The Mumbai Coastal Road, popularly imagined as a cure for traffic jams and an errand of urban modernity, is itself more than a civil engineering enterprise. It represents a more profound cultural and political story—how a city imagines its future and whose desires inform that vision. Whereas Part 1 focuses on the ecological and community-scale displacement narrative, this second part looks at the rival aspirations for modernity, urban greenery, and the reimagining of histories from a sociological context.
Aspirational Aesthetics and "World-Class" Urbanism
Policymakers and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) alike invoke the language of world-class infrastructure often. And it is not only technocratic—this language is ideological. It is informed by a neoliberal urban imagination in which cities globally compete for investment and reputation, often through the "spectacularization” of infrastructure. Coastal roads, sea links, and promenades become developmental symbols, even though their advantages are not enjoyed equally among citizens.
As urban sociologist Ananya Roy has argued, such infrastructure schemes usually constitute a "politics of inclusion and exclusion," as dreams of a middle-class public are translated into reality, often at the expense of marginalized communities. But these dreams are not shared equally. They tend to reflect the capitalist state's common preference for clean, sanitized, car-friendly environments, often marked by open spaces and imposing architecture. All while marginalizing the organic, diverse, and lived-in textures of working-class spaces.
The Middle-Class Imagination and Greenwashing
Some of the backing for the project comes from the hope of recovering green space, a valuable resource in Mumbai. With the city being one of the most urbanized places in the world, public pressure to have open spaces such as gardens, cycle lanes, and promenades is not surprising. However, researchers have often made the case that when it comes to ecological wellness, quality matters as well as quantity: mere square miles of open space helps, but he quality, diversity, and connectivity are equally, if not more critical for making an ecological impact. For example, a study in Beijing situates the extreme importance of the variety, density, and quality of biodiversity planning in comparison to simple greenwashing structures.
Suburban dwellers, who are driven by elite environmentalism, can see these new spaces as "restorative." This is reflected in their reporting of such spaces being announced. But this restorative urbanism is shallow when it covers vibrant ecosystems (such as mangroves and tidal flats) with man-made landscapes lacking common usage, such as fishing, communal congregation, or mangrove gathering.
In addition, the very concept of beautification can turn exclusionary. If promenades are fenced and guarded, then they subtly deter entry by street vendors, fisherfolk, and marginal people, reinforcing class-based geographies of belonging.
The Politics of Silence: Whose Voices Get Heard?
One of the major sociological shortcomings of the project is the silencing of alternative urban visions.. Studies by the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) and interviews conducted by organizations such as GroundXero indicate that fisherfolk and squatters were excluded from Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA), even though they are reliant on the coasts being remade.
This is part of a broader Indian urban phenomenon in cities, where public consultation processes are out of reach for the urban poor. As political theorist Partha Chatterjee explains in Politics of the Governed, relations between the state and society in India tend to render the urban poor as subjects to be controlled rather than citizens to be asked. One major example of this was when the Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) conducted for the Mumbai Coastal Road project just outright did not consult or account for the lived realities of women from the Koli community. These women play a critical role in the fishing economy through manual fishing, sorting, and selling. This omission was not a simple technical oversight, but rather reflects a deeper structural relation in urban planning where informal and gendered labor remains invisible. In Part 1 of this series, we explored a report on the local protests on the MCF project that showcased that women from Koliwadas were neither approached during consultations nor represented in impact data, despite being disproportionately affected by declining fish stocks and the loss of nearshore access (GroundXero, 2019). Their exclusion from planning processes shows not just bureaucratic negligence but a sociopolitical marginalization of knowledge systems, livelihoods, and community rights rooted in generations of coastal stewardship.
Public Transport vs. Private Gain
One such contradiction is in the project's declared intention: alleviating traffic congestion. Analysis of this claim based on one of the most well-known paradoxes in transportation, the Downs-Thomson paradox, suggests that adding supply to the road only triggers additional demand for private automobiles. However, more than 80% of Mumbai commuters use public transport, and the coastal road disproportionately favors the private car-owning elite. The MCF Project clearly shows a prioritization and favouring of car-based infrastructure in urban transport planning, especially over investments in bus transit, local railway growth, metro expansion, and pedestrian-friendly designs.
Commodification of the Coastline
As we convert the coastline into a trimmed, aestheticized space for an imagined ideal, especially one that work well on social media, there is a clear commodification of the commons. The conversion is not value-free and selectively redelivers public assets by converging with strategies for city branding. This transformation of Mumbai’s coast from working shoreline to beautified infrastructure illustrates what urban theorist Henri Lefebvre called a loss of the right to the city: the ability of residents not just to inhabit space, but to shape its form and function. For generations, Koli fishing communities have engaged with the coastline not as a scenic backdrop, but as a working commons—launching boats, drying nets, gathering shellfish, among others. These were not leisure spaces but livelihood spaces, deeply entangled with cultural and ecological rhythms. This is not to say that two ideas of spaces cannot inhabit the same physical structure, but when something like promenades and cycle tracks replace these means for livelihood, the Kolis are physically displaced from coastal access and symbolically erased from the city’s vision of modernity, growth, etc. This is not just a matter of losing access to space, but also is one of losing recognition within it. By understanding this case of spatial injustice, we see that the Mumbai Coastal Road doesn’t just build over land; it builds over memory, function, and community.
The Mumbai Coastal Road serves as a case study in competing claims to space: state-led visions of progress vs. community-rooted practices of sustenance. From a sociological point of view, resolving this tension requires more democratic planning, where fisherfolk and informal workers are recognized as urban stakeholders. This would help in including more robust ecological metrics that go beyond beautification to include biodiversity, sustainability, and resilience. There are a plethora of examples and successful case studies that would serve to help pave out alternative methods of urban planning: This case study on Biophilic design of Singapore, or that of the Green Space Contract of Hamburg, or even the Sponge City model of Bangkok. All these are exemplars of how there are multiple ways of ways for planning and caring for our cities and urban spaces, which makes it livable and enjoyable for all species inhabiting it.
Nitin Kumar
