Overview of the project: Mumbai and the global pressures on older industrial regions

For the next week, I'll be working with my brother, Hunter, on a consulting project with the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority. Hunter was the planning director for the City of Cleveland for twenty+ years, and he now heads the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at Youngstown State.

Hunter is also deeply involved in thinking about regions from a physical planning perspective. He has been engaged with Brookings on their recent report on the Great Lakes, The Vital Center: A Federal-State Compact to Renew the Great Lakes Region. He is also engaged in a project with Bob Yaro at the Regional Planning Association in New York, America 2050.

I'm deeply involved with the Purdue Center for Regional Development, where we are working on new models of regional, workforce, economic and rural development. My work at Purdue is geared toward designing new approaches to regional economic development based on "open source" models of collaboration. We are implementing these models in a variety of areas, including the Workforce Innovations in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) initiative North Central Indiana.

Here in Mumbai, Hunter and I are here working with USAID and the International City Managers Association. Mumbai's leaders are interested in learning how older industrial regionas are coping with the challenges of globalization.

Mumbai, located in Maharashtra State in western India, is the commercial and financial capital of the country. Mumbai and its hinterland are growing at a fast pace and contribute substantially to the economy of both the state and the country. Mumbai municipal limits includes 12 million people (about the size of Ohio). About half of those people are urban poor, and that's a big part of the challenge facing Mumbai's leaders. In the region, the population is closer to 19 million.

Since India launched its economic reforms in 1991, Mumbai has been the cash cow. Far more cash has flowed out of the metro to the state than the state has reinvested in the metro. In recent years, Mumbai has experienced a consistent downturn in its economy and the quality of life of its citizens. Just getting this place to work has posed serious problems. These challenges are even more difficult with slower economic growth.

In September 2003, a local civic organization, Bombay First, and McKinsey consultants produced Vision Mumbai, a ten-year agenda to revitalize the city. The report set the goal of transforming Mumbai into a world-class city by 2013. You can download the executive summary of the report here.

We're here to get an update on the progress of their implementation and to give the MMRDA some guidance on implementation. I am particularly interested in the economic development sections of the McKinsey report. These sections are not very detailed, and accelerating growth will require the leaders in Mumbai to implement new models of economic development.

Like other regions, Mumbai has been hit by globalization. The textile industry, which provided the manufacturing backbone of the economy, has been seriously weakened by global pressures. In this way, Mumbai is not that much different from the industrial Midwest, which has seen its manufacturing base erode with global competition.

The challenges are complex, as this article outlines.