Urban commons to private property: Gendered environments in Mumbai’s fisher communities

Abstract

The enclosure of urban ecological commons into private property has facilitated the growth of the neoliberal service sector in Mumbai, India. These changes are brought forth through a reworking of communally managed land into narrowly understood public space, which has paved the way for private development. At the helm of Mumbai’s urbanization is a power alliance between state and elite non-state actors across colonial and neoliberal regimes. The process has gravely impacted subsistence and livelihood activities of fisher communities residing in proximity to the development, disproportionately affecting fisherwomen. This paper centers fisherwomen’s urban worlds to analyze the uneven legibility of existing spatial patterns. Across various scales, the categorical and material reworking of land–water commons has reduced resource availability. Women bear a greater, although underrecognized, burden in maintaining lives and livelihoods within this changing landscape. The relative illegibility of fisherwomen’s spaces, however, allows some everyday activities to continue unnoticed despite ongoing processes of enclosure. My analysis of the enclosure of urban ecological commons and its gendered dimensions advances a dialogue between intersectional feminist and urban political ecology on colonial–neoliberal continuities, categorical exclusions in public–private binaries, and gendered urban environments.

Keywords

South Asia urban political ecology feminist political ecology neoliberal urbanism Mumbai intersectional feminism

Introduction

This paper centers fisherwomen’s urban worlds in analyzing the enclosure of urban ecological commons (Gidwani and Baviskar, 2011) to form private property in Mumbai. Since the 1990s, the historically peripheral area of Malad in Mumbai has become a hub for call centers and an area emblematic of the current phase of service-oriented and consumption driven urbanization in the city. This symbolic change has occurred through categorical shifts in boundaries between the public, private, and communal domain at multiple scales and has involved a physical reworking of land–water edges. These changes have had detrimental impacts on koliwadas (fisher settlements)¹ in Malad. For centuries, the Koli (fisher) community has lived and worked in this coastal stretch, relying on fish for subsistence, and as a pivotal livelihood source. In this area, the construction of call centers has grievously impacted fishing communities, with fisherwomen bearing the greater brunt of adapting to changes.

Fisherwomen’s daily activities of subsistence and livelihood have historically occurred in urban areas marked by spatial and categorical fluidity. These activities and the commons they produce have been reworked to form part of the “public” sphere,² which has in fact heralded the formation of private property. The neoliberal conversion is undertaken through cooperation between state and elite non-state actors. Such public–private governance is underpinned by power legacies set up under the colonial regime and early decades of the postcolonial nation-state. As a result of these processes, the historically peripheral areas within which fisher lives and livelihoods have long transpired are now iconic of the neoliberal city. Such change has impacted the well-being of fishing communities through a material transformation of their spaces, as well as from pressures induced by a sharp spike in market value of these areas.

My discussion on the enclosure of commons into private property draws on 10 months of qualitative field-based research in Mumbai, India, in 2015–2016, supplemented with document analysis. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews with community leaders and residents in Malad’s koliwadas. I also went on transect walks in fishing villages and surrounding areas with fisher folk, where they showed me changing boundaries between land infill and built form. I spent time in the koliwadas of Malvani and Bhandarwada in Malad, observing women and men as they went about with their household and livelihood activities. These activities had a fairly consistent daily pattern and occurred primarily in communally owned and managed spaces. Koliwada residents pointed to the importance of community spaces in helping fulfill livelihood activities and highlighted how these spaces were threatened by contemporary fast-paced development. To support their claims of development-induced threat, community leaders showed me city planning documents, pointing out how new roads and built form had detrimentally affected koliwadas. Thus, fisher folk provided insight on the relation of the call center industry with existing land-use and environmental practices. I also collected a range of policy documents, urban vision documents, development plans, and newspaper articles about Malad’s development and urbanization more broadly within Mumbai. These sources situated the experiences of fishing communities within the broader terrain of real-estate change and Mumbai’s land-use history, helping triangulate information presented in interviews and providing a starting point for interview questions in some instances.

This paper extends a dialogue between intersectional feminist political ecology (FPE) and urban political ecology (UPE) on the gendered dimensions of enclosing multi-scalar communal domains. I focus on the reworking of land–water commons into a restrictive propertied regime to illustrate the uneven legibility of diverse use patterns and the differential experience of transformed landscapes on and within fisher communities. I explain strategies used to fix the communal nature of Koli resource management and associated spatial boundaries and to transform it into “public” land, which in turn has facilitated the formation of private property. A focus on communally managed space brings forth capacious notions of land use that challenges the polarized fixity of public and private designations. I also illuminate the neoliberal cooperation of state and elite non-state actors who dominate development processes, rooting them within power legacies set up under the colonial and postcolonial nation-state. Such rooting illustrates historical continuities in land control that operationalizes narrow conceptions of the public sphere, while erasing existing environmental associations of fisher communities. Finally, I explicate multi-scalar reworking of communal spaces and its gendered impacts on resource management.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: I build on theoretical insights about the enclosure of public and communal domains to form private property and on gendered resource management at the scholarly intersection of FPE and UPE. I then illustrate the reworking of land use and wetland management near koliwadas in Malad, foregrounding strategies entailed in making these changes to explicate the formation of an alliance between the state and elite non-state actors. Next, I turn to various scales of urban ecological commons that prevail within Malad’s koliwadas, the threats of re-development these spaces face, and their differential gendered impact. My analysis of the enclosure of urban and ecological commons and its gendered dimensions advances a dialogue between intersectional FPE and UPE on colonial–neoliberal continuities, categorical exclusions in public–private binaries, and on gendered urban environments.

