Dear readers,
In 2017, a river in New Zealand, the Whanganui, was granted the same legal rights as a human being. The landmark status means harming the river is the same as harming a person. “A river has a right to flourish, free from pollution, and a right to flow,” Robert Macfarlane writes in his book Is a River Alive? Unfortunately, as cities developed and expanded, they curtailed rivers and forgot about their rights. Cities across India have exploited rivers ignoring other aspects which has led to a fractured relationship. This edition of Question of Cities reiterates the importance of restoring rivers as lifelines of cities, of reviewing the ‘river management’ approach, and calls for integrating them into urban planning to reestablish the river-people relationship.
The QoC Editorial argues that rivers are slowly being erased from people’s lives and imagination in cities. Seen largely as water sources, as dumping yards for waste, and their floodplains as developable land, the rivers remain disconnected from the rhythms of urban life. Rivers are – can be – a lot more to cities they flow through if only governments and people ‘see’ them and interact with what they offer, respect their rights – indeed, rivers have rights too – and forego the template of ‘urban river management’ which has led to more concretisation of rivers. Read it here.
Our imagination of rivers often contrasts with what we see in our cities. They are integrated into urban systems as stormwater drains, overlaid with sewage lines, carry domestic waste, and in the case of Vrishabhavathi River, become an outlet for industrial discharge turning it into a black flowing stream that winds through Bengaluru. This is not just a polluted river but a reshaped idea of a river within a city. The narrative of a river in violation like this is our anthropocentric way of thinking about rivers and their relationship with urban spaces, writes Fauwaz Khan, Urban Fellow at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in 2023. Read it here.
The Yamuna has been Delhi’s lifeline for centuries but the city now has a severed, mostly utilitarian, relationship with the river. Only two percent of the Yamuna flows through Delhi but the city is responsible for 76 percent of its pollution – uncontrolled after clean-up programmes of nearly Rs 8,000 crore over 33 years. Now, the riverfront ‘development’ has begun. The Yamuna has little resonance for most Delhiites but, for the few who still interact with it, it offers livelihoods. This photo essay by freelance journalist Umer Ahmed shows both the connection of the few and the city’s disconnect with the river. Read it here.
As the plan to develop the Mula-Mutha riverfront in Pune gathers momentum, many residents and environmental activists believe it’s a death knell for the river. Architect Sarang Yadwadkar, among those in the forefront resisting the project, thinks that Pune may be heading in the same direction as central Texas that recently saw massive flash floods. “We cannot ‘widen the rivers’ so that the water has more space. At least, we should not encroach upon the rivers and reduce it…Pune people have lost their connection with the river,” he says in an interview with Question of Cities. Read it here.
The idea of allowing rivers to reclaim space on their floodplains is not new. There have been programmes such as the ‘Room for the River’ in the Netherlands since the mid-1990s and the ‘Making Space for Water’ strategy in England, write Christina McCab and Jonathan Tonkin in The Conversation. However, such initiatives have been typically focused on flood protection but their new research shows that well-designed approaches can deliver ecological gains alongside flood protection. This is crucial because floodplain river systems are among the most valuable ecosystems of all. Read it here.
In our regular News Digest section read about the monsoon fury in Himachal; how climate change has affected traditional weather forecasts in Jharkhand; deadly Texas floods; climate change triples heatwave toll in Europe.
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Thank you,
Smruti
July 11, 2025