How Mumbais flamingos and Koli fishers could help the city in its battle against flooding – Scroll.in

The monsoons of Mumbai never let us entirely forget that water can simultaneously exist in multiple states. As it rains, water held in the sea, land, atmosphere and vegetation swells and claims the city in all its forms. Moss covers surfaces, electronics emit excess current as moisture penetrates the earthing, doors distend, resisting their frames, chips lose their crunch, the smell of petrichor fills the lungs even as the winds and clouds clear our polluted skies.

Yet what gets spoken of the most is the visible water, pouring out of nullahs, overflowing from dams and making potholes and flooding streets and homes.

When speaking of cities, we have been trained by maps and satellite imagery, to notice only this visible water, even though it is only one threshold or moment in the hydrological cycle. The maps on which city planning, urban design, property law, public and environment policy operate, are snapshots, stills of a dynamic movement of tidal and atmospheric water.

A series that seeks to reimagine the futures of the coastal city of Mumbai in its climate-changed waters.

The ubiquitous nature of these maps, which are drawn in the driest moments of the year, directs us to imagine water only in its visible, liquid form contained in its cartographic limits.

In attempts to define the precise position of water, we have lost all tangible measure of its flow.

Delineating permanent high tide lines, river banks and coasts has erased clouds, mist, dew, waves, creeks, swells, storms, cyclones and rain from our consciousness. To map and extract a fixed position for water in a terrain born from moisture, we need to create languages of separation, and pitch land and water as opposing dualities. Water in this duality breaches boundaries and floods land, the city has to be defended from the monsoons, land has to be reclaimed from the sea.

In order to respond to the challenges of climate change to the compounding droughts and flooding, the struggles for ecological and social justice, the debate of resistance over retreat it is essential that this divide and inhabit different systems of observing the city and environment is questioned. The work of architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha offers us an alternative to the cartographic separation of land and sea in the form of a gradient of wetness.

The sea is very wet, the desert only less so, said Da Cunha.

In the Drawing on Wetness research of the Inhabited Sea project that aims to offer new ways in which Mumbai can be understood as a meeting of sea and monsoon rather than islands, I question the monolithic ideas of city and sea by asking what a flamingo could teach us about salinity, how Koli fishing can describe land from an aqueous perspective or how the local train can challenge assumptions about land making.

The post-human imagination pushes us to see beyond an anthropocentric world, into the lives of other living beings, self organising material systems, and machines. The video follows three agents Koli fishers, flamingos, and the local trains across this human, other-than-human animal, and machine spectrum and observes the ways that they inhabit and make the city. The practices of these agents transcend the duality of land-water, city-sea, organism-environment, artificial-natural. They see and draw different thresholds in the wet-dry gradient in order to operate.

The research uses drawings as tools to analyse and represent these alternate thresholds, and to offer a complex, monsoon-rich, entangled ground on which to design a more watery, resilient and just city.

Rhea Shah is a transdisciplinary environmental designer who believes design should be a cultural manifestation of ecological processes.

This is the fifth part of a series that seeks to reimagine the futures of the coastal city of Mumbai in its climate-changed waters. Read the entire series here.

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How Mumbais flamingos and Koli fishers could help the city in its battle against flooding - Scroll.in