Intersectional feminism, urban enclosures, and environmental commons

This paper analyzes the multi-scalar gendered implications of enclosing urban commons. Placing intersectional feminist and urban political ecological perspectives in dialogue with insights on commons and their enclosure, I elaborate on stakeholder dynamics embroiled in the conversion of land–water commons into private property, the impact of neoliberal development on urban environments, and gendered dimensions of their restructuring at multiple scales.

The fields of FPE and UPE build on concerns in political ecology to identify winners and losers in socio-environmental processes. In UPE, scholars consider uneven urban environments as a site for social critique (Lawhon et al., 2014), positioned within power-infused socioecological processes which put in place and rework scalar relations (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003). FPE has provided a robust analysis at the household scale, shedding light on women’s roles and responses to changes in environmental resources and landscapes, with attention to everyday experiences of women (Schroeder, 1993) and how they navigate stigma-ridden landscapes to access environmental resources (Sultana, 2009, 2011). Until the last decade, studies in UPE had occurred primarily in Global North cities (for some exceptions, see Gandy, 2008; Myers, 2008; Njeru, 2006) while FPE has had a predominantly rural focus. More recently, however, scholars have not only extended FPE’s focus into the urban realm (see, for example Doshi, 2013; Hovorka, 2012; Truelove, 2011) but also conducted an urban political ecological analysis of cities in the Global South (Domínguez Rubio and Fogué, 2013; Hartmann, 2012; Millington, 2018). At the intersection of these concerns, feminist geographers Yaffa Truelove (2011, 2019) and Sapana Doshi (2013, 2019) have made critical interventions in articulating how differentially positioned actors negotiate unequal resource access and make claims to the environment respectively. My work builds on these insights to analyze the restructuring of gendered urban environments.

In particular, I focus on the enclosure of urban ecological commons, which I ground in political ecological and feminist insights on commons and their enclosure. The term “commons” is used to denote a structure of power wherein a community regulates access to resources or processes (Nightingale, 2019). Political ecologists have shown how commons operate at the edges, or outside binaries of public and private (Turner, 2017), epistemologically often exceeding legalistic notions of the “public” (Gidwani and Baviskar, 2011). The process of commoning (Nightingale, 2019) highlights the relational nature of property, mediated socially and intertwined with livelihoods (Ribot and Peluso, 2003 in Turner, 2017). Such local relational management, political ecologists have shown, is interlinked with other scales and can be placed within broader structures of power (Blaikie, 1985). These linkages are complemented by feminist insights, which have illustrated the significance of a multi-scalar understanding of commons (Giordano, 2003) through a focus on the “interdependence among bodies, households, communities, organizations, ecologies, political and economic processes” (Clement et al., 2019: 5). A scalar understanding helps us read the potential of land–water commons in sustaining fishing communities at several levels, where the modality of the commons acts as an important ballast against commodification (Gidwani, 2013). Such an analysis also illustrates how the structuring and maintenance of Koli commons relies disproportionately on women’s labor, heeding the scholarly warning that the potential of commons is ambivalent (Nightingale, 2019) and should not be romanticized (Turner, 2017).

Commons are often rendered illegible within the binary of public–private governance. The state has, in numerous settings, played an important role in regulating commons and facilitating their enclosure (Mansfield, 2004). Within the ambit of scholarship examining contemporary processes of enclosing rural and peri-urban commons (see White et al., 2012 for overview) and their gendered dimensions (Sato and Alarcón, 2019; White and White, 2012), development sociologist Michael Levien’s (2012) work in northwestern India is important here—in showing how the neoliberal state has acted as a land broker and enclosed diverse property forms for capitalist investors. While the Indian nation-state has used eminent domain to procure land since the end of British colonialism, the neoliberal iteration marks a shift from obtaining land for ostensibly public purposes to the state acting merely (and transparently) as an intermediary for the private sector. As Levien (2012) notes, within its reworked role as a mediator for the private sector, the state continues to use eminent domain for land acquisition, creating an artificially low land price in lieu of direct purchase within a real-estate market.

Studies on urban commons in India, albeit limited, have shown how processes of enclosure heighten real-estate value, whose narrowly defined programs and securitized access (D’Souza and Nagendra, 2011) flatten diverse environmental imaginaries (Zimmer et al., 2020). In Mumbai, where a “sea view” can fetch exorbitant sums for residential and commercial property, fisher lives and livelihoods—which transpire in environmental commons that abut the coast and extend into marine ecologies—are rendered particularly vulnerable to enclosure. Within the singular imaginary of real-estate that frames ongoing development processes, commons formed through a bundling of land and water are illegible (Chung, 2019). In other words, these commons inhere fluid land–water relations that makes their legibility as territory challenging (Blomley, 2019). This produces contradictory effects.

On the one hand, a purported inability or direct refusal to recognize land–water bundles as commons with associated communal rights has facilitated a physical and territorial expansion of the city’s boundaries. These changing spatialities index broader hierarchical systems of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy and are differentially experienced (Mollett and Faria, 2018). I articulate these hierarchies by situating neoliberal power relations vis-a-vis earlier modes of colonial and postcolonial governance, explicating the role of the colonial residue in shaping racialized subjectivity under a neoliberal regime (Collins, 2019), unsettling sediments that result in long and slow accumulations of structural violence (Faria, 2017), and shedding light on experiences that otherwise lay buried beneath hegemonic narratives (McGeachan, 2014, 2019). I also explicate women’s position within this dynamic of public–private governance (Adams et al., 2018) and the salience of patriarchal norms in shaping resource access (Truelove, 2019), extending the scope of such analysis to the domestic sphere (Agarwal, 1994; Sultana, 2009).

