Three hegemonic phenomena dictate the fate of slums in contemporary Mumbai, India. First, the teleological statement: “Mumbai is to be Slum Free.” This ubiquitous proclamation denounces the possibility that the practices through which slum-residents build urban habitats can help rethink urban planning, and in doing so, relegates slums to the realm of “non-planning.” Second, the dominance of neoliberal slum policies, which reify localities built by residents over years into lands with a “developmental value” and alienate residents from their memories, desires, and the sociality embedded in the built environment. And third, the utilitarian impulse of urban development, which uses planning as instrumental means to achieve specific ends. This instrumentality can be traced back to colonialism, during which the ideologies of industrious reason and utilitarianism played a key role in the capitalist transformation of colonized lands. This relationship between means and ends, normalized today, legitimizes the will and the power to “improve” the world of “others” in the names of planning, development, and progress.

This dissertation is a response to these three hegemonic phenomena. It uses the concepts of mimesis, excess, and aesthetics to present ethnographic stories about four objects—idle time, films, toilets, and waste, located in the quasi-fictitious Muslim-dominated slum of Toba Tek Nagar. These stories explore four interrelated themes: Chapter One highlights how everyday storytelling, while idling in public spaces, is significant to confronting urban violence and slum planning; Chapter Two describes how rundown video-theaters and locally produced crime-shows become spatial and virtual mediums for residents to construct imaginary worlds in a melancholic context; Chapter Three explores the subject-positions and practices through which residents navigate the world of neoliberal developmental programs in order to build community toilets in their localities; and Chapter Four documents how the ongoing modernization of Mumbai’s waste-management system encloses and divides the common spaces of waste collection and recycling, and its varied impacts on waste pickers. Each story provides a thick description of the daily life and politics that constitute these objects, and contextualizes them within Mumbai’s history. The conclusion draws on the ethnographic insights to conceptualize planning as a form of “commoning.”