INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12743 273 © 2019 Urban research PUblications limited The authors would like to thank those who offered valuable comments on earlier drafts, including Gavin Shatkin, Daniel Falzon, Sudeshna Mitra, Ben Wisner, James Connolly, Phil Brown, Laura Senier, Sharon Harlan, and the three anonymous IJURR reviewers. — RESILIENT GROWTH: Fantasy Plans and Unplanned Developments in India’s Flood-Prone Coastal Cities Liza Weinstein, andreW rumbach and saumitra sinha Abstract Academic and policy literatures on urban climate resilience tend to emphasize ‘good planning’ as the primary means for addressing the growing risk of fooding 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 fooding 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 fooding. 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 fooding owing to tendencies to sidestep questions of politics, power and the distributional conficts that shape urban development. We conclude that eforts to reduce urban food risk would beneft from the research, methods and analytic concepts used to critically study cities, but signifcant gaps remain between these felds. Introduction In late April 2018, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) released its much-awaited revisions to the city’s development plan, outlining the priorities and regulatory frameworks to shape development in the city and region through the year 2034. The plan’s main priority, presented first in the introductory comments by Municipal Commissioner Ajoy Mehta, and emphasized throughout the 600-page document, is to redress Mumbai’s ‘space constraints’ through regulatory changes that open new land for development and increase building heights and floor space area (MCGM, 2018). While the plan acknowledges other challenges facing the city, including threats from climate-induced flooding, its focus is firmly on development- driven economic growth, facilitated by bolstered land supply. Among its strategies for increasing land, the plan reduces building restrictions on some of the city’s ecologically sensitive coastal areas, including roughly 300 hectares of salt pan lands along the eastern side of the island city ( ibid.; Chandran, 2018). Currently designated as protected wetlands, the salt pan lands are intertidal areas that, according to ofcials at the Metropolitan Mumbai Regional Development Authority (MMRDA), ‘are critically important from the point of view of flood protection as they are shallow, depressed areas holding sea water’ (Gadgil, 2016: paragraph 2). While the state government has long advocated the de-reservation of