On the other hand, while the burying of water and land under a deluge of concrete has broadly dissolved existing spatiality and use, smaller and less legible spaces—in particular those considered women’s domain, continue to occupy liminal spaces (Parikh, 2019) and provide glimpse of a “liveliness” (Ghertner, 2020) that can expand urban environmental imaginaries and show the contingent and often unfinished project of enclosure.

Across colonial and neoliberal regimes, the enclosure of urban commons to form private property in Mumbai has restructured urban environments at multiple scales, with uneven social and spatial impacts. Using a feminist intersectional lens, I illustrate the persistence of colonial traces in shaping a neoliberal project where the lives and livelihoods of fishing communities are rendered largely illegible. My focus on fisherwomen also reveals the differential implications of such enclosures within fishing communities, where women face a disproportionate burden to adapt, even as their less legible communal spaces present an avenue of hope.

Transformation of multi-scalar urban ecological commons in Mumbai

I now elaborate on land-use patterns in multi-scalar urban ecological commons in Mumbai, their categorical and spatial reworking by a state–elite alliance, and the gendered impacts of these transformations on resource management within koliwadas. The first sub-section focuses on the conversion of a former wetland into a state-managed garbage dump, which was then transformed into private development for the outsourced call center sector. I show the similarity in strategies undertaken by colonial and neoliberal regimes, both of which rely on sustained cooperation between the state and elite non-state actors. I also explain the postcolonial nation-state’s categorical reworking of broadly construed communal land–water use into more restrictive formulations of public space. Similar strategies threaten urban ecological commons within fishing communities, which is the focus of the following sub-section. I elaborate on fisher folks’ use and management of fish drying grounds, local street markets, and inter-household communal spaces. I explain how these are restricted and reworked by development schemes. My focus on fisherwomen illuminates the intersecting dimensions of adapting to such restrictions. Patriarchal expectations that shape gendered spatial divisions persist in resource management adaptations necessitated in light of shrinking commons. In particular, a depiction of inter-household communal space helps explain the patriarchal formulations within fishing communities as they manifest in gendered divisions of roles and spaces, even as their relative illegibility sometimes escapes enclosure.

Urban ecological commons edging fishing communities

In the past two decades, the most visible change in Malad has been a transformation in its built environment. Through such material reworking, Malad has become an area symbolic of the city’s neoliberal growth. The primary sector in this development has been that of outsourced call centers, which have come up on and around what was historically a communally used wetland. Elsewhere, I have focused on critical creative representations of toxic residues resulting from the conversion of the wetland into a garbage dump and subsequently into built form for the outsourced service sector (Parikh, 2020). Here, I focus on the enclosure of urban ecological commons as well as strategies entailed in these categorical and spatial conversions.

Wetlands and state–elite cooperation

The wetland formed an important communal space for Malad’s fishing communities. Malad has historically been occupied by fishing communities, similar to several others in the coastal city of Bombay (now Mumbai).³ These communities have historically relied on fishing for subsistence and livelihoods, a dependence that continues intergenerationally into the making of contemporary lives and livelihoods. There are presently 23 koliwadas (fishing settlements) located within the city’s administrative boundaries. As of 2005, Mumbai’s fisher population was estimated in the range of 50,000–100,000 people (Parthasarathy, 2011).⁴ For these communities, fishing activities primarily fulfill the role of subsistence. In many cases, fishing goes beyond the realm of subsistence, involving contracts with regional supermarket chains, wholesalers, restaurants, and global markets (Parthasarathy, 2011). Within Malad, two fishing communities—Malvani and Bhandarwada—are located near what is now Mindspace Malad, a call center hub. Malvani and Bhandarwada, like other koliwadas in the city, have historically been inhabited by several groups including: the Koli fishing community; the Bhandaris, who are involved in making seafaring vessels; and the East Indians, a Roman Catholic community evangelized by the Portuguese. These groups continue to reside in koliwadas.⁵

During the pre-colonial and colonial era, the area between the settlements of Koli communities and the creek leading into the Arabian Sea was characterized by a stretch of shallow flats. In these land–water bundles (cf. Chung, 2019), the depth of the water used to vary both by tide and seasonally, reaching a maximum depth of 1.7 meters. These shallow waters were conducive to small-scale subsistence agriculture such as rice. These crops were managed and maintained by women. Fishermen used to fish and swim in the wetland, treating it as a space for livelihood and leisure.

The wetland underwent a categorical transformation in land ownership under British colonial governance, with rippling impacts on land use as well. As explicated in the timeline (Figure 1), the British gifted the wetlands in Malad to the Dinshaws—an elite Mumbai-based family—for their loyalty to the colonial state.

Figure 1.

Timeline of land transactions for Mindspace Malad.

