Remembering the river: Flood, memory and infrastructural ecologies of stormwater drainage in Mumbai

V. Chitra*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1855-1871
Number of pages17
JournalUrban Studies
Volume59
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2022
Externally publishedYes

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