Family experiences of urban transformation: entangled bodies, hopeful imaginations and embodied utopias

Abstract

We offer an analysis of embodied utopias, the everyday ways in which children, young people and their families experience urban transformation–urban change which has been imagined, designed and planned to be utopian. Lavasa, a private sector, hill city development in the Indian state of Maharashtra, is one such utopian vision. We use the lenses of citizenship, control, precarity and performance to show how participants embody utopia. In sites of major infrastructural change, development can take years, if not decades. Thus, children are spending their whole childhoods navigating utopian urbanism. We expose a series of intersecting vulnerabilities, impacting on participant mobility, education and livelihood. Despite this, we find a hopeful narrative where participants positioned their bodies as part of urban change. Our focus on embodied utopia complicates understandings of neoliberal utopian urbanism.