Following this transaction, Kolis were required to pay rent to the Dinshaws. By paying rent, they were able to access the wetland and obtain resources which facilitated the continuity of their households and communities. While they owned the land, the Dinshaws were required to obtain a no-objection certificate from the fishing community in order to sell the lot. The colonial transaction of the wetland depicted a categorical change, wherein a communal resource was rendered legible in the eyes of the state and passed on to elite control through the “informal” strategy of gifting. My claim of gifting as an informal planning mechanism of the colonial state builds on critical urban scholarship that articulates how the state facilitates private development through informal (Roy, 2005) and flexible mechanisms (Gururani, 2013). This scholarship has primarily focused on planning schemes that occur under a neoliberal regime. I extend this line of thinking by revealing colonial practices that precede these formulations even as they follow similar logics. Further, I argue that the colonial legacy forms a residue (cf. Collins, 2019) that helps coalesce contemporary power structures.

In 1968, the postcolonial nation-state acquired the shallow flats, converting the wetland into a garbage dump and using it as such for three decades. The conversion of water into land reveals similarities with other land infill schemes in colonial Bombay that has facilitated a growth in the city’s administrative boundaries. British Bombay consisted of seven islands connected through a set of wetland reclamation projects involving land infill, building of embankments, and flattening of hills (Perur, 2016). Having begun in the 18th-century, these reclamation efforts merged and incorporated islands dotted with fishing villages, paddy fields, and agricultural activities (Dossal, 1991, 2010).⁶ The conversion to a garbage dump changed the capacious communal use of the wetland, drying out the land–water bundle into a more narrowly conceived “public” use. The colonial land transaction had made this land legible in the eyes of the state, bringing forth preliminary shifts in land-use patterns. The postcolonial state’s conversion of the wetland into a dump has intensified constraints in communal land use. Here, a change in the morphology of the built environment was brought forth through both a categorical conversion to public space and a material reworking of water into land.

The neoliberal regime built on the power alliance formed during the colonial era combined with the postcolonial attention to the site. Neoliberal India has been marked by a shifting state discourse that centers the urban as the site for development intervention (Banerjee-Guha, 2009). Within this milieu, the development of Mindspace Malad was brought forth by closure of the garbage dump in 2002. The Wadias (acting on behalf of the Dinshaws)⁷ sold the land to K. Raheja with an agreement that K. Raheja would develop it and pay 12% of the sales, as well as a sum of $11.5 million (₹750 million) over 10 years in return (Parikh, 2020). The sale of land to K. Raheja indicated a departure from the Urban Land Ceiling Act of 1976, which stipulated that a landowner can only own a plot of land up to 500 square meters.⁸ Under the act, any excess of this area is declared a surplus and is acquired by the state government. This act has been poorly implemented, and many developers have been granted an exemption. The exemption has officially worked its way into the act for the construction of Information Technology services on lands designated as no-development or coastal regulation zones. The wetlands in Malad where Mindspace was constructed is one such example (DNA Correspondent, 2006). Thereafter, the state of Maharashtra repealed the Urban Land Ceiling Act entirely in 2007 (Jamwal, 2007). The reworking and exemption-making evidenced in the land transactions and construction of Mindspace Malad reveal the continuation of a colonial power alliance wherein the state promotes the interests of private developers.

The use of informal strategies to maintain state–elite cooperation—as manifested in the act of “gifting” during the colonial regime—also continues into neoliberal governance. In a city like Mumbai, where urban planning has always prioritized the concerns of various business leaders, the use of informal mechanisms under a neoliberal regime has exacerbated government support of the private sector. In addition to an alteration of land acquisition laws, the neoliberal state has made exemptions in land use to permit the growth of the outsourced industry on a former dump site. In doing so, they have permitted the conversion of “public” land into private development, a shift which, as I have explained, ignored existing communal patterns of using a space characterized by changing land–water boundaries. The city government of Mumbai has also presented its alliance with large-scale private stakeholder interests by investing in a wide-ranging service sector and an extension of support from the local elite to include international companies. Further, the privatization of services and the creation of a business-friendly environment are supported through planning provisions that relax land-use zoning to permit new office locations, interchange of land use in dilapidated areas, and removal of constraints on both land-use conversion and transfer of land to service industries (Banerjee-Guha, 2002). These interventions have created conditions to build a hub for transnational call centers in the area of Malad in Mumbai.

As I have shown, land transactions illustrate the powerful alliance formed between the state and elite non-state actors within a neoliberal regime, their continuity of power from earlier forms of governance, and their use of informal strategies. Within these already power-laden dynamics, unequal gender relations render fisherwomen even more vulnerable, evidenced in the disproportionate labor they have to put in to adapt to the reworking of various scales of communal spaces under urban development processes, as is the focus of the next section.

Communal spaces within fishing communities

I now turn to three spaces that speak to the multiple scales of urban ecological commons impacted by development processes within koliwadas. Through an elaboration of land-use and resource management patterns in fish drying grounds, street markets, and semi-public household spaces, I show how the production of narrowly framed public and private sector growth renders differential communal use illegible. I also illustrate the patriarchal notions that structure varying levels of public and private spaces within Koli communities, and how these divisions perpetuate or open other possibilities with the introduction of new development schemes.

Fish drying grounds

The layout of Koli settlements in Malad is shaped by communal land rights and spatial requirements of fishing activities. In these villages, individual houses are located on spines that trail off from centrally located communal spaces. The layout is similar to Mumbai’s numerous other koliwadas, where there is extensive communal land that is central for managing livelihoods. These community-managed spaces are reserved for activities such as fishing, boat repair, fish drying, and drying of nets. Subsidiary activities such as repair enterprises, ice factories, and fish markets exist in close conjunction to fishing and often occupy community land as well (Shetty et al., 2007). These spaces that act as an ecological common do not fall neatly within the distinct binary of public and private space and have been susceptible to changing land-use allocations.

