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This article examines the changing housing rights regimes amidst the urban renewal currently underway in Shanghai and Mumbai. We examine the policies and regulations that govern residential security and housing tenure, the alteration of policy implementations by electoral and extra-electoral contestations, and the opportunities and strategies for housing activism in each context. We find that political contestations have enabled the construction of a more protective, although precarious, regime in Mumbai than in Shanghai. Despite striking differences, in both contexts housing rights regimes have produced fragmented urban citizenship rights by distributing protections unevenly and inconsistently to urban residents. Finally, although the forms of housing activism differ, residents and civil society groups in both Shanghai and Mumbai employ a variety of strategies in their resistance against demolitions and urban renewal. In the process, they become active urban citizens by articulating their rights to housing and by making new claims to the city.In his recent reflections on Lefebvre's classic essay, The Right to the City, David Harvey (2003a, p. 939) asserts that "the right to the city is not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart's desire". In this article, we contend that both sets of rights-the right of access and the right to change the city-are socially and politically structured, situated in particular legal institutions, political actions, and culturally mediated contexts. To illustrate this claim, we highlight the urban renewal efforts currently underway in Shanghai and Mumbai, comparing institutional reforms and political machinations in the cities, and reflecting upon the changing right to each city. Employing a comparative approach, our analysis reveals the particular manner in which the right to the city is socially and politically structured. In so doing, we adopt Harvey's two-part characterization, analyzing the changing regimes of access, specifically around housing rights, and the opportunities to resist those regimes and to employ measures to shape them.With a combined urban population of almost 975 million people, cities in China and India house roughly one-seventh of the world's total population. This demographically relevant detail becomes even more socially significant when we consider the tremendous * Correspondence should be addressed to Xuefei Ren,

Academic and policy literatures on urban climate resilience tend to emphasize ‘good planning’ as the primary means for addressing the growing risk of flooding in Asia's coastal megacities. Cities have come to rely on disaster and climate resilience plans to future‐proof their landscapes and protect vulnerable populations. Yet while data is collected, models are built and plans are drafted, environmentally destructive development practices continue unabated and often unchallenged. This article examines and seeks to explain the contradictions between a growing awareness of the risks of climate‐induced flooding in resilience plans and the continuation of development practices widely acknowledged to exacerbate those risks. It analyzes these contradictions in the context of Mumbai and Kolkata, India's largest coastal cities, which are facing the severest threats from climate‐induced flooding. Based on analyses of key resilience planning documents and both planned and unplanned developments in some of Mumbai's and Kolkata's most ecologically sensitive areas, our analysis reveals that resilience planning, promoted by the central government and international consultants, and presented in locally produced ‘fantasy plans’, fails to address the risks of climate‐change‐related flooding owing to tendencies to sidestep questions of politics, power and the distributional conflicts that shape urban development. We conclude that efforts to reduce urban flood risk would benefit from the research, methods and analytic concepts used to critically study cities, but significant gaps remain between these fields.

This article considers the fractured nature of state power in contemporary Mumbai. Based on a case study of the ongoing Dharavi Redevelopment Project, a 2‐billion US dollar initiative to redevelop Mumbai's most infamous ‘slum’ settlement as a mixed‐use, mixed‐income township, it details the new state strategies emerging to support urban development efforts in India today. Identifying the structural weaknesses that have traditionally hindered development planning in Mumbai, it describes how a private developer, acting as a political entrepreneur, has worked to consolidate the authority and resources necessary to overcome these institutional gaps and structural weaknesses. Situating the analysis in theories of state restructuring, this case sheds light on how the local Indian state is responding to the pressures associated with neoliberal globalization and competitive urbanism. While a growing literature in this area has offered important insights into emerging configurations of power, it remains overly focused on the role of NGOs in these efforts, failing to provide an adequate analysis of alliances between the state and other private actors. This article attempts to address this gap with an in‐depth examination of the political entrepreneur as a site of institutionalized, but ultimately incomplete, power in globalizing Mumbai.

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