbanism is put together here from 1500s- 2004 (based on the Design Cell's classification of the city as colonial merchantile, colonial indutsrial, socialist and global )that deal with selected issues that the fictions of Tactical city later begin to play with. This timeline focuses on the powerstructures and the tools they use.  

For a flash time map please go to the following link I have set up. You will have to download flash plugins to see this animation:

http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/rg226/

Best,
Rupali