Since the 1980s, Malvani and Bhandarwada, like fishing villages across Mumbai, have faced pressure from the state and the private sector for land-use conversion, particularly enclosures into real-estate parcels. This pressure has been especially acute on community land that lacks clear land titles or had joint ownership. Such spaces are often labeled as “public land” in government-issued development plans, a category that fails to capture the nuance of community-managed spaces. A re-categorization of community land as public has rendered it vulnerable to enclosure, facilitating the government to transform it or hand it off for private development.

These systems of land re-classification can be traced back to the 1980s, when the federal maritime board took up “public” land adjoining the sea and claimed it by constructing a fence around it. Since then, developers have managed to obtain small pockets of land in and around Malad’s koliwadas and demanded a wide access road on completion of building construction. Such planning strategies, where infrastructure is introduced following private development, has had devastating effects on Koli communities. For instance, Figure 2 shows a snapshot of Mumbai’s development plan, on which one of Malvani’s community leaders made crosses to indicate to me where roads (labeled in orange) were put in after the construction of real-estate, while the faint lines below indicated a razed built environment that served residential, communal, and commercial functions. These wide roads are also meant to create vehicular access for newer development schemes that places existing street usage—such as markets—at risk. As such, wide roads have destroyed built form and accompanying semi-public space.⁹

Figure 2.

Image of development plan denoting roads that cut through the existing urban fabric in the Malvani koliwada, located in Malad.

Street markets

The semi-public spaces referred to above, often unmarked for any specific program, are crucial for daily and weekly markets. In these markets, seen in Figure 3, fish is the primary commodity. An overwhelming majority of the vendors and buyers are fisherwomen. Fishing is a gendered activity, with men going out to fish in the wee hours of the morning, while women complete domestic chores. Later in the morning, men return home with their haul, and following an afternoon siesta, they typically spend time drying nets and conducting repair tasks.¹⁰ Meanwhile, women sell any fish not required for subsistence. They do so through house-to-house visits in apartment buildings, at local markets within koliwadas, and markets in other neighborhoods.

Figure 3.

Street market in Malad’s koliwada.

Women are the primary actors—as both buyers and sellers—in these markets. Within local street markets, some fisherwomen sell excess fish left over after subsistence, while others buy fish for household consumption if their husbands have not had a good haul. The lack of a good haul has become increasingly prevalent following the concretization of wetlands and toxicity resulting from construction of call centers (cf. Parikh, 2020). Families who reside in the koliwada or at its edges but are not involved in fishing livelihoods also visit these markets to purchase fish. These markets also act as small-scale retail centers for groceries and other essentials. Beyond the temporary setup for selling and buying of fish and produce, small general stores that operate within fishing villages are located on streets looking out into temporary markets. At their shopfronts, people gather and socialize, especially when markets are in operation. As such, these markets play an important role in the life of the community, fulfilling various social, household, and livelihood functions.

While the loss of fish and of market space impacts men and women within Koli communities, women tend to be responsible for managing masculinity and otherwise adapting to these changes. Such management reveals a gendered ideology that shapes household roles. My interviews with fisher folk revealed that men were uncomfortable selling fish because they considered it women’s work and were also unhappy that their wives and daughters bought fish hauled by other fishermen, as it made them feel “less manly.” For some men, the fact that their wives now participated in the market economy by buying fish reflected the gravity of their losses, despite the fact that fisherwomen had already been active participants in the market by selling fish. The fisherwomen, however, thought differently about this. They felt that “manliness was well and good, but everyone wanted food on the table at tenight.”¹¹ As such, pressures from reduced availability of fish and loss of market space have been exacerbad by a continuation of gendered household roles that prevail within fishing communities.

Because of the scarcity of fish and continuing gendered division of labor, many men in Bhandarwada are unemployed. Some of them had taken up jobs as security guards and other low-wage positions in Mindspace Malad,¹² often for lots they previously used to own. Several others refused to do so. For some, it was “a question of honor,”¹³ not wanting to protect land for those who stole it from them. Others decided not to do so because they considered the remuneration, which was often below $86.18 (₹6000) a month,¹⁴ to be insufficient. The absence of subsistence activities has made the lack of cash availability stemming from unemployment or underemployment an especially glaring issue.

The re-categorization of “public land” that is utilized as ecological commons and street markets into spaces for private development renders the Koli community vulnerable. This conversion process fails to acknowledge existing land-use practices and has been exacerbated by the generous support the state accords to real-estate developers under a neoliberal regime. The threat in these areas is particularly grave because koliwadas occupy sea-facing land, which is considered prime property from a real-estate perspective. The threat plays out directly when communal land within villages is enclosed for contested forms of re-development and in subtler ways when land adjoining koliwadas undergoes transformation. As I have shown, the adaptation to such threats is disproportionately gendered at the household level.

Semi-public household spaces

In addition to buying and selling fish, women in fishing communities are responsible for a variety of household functions, including cooking. In fishing villages, cooking is carried out on woodstoves which are fueled by mangrove sticks. These sticks are collected from coastal edges and are subsequently stored in inter-household spaces off of kitchens. A focus on the use of these spaces provides important insights about environmental practices that help make inter-scalar and gendered links across ecological commons. Furthermore, I situate these spaces within the threats posed by the enclosure of communal space to form private property by way of the state, even as I show the gaps within this broader context that escape notice.

