Dear readers,

Dear readers,

Out of the 2.4 million water bodies in India listed in the Waterbody Census of 2023, only 2.9 percent were in urban areas; of these, 21 percent had dried up, built upon, or polluted.^[1] An estimated two out of every five wetlands and water bodies in India have been lost over the last three decades.^[2] As cities deal simultaneously with water scarcity and floods Question of Cities, brings the focus back to the severed relationship between land and water, and the fractured networks of water bodies. 

Development has meant more and more riverine areas, floodplains, wetlands, creeks, lakes, streams, and marshlands being landfilled for construction or turned into sewage drains. From the lakes in Bengaluru and Nagpur to create new urban enclaves to the Ulwe and Gadhi rivers in Navi Mumbai diverted for the new international airport, and scores of riverfront development projects underway, it has been forgotten that water bodies in cities are natural cooling and flood mitigation infrastructure. This is the third in our series examining the built environment by scholars and storytellers who responded to our Call for Papers.

In the lead essay, landscape architect and academician Resham Mehta, and architectural writer and researcher Rama Raghavan, point out that rivers vary across space as well as time but the policy standard is a 15-metre to 50-metre no-build zone, whether the river is a narrow city channel or a wide and wandering one. The fixed widths and blanket regulations allow development at the expense of ecological reality of rivers. The alternative context-responsive approach, they argue, would recognise a river’s ecology and hydrology, decipher the river-watershed relationship, delineate active floodplains, assign ecological performance criteria, and adapt urban plans to the river. Read it here.

In Chennai, where water scarcity alternates with floods, the built-up area tripled from 102 to 295 square kilometres between 1991 and 2021 while water bodies declined by 55 percent. Wetlands which covered about 80 percent of the city’s area in 1980 had reduced to 15 percent in 2010. The way the city has been built – hard infrastructure encroaching on water bodies – denies it the ability to safely move its waters across the landscape during the monsoon, and to store and use during the drier months, write researchers Anirudh Kishore and Sahil Mathew. The challenge is institutional as much as ecological, they argue and suggest ways forward. Read it here.

Kochi, the city that water made, is being unmade by water, at an accelerated pace. But the unmaking is uneven and reflects the fractured violences of caste, class, and feudal-colonial spatial logic, explains Abhinand Kishore, researcher, artist, and social practitioner in this intersectional essay. Areas caught between the land and sea, especially housing vulnerable communities, ask us to see development from a tripartite lens of social dispossession, spatial confinement to hazardous edges, and relentless violence of polluted water, incessant floods. Kochi must be reimagined as an ‘amphibious city’ that formally recognises wetlands and mangroves as critical public infrastructure, besides securing people’s Right to the City, especially in ecologically vulnerable areas, he writes. Read it here.

The hill town with the old water system built in tune with gravity now has water anxiety and private rooftop reservoirs, covered in iron grills to protect them from monkeys. Sonali Gupta, lawyer and anthropological archaeologist, writes that the building as if Shimla is a flat town and Kullu a riverfront has led to landslides and water shortages in the former and a corridor of damage during the monsoon in the latter. The ecology-based way forward is to accept that geology and water get the first word, not the last; sacred social geographies like devta routes and commons are not treated as mere folklore; and gravity, water and forest maps, and carrying capacity inform planning and building decisions. Read it here.

Nagpur’s water network – Nag River, Pili and Pora flowing into it, Ambazari and Futala lakes – was its natural cooling infrastructure. Now a drain for sewage and effluents, construction has shrunk it. Aniket Sawargaonkar, researcher and disaster management professional, analysed the severe heat wave on May 29, 2024, when temperature hit 47.63 degrees Celsius in Nagpur, and inferred that neighbourhoods in the vicinity of the lakes were cooler by four to eight degrees Celsius. But Nagpur’s water bodies diminished by 81 percent between 2000 and 2023 while built-up area more than doubled, showing that Nagpur built against its water network, he writes. Read it here.

In our regular section, News Digest, read some of the important and interesting news about environment and climate change — Heatwaves and lightning will now be recognised as natural calamities in India; Assam’s Adivasis continue agitation against hotel at Kaziranga; Wildfires singe Europe; 100s escape Greece by sea; The impact of strongest El Niño on humans; Climate change driving butterflies out of their habitats.

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Thank you,
Smruti
August 7, 2026