TY - JOUR
T1 - Remembering the river
T2 - Flood, memory and infrastructural ecologies of stormwater drainage in Mumbai
AU - Chitra, V.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Urban Studies Journal Limited 2021.
PY - 2022/7
Y1 - 2022/7
N2 - Mumbai’s storm water drainage system is rapidly transforming as incidences of heavy rainfall rise. Its transformation is built on the idea of conserving the city’s ‘rivers’ that were lost to urban development. While this move to recuperate a heritage of rivers seems like a step in the right direction, Mumbai’s drainage system was largely cobbled together over time through piecemeal interventions in an estuarine landscape. This article shows how by engineering a history of rivers, the city’s planning authorities set in motion an agenda to train the expansive estuarine and improvisational systems into governable riverine channels contained within the state’s developmental visions. It focuses on one major channel, the Mithi, to show how the rationality of disaster preparedness, the emergent calculus of carrying capacities, as well as infrastructure are braided into constructed ecological histories to inscribe a new hydrological order on the city. For Mumbai’s engineers, these changes introduce new scalar logics and alter the nature of the drainage assemblage. Mithi’s transformation is emblematic of how articulations of nature, technology and urban development are emerging from the anxieties of climate change.
AB - Mumbai’s storm water drainage system is rapidly transforming as incidences of heavy rainfall rise. Its transformation is built on the idea of conserving the city’s ‘rivers’ that were lost to urban development. While this move to recuperate a heritage of rivers seems like a step in the right direction, Mumbai’s drainage system was largely cobbled together over time through piecemeal interventions in an estuarine landscape. This article shows how by engineering a history of rivers, the city’s planning authorities set in motion an agenda to train the expansive estuarine and improvisational systems into governable riverine channels contained within the state’s developmental visions. It focuses on one major channel, the Mithi, to show how the rationality of disaster preparedness, the emergent calculus of carrying capacities, as well as infrastructure are braided into constructed ecological histories to inscribe a new hydrological order on the city. For Mumbai’s engineers, these changes introduce new scalar logics and alter the nature of the drainage assemblage. Mithi’s transformation is emblematic of how articulations of nature, technology and urban development are emerging from the anxieties of climate change.
KW - climate change
KW - disaster preparedness
KW - floods
KW - infrastructure
KW - urban ecology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85111891541&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/00420980211023381
DO - 10.1177/00420980211023381
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85111891541
SN - 0042-0980
VL - 59
SP - 1855
EP - 1871
JO - Urban Studies
JF - Urban Studies
IS - 9
ER -