Unexpected Outcomes: Land Ceilings, Rent Control, and the Rise of Real Estate in Bombay

Nikhil Rao — 2025-12-09T06:00:00Z

Paradoxically, Mumbai's neoliberal real-estate system has its origins in progressive legislation.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” When the Phoenix Mills compound in central Mumbai reopened in 1999 after a long closure, the former textile factory complex featured a bowling alley and a nightclub. It bore the distinction of being the first mill compound in Mumbai's storied textile mill district—Girangaon, or the village of mills—to transform itself from a manufacturing space

- Essays / Bombay, Mumbai, rent control, land ceilings, real estate, real-estate turn, legislation, governance

Plague and Urban Policy in Bombay, 1896–1914

Vanessa Caru & translated by Oliver Waine — 2022-11-18T06:00:00Z

What consequences can an epidemic have on a city? Vanessa Caru describes the ways in which a plague epidemic in Bombay at the turn of the 20th century changed the British colonial authorities' attitudes, the urban policies they implemented, and ultimately even the very morphology of the city.
On September 18, 1896, the first case of bubonic plague, in all likelihood spread by rats on board a boat from Hong Kong, was detected in Bombay (today Mumbai). As the first Indian city to be infected,

- From the Field / colonial urban planning, Mumbai, India, Bombay, history, urban policy, epidemic

Metropolitics

Unexpected Outcomes: Land Ceilings, Rent Control, and the Rise of Real Estate in Bombay

Plague and Urban Policy in Bombay, 1896–1914