Malad’s heightened real-estate value following the development of Mindspace Malad has led to an increased interest in maximizing its market potential. Such interest manifests as threats to mangroves in and around Malad from state-led developmental plans that allocate communal lands for narrowly understood public transformation and illegal attempts at land infill by private real-estate developers. Such developmental efforts have been critiqued for wreaking ecological damage. Mangroves act as a buffer between land and sea, and as such are significant in preventing flooding, which is crucial given the intensity of monsoon rainfall in Mumbai (Deshpande, 2016).¹⁵

Ecological critiques against mangrove depletion are complemented and deepened by household practices, which have not received much attention or visibility. Mangroves form a vital fuel source for woodstoves in koliwadas, for which sticks are collected slowly over time. Such slow collection facilitates the long-term sustenance of mangroves. Fisherwomen are responsible for collecting these sticks, which they do early each morning. As seen in Figure 4, these sticks are dried in open areas between houses, an important step to make them a viable fuel source. These spaces between houses are communally owned and managed and are considered the domain of women. Such a gendered spatiality is reinforced by its point of access, which is from the kitchen. While the removal and conversion of mangroves threatens the urban ecology of the city at multiple scales, spaces where women—within and across households—store sticks often go unnoticed. These lively spaces, which lie liminally in already diverse property regimes, allow for the continuity of household practices at the communal level without being easily co-opted into development schemes. Fisherwomen’s household activities and practices of managing ecological resources provide an alternative form of environmental engagement, one that relies on the existence of commons at the household and community scale.

Figure 4.

Alley adjoining house in Malvani where fisherwomen store mangrove sticks.

Conclusion

This paper analyzes the uneven legibility of Mumbai’s urban ecological commons at multiple scales. I show how colonial legacies set the stage for neoliberal state–elite cooperation that facilitates the conversion of communal land into private property by way of “public” categorization. I posit that such spatial restructuring has gendered underpinnings, as is evidenced in resource management and adaptation patterns. In doing so, I make the following interventions at the intersection of FPE and UPE.

First, relaxations in zoning and other policies facilitating Mindspace Malad’s development have occurred through a categorical transformation of communally used space into narrowly defined “public” land, which has heralded its enclosure to form private property. Communal spaces, with their changing land–water boundaries, are rendered illegible. The state has reconfigured such community-managed land as public, subsequently handing it off to real-estate developers for service sector growth. The categorical conversion paves the way for material change in these spaces, with heightened impact on ecological spaces with communal management. Such changes have materialized by infilling the wetland with the city’s garbage and subsequently with the construction of glass-and-steel buildings for the service sector.

Through a focus on the categorical and material transformations in Mumbai’s urban ecological commons, this paper contributes to a dialogue between FPE and UPE on the reworking of the public sphere. I reveal the tensions between community- and state-held perspectives, arguing for a broader conception of the public domain beyond existing categorical and material designations. In tandem with the expansive attention to the enclosure of rural commons, these insights also contribute to a capacious understanding about the restructuring of urban commons and their reverberating effects on environmental resource access at a communal level.

Second, state–elite cooperation in neoliberal enclosures depicts continuities with colonial strategies for land transfer and development. Under British colonial rule, the wetland in Malad was gifted to elite non-state actors. I argue that this process of gifting is akin to what has been identified in critical urban scholarship as informal strategies adopted by the neoliberal state. The coalescing of power and presence of strong networks between the state and elite non-state actors under a colonial regime continues into neoliberal formulations that drive Mumbai’s urbanism. Similar to other contexts, the introduction of neoliberalism in India is marked not by a retreat of the state, but rather a shift in its role according greater support to the private sector. In this regard, the state reworks or makes exemptions in policies and land use to support private sector growth, which, as I have shown, cut across a range of issues. This is observable in the state’s decision to make an exception in the Urban Land Ceiling Act that facilitated enclosure processes for Malad’s development, whereby a single real-estate developer could own and develop a large tract of urban land. We also witness state support for private development in the justification and introduction of roads following the construction of apartment buildings in Malad.

My focus on continuities in state–elite cooperation from colonial to neoliberal regimes contributes to calls for an intersectional perspective within feminist political ecological scholarship that accounts for impacts of the colonial residue (cf. Collins, 2019) and their patriarchal implications on environmental change (Mollett and Faria, 2013). In doing so, I also historicize the use of informal strategies by the state, thereby extending their scholarly scope in articulating development processes (Gururani, 2013; Roy, 2005).

Third, I show the spatiality and gendered dimensions of commons at multiple scales within koliwadas. The challenges urban development poses to fish drying grounds, local fish markets, mangroves located at land–water boundaries, and stick drying areas between households refract in differential ways. The threats posed to local markets from road widening processes and decreased fish availability deepen women’s labor burdens, who are primary buyers and sellers in these markets. Fisherwomen also have to manage masculinity, grappling with men’s hesitation or refusal to participate in roles that are traditionally considered women’s domain. In addition to local markets, women are responsible for household cooking, which entails the use of sticks obtained from nearby mangroves, which too are facing threats from urban development schemes. Despite these concerns, I show how a lack of legibility permits the unobserved continuity of gendered communal and household environmental activities—as seen here in the liminal stick drying and storage area between households.

My focus on fisherwomen’s role in the face of threats to environmental resources emerging from development schemes extends feminist and urban political ecological scholarship on the role of household spaces in the production of urban life. I also illustrate the significance of an intersectional approach in revealing the differential underpinnings of communally used space along gendered lines, women’s role in the reproduction of fishing communities, their disproportionate labor in adapting to shrinking resource availability, and “lively” spaces whose lack of legibility can, in some ways, enable continuity and a sense of hope.

