"The Mantra of the Moment": What is the Future of Resilience? A case study of Mumbai, India

This senior project traces and critiques the discourse of resilience from its historical roots to its contemporary applications, and in response, offers a new framework to "rethink" resilience. The rise of resilience rhetoric can be regarded, in part, as a reaction to growing uncertainty in everyday life, especially in the face of severe and escalating effects related to climate change. Despite the term's novelty and increasing popularity across myriad contexts, especially urban environments which are the focus of this paper, I argue that the present incarnation of resilience remains susceptible to familiar critiques emphasizing the depoliticized and ahistorical logics that have long been used to frame development interventions. Using Mumbai, India as a case study, this thesis shows some of the specific ways in which the abstracted rhetoric of "resilience" falls short of apprehending the irreducible and intractable urbanization of Mumbai and the colonial histories that constitute it. As I will argue, the meaning and practice of resilience are shaped by competing and unequally powerful actors within Mumbai and beyond. Mumbai demonstrates the importance of integrating elements of a new framework of resilience that might address the current discourse's shortfalls both in theory and in practice.