One of the most influential practices in the modern world is that of the ‘conference’. It is an easily funded event that helps bring together themes, ideas, practices, resources, and political will into a consolidated moment. A conference can circulate themes across vast territories through its participants attending it from all sorts of places. The media picks up strands of arguments and disseminates them further.

There is a new and curious kind of conference making its presence felt these days. The grand ‘Urban Conference’ which is – at one and the same time – an intellectual meet where all kinds of complex ideas are discussed, and a trade-fair in which those very ideas are audited through pure commercial interests. They are then rejected through sophisticated debate or endorsed wholeheartedly before being dispatched to the media. They commission their own research – often of high quality – but manage to moderate the findings in subtle ways. The conference itself validates its own research and gets it closer to policy makers in one swift and efficient move. In the grand ‘Urban Conference’ intellectuals rub shoulders with builders who rub shoulders with financers who rub shoulders with politicians who rub shoulders – or are supposed to – with citizens at large. The attempt is to sell an idea and get everybody to buy it in the surest possible way, through intellectual argument, monitored by money.

Sometimes established architects are pushed in the forefront, being made into unwilling stars of these glittering events. After all, they are the perfect candidates – intellectual, creative, skilled, hands-on and media savvy. They can be highly persuasive and useful since they are natural connectors of disparate worlds. They can make a suspicious academic who has spent most of her life critically discussing urban markets, feel comfortable with a brazen real-estate developer who slowly appears to her eyes as ‘a nice guy after all, with an interesting point’.

These convivial conglomerations of city makers – engineers, intellectuals, architects, academics and finance companies – discuss subtle and abstract themes (The Urban Age, India Habitat Summit). However, they are also skillful diluters of their own research through dazzling gestures that eventually reward grand infrastructural and architectural projects needing huge amounts of money and finance. One has often seen many brilliant and critical economists and historians sitting defeated in one corner sipping their wine, silenced by the promise of yet another sponsored trip to another destination.

Today – after the artificial propping of the Dubai real-estate bubble – fuelled so clearly by speculation gone haywire, it will be only a matter of time when such conferences start to play a bigger role in creating a global Mumbai real-estate bubble (enveloping the mad bubbly market that our city already is with regard to housing) in the Asian region. Mumbai can well be the next willing bakra on the roulette of global speculation. It is easy for this beleagured infrastructure challenged city to be seduced by such promises and make short-sighted choices in the process.

In fact such an impending conference is sending feelers already. It has a clear agenda. It wants to sell the idea of the vertical city – build taller and higher – as a one-stop shop for all the city’s ills. In an ad, it has even subverted the spirit behind the work of one of India’s leading and most respected architects, who wrote a book about the importance of low-rise high-density clusters in Mumbai, by labeling his session as ‘High Rise, High Density’.

Such is the power of these grand conferences! Exercising a little caution in dealing with them won’t harm us.