The role and differential legibility of communally managed urban environments at multiple scales are vital to consider given the developmental changes the city and its coast are witnessing. Land infill efforts for a coastal road in the Arabian Sea along Mumbai’s western coast have rapidly proceeded during the lockdown accompanying the global pandemic. This project has been hotly contested for the past several years, with objections being filed on multiple grounds, coalescing around the extensive environmental damage that will accompany a project with questionable public benefit (Deshpande, 2020). The building of the coastal road is expected to have devastating impacts on Mumbai’s fishing communities—through changing marine ecologies and associated lack of access to coastal commons, restructuring of other communal spaces within koliwadas, and the real-estate pressure that is expected to follow (Wagh and Indorewala, 2015). We can anticipate that these changes will likely exacerbate inequities wrought by previous construction activity, which have had differential impacts within households, revealed continuities between colonial and neoliberal developmental activities, and privatized urban environmental commons by way of “public” categorizations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my research participants for their time, my dissertation committee, and my colleagues at Penn State and Dartmouth College for their helpful and incisive feedback. Many thanks to Kate Derickson and the three reviewers for their guidance in strengthening the focus of the paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Society of Woman Geographers.

Notes

ORCID iD

Aparna Parikh

Aparna Parikh is a feminist urban geographer and currently a lecturer at Dartmouth College. Her work focuses on gendered dimensions of urban environmental belonging in South Asian cities facing the intertwined pressures of global capitalism and nationalist patriarchy.

References

Adams

Juran

Ajibade

(2018) ‘Spaces of exclusion’ in community water governance: A feminist political ecology of gender and participation in Malawi’s urban water user associations. Geoforum 95: 133–142.

Agarwal

(1994) A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Vol. 58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Banerjee-Guha

(2002) Shifting cities: Urban restructuring in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly 37(2): 121–128.

Banerjee-Guha

(2009) Neoliberalising the ‘urban’: New geographies of power and injustice in Indian cities. Economic and Political Weekly 44(22): 95–107.

Blaikie

(1985) The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in the Third World. London: Longman.

Blomley

(2019) The territorialization of property in land: Space, power and practice. Territory, Politics, Governance 7(2): 233–249.

Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (2010) Marine Fisheries Census 2010 Maharashtra. Kochi: Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute.

Chatterje

(2020) Coastal road reclamation may harm coral patch at Haji Ali. Hindustan Times, 17 June 2020.

Chung

(2019) The grass beneath: Conservation, agro-industrialization, and land–water enclosures in postcolonial Tanzania. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109(1): 1–17.

10.

Clement

Jane Harcourt

Joshi

, et al. (2019) Feminist political ecologies of the commons and commoning. International Journal of the Commons 13(1): 1–15.

11.

Collins

(2019) Colonial residue: REDD+, territorialisation and the racialized subject in Guyana and Suriname. Geoforum 106: 38–47.

12.

Deshpande

(2016) Urban planners, greens see red. The Hindu, 1 January 2016, sec. Mumbai.

13.

Deshpande

(2020) Who is to blame for the 2020 Mumbai floods? HuffPost India, 14 August 2020, sec. News.

14.

DNA Correspondent (2006) Govt gets 300-acre bonus. DNA, 2006.

15.

Domínguez Rubio

Fogué

(2013) Technifying public space and publicizing infrastructures: Exploring new urban political ecologies through the square of general V Ara Del R Ey. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(3): 1035–1052.

16.

Doshi

(2013) Resettlement ecologies: Environmental subjectivity and graduated citizenship in Mumbai. In: Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp.225–248.

17.

Doshi

(2019) Greening displacements, displacing green: Environmental subjectivity, slum clearance, and the embodied political ecologies of dispossession in Mumbai. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43(1): 112–132.

18.

Dossal

(1991) Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1845–1875. New York: Oxford University Press.

19.

Dossal

(2010) Theatre of conflict, city of hope: Mumbai 1660 to present times. OUP Catalogue. Available at: https://ideas.repec.org/b/oxp/obooks/9780198064381.html (accessed 22 March 2016).

20.

D’Souza

Nagendra

(2011) Changes in public commons as a consequence of urbanization: The Agara Lake in Bangalore, India. Environmental Management 47(5): 840.

21.

Faria

(2017) Unsettling the sediments of violence. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35(4): 584–588.

22.

FE Bureau (2015) Wadia-Raheja disputed land may be worth Rs 23,000 crore. The Financial Express, 11 April 2015.

23.

Gandy

(2008) Landscapes of disaster: Water, modernity, and urban fragmentation in Mumbai. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 40(1): 108–130.

24.

Ghertner

(2020) Lively lands: The spatial reproduction squeeze and the failure of the urban imaginary. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44(4): 561–581.

25.

Gidwani

(2013) Six theses on waste, value, and commons. Social & Cultural Geography 14(7): 773–783.

26.

Gidwani

Baviskar

(2011) Urban commons. Economic & Political Weekly 46(50): 42–43.

27.

Giordano

(2003) The geography of the commons: The role of scale and space. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(2): 365–375.

28.

Gururani

(2013) Flexible planning: The making of India’s ‘millennium city’ Gurgaon. In: Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability. Vol. 1. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

29.

Hartmann

(2012) Uneven urban spaces: Accessing trash in Managua, Nicaragua. Journal of Latin American Geography 11(1): 143–163.

