Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability

6. From the Frying Pan to the Floodplain: Negotiating Land, Water, and Fire in Chennai’s Development

Introduction From late 2008 to 2009, the Tamil Nadu Public Works Department launched a spate of large-scale slum evictions targeting about 25,000 slum-dwellers in Chennai and its adjoining municipalities. This drive was aimed at clearing encroachments on nineteen water bodies to restore their water-holding and flood-carrying capacities. Ironically, some of the same water bodies had been declared “defunct” by the government’s Housing Board in the early 1990s, to defend its construction of a large-scale housing project by land-filling on the lakebeds. Residents of these slums, if they fulfilled certain criteria, were moved to resettlement colonies located 20–40 kilometers outside the city, typically also on floodplains or lakebeds. The slum demolitions were conducted with a conspicuous deployment of police, and the common sequel was long lines of anxious people waiting at local revenue offices for tokens that entitled them to a resettlement site. Meanwhile, a series of fires broke out in Chennai’s slums in the summer of 2009. While this was hardly an unusual occurrence, these fires were of a size, speed, virulence, and timing that raised suspicions of arson. Residents of the fire-affected slums, sited precariously on strips of land near burial grounds or at the edges of waterways, hinted that some slum residents had set these fires themselves to gain access to the resettlement tokens that were now routinely distributed to slum residents following disasters like fires or floods.1 These episodes indexed for us the measures of desperation and pragmatism with which the urban poor living in “objectionable” spaces had come to negotiate their shelter options.2 They appeared to be balancing the state’s evidently hardening intent to reclaim waterfront real estate against 6 From the Frying Pan to the Floodplain: Negotiating Land, Water, and Fire in Chennai’s Development Karen Coelho and Nithya V. Raman 146 Karen Coelho and Nithya V. Raman the emerging possibilities of obtaining “secure” housing allotments in resettlement colonies. These considerations in turn were weighed against the squalor and struggles faced in their current habitats and expected in the resettlement colonies. Chennai’s slum residents, then, framed their negotiating strategies from tight spaces, literally with their backs to the river. This chapter seeks to show how the complex and changing landscapes of urban land and water are closely interwoven with the complex and changing landscapes of eviction and relocation in Chennai. It argues that the rationalities underpinning projects of spatial engineering in the city have shifted, reversed, and contradicted themselves over time, revealing the ready plasticity of environmental policymaking in growing cities.3 On the one hand, this is a story of the making and remaking of the city’s physical form through historical processes of land reclamation from water bodies through spontaneous settlement, but also and more importantly as part of the state’s urban expansion programs for housing and institutional development. On the other hand, this is simultaneously a story of the constitution of the city’s social geography through large-scale relocations of the urban poor to floodprone marshlands or swamps on the edges of the city, particularly since the 1980s. This was a process through which the boundaries between land and water in urban peripheries were reshaped—sometimes casually blurred and sometimes consciously and irreversibly re-inscribed. These stories, of the state filling water bodies to house people, then removing people to restore water bodies and relocating them onto other water bodies, speak, at one level, of historical shifts in the political and economic rationalities that connect municipal governance to paradigms of planning and social engineering. Where urban water bodies were once seen as land-inthe -making, to be filled and reclaimed for bus stops, housing projects, dump yards, and resettlement sites, they are now seen as lakes-in-the-making, to be cleared, dredged, desilted, and beautified. These shifting rationalities are underpinned by transformations in conceptions of the urban—from developmentalist visions of cities as sites of social and economic mobility, catalysts of modernity for the region, to neoliberal visions of cities as strategic nodes for the operations of financial globalization.4 Competitive efforts by municipal and state governments to attract global investment, reliant on instruments like credit ratings by independent agencies, critically alter the meanings and values associated with water in the urban landscape. Water bodies and waterways are now, above all, emblems of the city’s aspiration From the Frying Pan to...