Two events make this an important year for Mumbai. The city is voting in a new set of 227 municipal corporators for the next five years and the authorities are undertaking a once-in-two-decades exercise to revamp the Development Plan, a land-use blueprint that will shape the city in the years to come. What better time, then, to look for ideas to improve Mumbai.

This is not a list of big-think city-wide makeovers – the kind that the government likes to commission every few years to convert Mumbai into Shanghai, Singapore, what have you. It does not cover multi-crore mega-infrastructure projects either. The ideas here focus on small physical improvements, the kind that make everyday life a little easier – proposals to make it easier to walk the streets in Marol, sit down for a minute at Fort, catch a bus across town or preserve an old-world neighbourhood.

Some of these plans are already in motion. Some offer alternatives to ongoing projects, like the proposals for more sensitive cluster redevelopment. Others are almost lab experiments, like the plan to introduce sewageeating- microbes at Powai Lake. What they all offer are serious solutions to ponder over for the new legislators who have taken their seats in the historic Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation Hall – and for the Mumbaikars who put them there.

Read about the Open Mumbai Exhibition happening at Nehru Centre.