30.

Hovorka

(2012) Women/chickens vs. men/cattle: Insights on gender–species intersectionality. Geoforum 43(4): 875–884.

31.

Jamwal

(2007) Maharashtra Repeals Urban Land Ceiling Act. DownToEarth, 31 December 2007.

32.

Lawhon

Ernstson

Silver

(2014) Provincializing urban political ecology: Towards a situated UPE through African urbanism. Antipode 46(2): 497–516.

33.

Levien

(2012) The land question: Special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India. The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3–4): 933–969.

34.

McGeachan

(2014) Historical geography I: What remains? Progress in Human Geography 38(6): 824–837.

35.

McGeachan

(2019) Historical geography III: Hope persists. Progress in Human Geography 43(2): 351–362.

36.

Mansfield

(2004) Neoliberalism in the oceans: ‘Rationalization,’ property rights, and the commons question. Geoforum 35(3): 313–326.

37.

Millington

(2018) Linear parks and the political ecologies of permeability: Environmental displacement in São Paulo, Brazil. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42(5): 864–881.

38.

Mollett

Faria

(2013) Messing with gender in feminist political ecology. Geoforum 45: 116–125.

39.

Mollett

Faria

(2018) The spatialities of intersectional thinking: Fashioning feminist geographic futures. Gender, Place & Culture 25(4): 565–577.

40.

Myers

(2008) Peri-urban land reform, political-economic reform, and urban political ecology in Zanzibar. Urban Geography 29(3): 264–288.

41.

Nightingale

(2019) Commoning for inclusion? Political communities, commons, exclusion, property and socio-natural becomings. International Journal of the Commons 13(1): 16–35.

42.

Njeru

(2006) The urban political ecology of plastic bag waste problem in Nairobi, Kenya. Geoforum 37(6): 1046–1058.

43.

Parikh

(2019) Liminality of women’s leisure in Mumbai, India. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. Epub ahead of print 1 July 2019. DOI: 10.1177/2399654419859358.

44.

Parikh

(2020) Urban as palimpsest: Neoliberal environments, fishing livelihoods, and toxic landscapes in Mumbai, India. GeoHumanities 6(1): 139–154.

45.

Parthasarathy

(2011) Hunters, gatherers and foragers in a metropolis: Commonising the private and public in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly 46(50): 54–63.

46.

Perur

(2016) Story of cities #11: The reclamation of Mumbai—From the sea, and its people? The Guardian, 30 March 2016, sec. Cities.

47.

Phadke

(2015) Mumbai coastal road: A SWOT analysis. The Indian Express, 16 June 2015.

48.

Ribot JC and Peluso NL (2003) A theory of access. Rural sociology 68(2): 153–181.

49.

Roy

(2005) Urban informality: Toward an epistemology of planning. Journal of the American Planning Association 71(2): 147–158.

50.

Sato

Alarcón

JMS

(2019) Toward a postcapitalist feminist political ecology’ approach to the commons and commoning. International Journal of the Commons 13(1): 36–61.

51.

Schroeder

(1993) Shady practice: Gender and the political ecology of resource stabilization in Gambian garden/orchards. Economic Geography 69(4): 349–365.

52.

Shetty

, Gupte R, Patil R, et al. (2007) Housing Typologies in Mumbai. Mumbai: Collective Research Initiative Trust.

53.

Singh

(2020) ‘Uncommon’ flooding in south Mumbai, heritage buildings affected. The Indian Express, 2020.

54.

Sultana

(2009) Fluid lives: Subjectivities, gender and water in rural Bangladesh. Gender, Place and Culture 16(4): 427–444.

55.

Sultana

(2011) Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict. Geoforum 42(2): 163–172.

56.

Swyngedouw

Heynen

(2003) Urban political ecology, justice and the politics of scale. Antipode 35(5): 898–918.

57.

Truelove

(2011) (Re-) conceptualizing water inequality in Delhi, India through a feminist political ecology framework. Geoforum 42(2): 143–152.

58.

Truelove

(2019) Gray zones: The everyday practices and governance of water beyond the network. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109(6): 1758–1774.

59.

Turner

(2017) Political ecology III: The commons and commoning. Progress in Human Geography 41(6): 795–802.

60.

Venkataramani

(2017) Identification, materiality and housing transformations in Mumbai. In: Trends and Issues in Housing in Asia: Coming of an Age. Abingdon, Oxon and New York, NY: Routledge, p.278.

61.

Wagh

Indorewala

(2015) Impacts of the coastal road project on Koliwadas. Collective for Spatial Alternatives (CSA) (blog). 9 October 2015. Available at: https://csaweb.org/2015/10/09/impacts-of-the-coastal-road-project-on-koliwadas/ (accessed 21 September 2020).

62.

Wagh

Indorewala

(2016) Mumbai’s planners propose ingenious way to create more open space: Just change the definition. Scroll.In, 29 July 2016.

63.

White

Borras

Jr Hall

, et al. (2012) The new enclosures: Critical perspectives on corporate land deals. The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3–4): 619–647.

64.

White

(2012) Gendered experiences of dispossession: Oil palm expansion in a Dayak Hibun Community in West Kalimantan. The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3–4): 995–1016.

65.

Zimmer

Véron

Cornea

(2020) Urban ponds, environmental imaginaries and (un) commoning: An urban political ecology of the pondscape in a small city in Gujarat, India. Water Alternatives 13(2): 225–247.