Coordinating Consent: Overcoming Urban Development Conflicts in Mumbai, India.

In most academic and popular accounts of urban development, conflicts over land acquisition are characterized as zero-sum struggles between the forces promoting development and those resisting it. Typically viewed from an instrumental Marxist perspective, pro-development forces, including financiers, developers, and state actors, work to acquire land and facilitate construction; while their efforts are opposed by antidevelopment groups, such as mobilized communities, environmentalists, and pro-poor activists. Although political economy frameworks or social movement models are sufficient to explain the character and outcomes of land contestations, at times, the interests of actors do not align so neatly, and development conflicts focus more on the terms of development than whether or not it should proceed. In these cases, development conflicts resemble coordination problems than zero sum contestations, and frameworks from economic sociology, or more specifically from the sociology of markets, may be better suited to explain the resolution of such conflicts. In this paper, we highlight one such case: the still-under construction Piramal Mahalaxmi development in South Mumbai, to help explain how development conflicts can be overcome through the use of formal institutions, informal norms, and innovative practices. With apartments starting at half a million dollars, on land that until recently housed a 20,000-person slum settlement called Dhobi Ghat Jhopadpatti, this case appears to be a prime example of prodevelopment forces prevailing over project. While Piramal Reality is certainly positioned to glean a hefty profit from the luxury towers being built on site, a majority of slum residents are not being dispossessed, but are being compensated for their land with new flats on the same site. The paper draws on fieldwork and interviews conducted between mid-2017 and late 2018, during which time the land at Dhobi Ghat was being cleared, and solutions to the development conflict were being negotiated by developers and residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]