Lalitha Kamath

Fisher Stories that Reframe Planning in Mumbai

Mumbai’s east coast has been produced as an industrial waterway for furthering British imperial and later Indian nationalist ambitions. More recent government interventions seek to (re)value this toxic industrial wetscape through new infrastructure that prioritises marine logistics, real estate development and ecotourism. Both these imaginaries of the east coast are founded on capitalist projects of land reclamation that ‘forget’; its watery history. They also erase those who inhabit the coast differently, such as the indigenous fishing community of Kolis. Yet numerous fishing villages of the Kolis hug the city’s coast, revealing older, now forgotten, traditions of inhabitation. This talk foregrounds their stories to help recover worlds that relate to the movement, relations and knowledge mediated by water as opposed to land, propertied ownership and pollution. Artisanal fishing practices entail sensing time and space differently. For fishers, time is measured by the rise and fall of water, not by standardized minutes, and is deeply connected to changing usage of spaces on land and in sea. This ecological sensing, assembled through fishing practice, informs an urbanism that is opposed to one where only property relations are valued. By dwelling in these wet stories, I seek to reclaim other ways of being for Coast and City while also demanding a substantive reframing of ‘expert-led’; planning approaches. The talk draws on film footage, ethnographic research as well as community memory and mapping processes.

Lalitha Kamath is an urbanist and planner working at the intersection of urban infrastructure, urban planning and governance and the environment. She writes on dominant forms of urban transformations in the Global South – both the structural violence of spatial transformation and processes of slow violence to urban environments. Her work demonstrates the agency of marginalised groups in challenging dominant urbanisms through ethnography, storytelling and multimedia formats (see https://www.inhabitedsea.org/the-sea-and-the-city and https://makebreak.tiss.edu/). She is the Chairperson of the Centre for Urban Policy & Governance, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. In 2024-25 she is a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow with the Dept. of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.

Light refreshments will be served. This event is open to Columbia University affiliates with a valid university ID. Any questions on the events can be directed Diana Guo, dg3372@columbia.edu; Vinita Govindarajan, vg2588@columbia.edu; Mauricio Enrique Rada Orellana, mer2245@columbia.edu

The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) is organized by the second year PhD students in Urban Planning: Vinita Govindarajan, Diana Guo, and Mauricio Rada Orellana.