With its high-density population of 19 million and the world’s largest underclass, Mumbai is the world’s fifth most populous region. And its planners want it to emulate Shanghai. But according to Charles Correa, “There’s very little vision. They’re more like hallucinations.” “Understanding the Maximum City”, a two-day conference in Mumbai from November 1-3, shared its title with the recent book by Suketu Mehta on India’s expanding cities. But although a compelling read, the book offers no practical answers as to how Mumbai could achieve responsible, inclusive growth.

This was the goal of the authoritative think tank Urban Age, backed by nearly a year’s research in India by the Cities Programme of the London School of Economics (organisers of the event), and steered as usual by urban advisor Richard Burdett in collaboration with the Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft. The latest in Urban Age’s global series of Davos-style summits, the event saw architects Charles Correa and Rahul Mehrotra joined by prominent Indian politicians including Sheila Dikshit, Chief Minister of Delhi, and figures responsible for the State of Maharashtra (whose capital city is Mumbai) and social activist Ramesh Ramanathan. Their debates on housing the urban poor and how best to plan and govern expanding cities were complemented by global analyses by Richard Sennett, Saskia Sassen and Burdett. Famed as the home of Bollywood, India’s entertainment and financial capital is seeing an astronomical boom in real estate prices in the city’s main central business districts, Nariman Point and the Bandra-Kurla Complex. It also has the largest slums, serious traffic congestion problems, and is suffering from a loss of wetlands.

Economist Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the 2006 Stern Report on climate change, recognised that Delhi had become one of the greenest capitals in the world. He has pressed for ecological measures to become central to India’s urban policies in general, so as to avert further natural disasters like the severe floods that inundated Mumbai two years ago. Experts called for a single overall planning authority, the lack of which is seriously hindering holistic planning, as chief planner Uma Adusumilli admitted. Mehrotra observed that positive change has taken place through organic “incrementalism” rather than via master planning. Government officials want to develop the Eastern Waterfront but the Mumbai Port Trust is unwilling to hand over the land. The government also wants to redevelop Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum: 583 acres in the heart of the city, surrounded by middle-income suburbs. Its privatisation and gentrification will leave residents with no option financially but “to sell up and move to another slum colony”, said Darryl D’Monte, former editor of The Times of India.

The efforts and promises of self-help groups working in the slums were honoured at Urban Age’s first award ceremony chaired by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Judges including Mehta and Bollywood actress and social activist Shabana Azmi chose 2 joint winners from 74 applicants. The first was Dayanand Jadhav’s Triratana Prerena Mandal (TPM), a body working with slum dwellers in Santa Cruz. “This began in Santa Cruz,” said Dayanand Jadhav, TPM’s founder, “but we would like it to be a model for Mumbai and the rest of the world.” The organisers of the Mumbai Waterfront Development Centre, which has created new green walkways, were joint winners: “With the immense pressures of population and construction, we sometimes forget that Mumbai is a beautiful city by the sea.” Lucy Bullivant