From the Frying-Pan to the Floodplain: Negotiating Land and Water in Chennai's Development - A presentation by Karen Coelho October 14, 2011

This talk seeks to show how the complex and changing landscapes of urban land and water are closely interwoven with the complex and changing landscapes of slum eviction and relocation in Chennai. 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, often as part of state programs of urban expansion for housing and institutional development. On the other hand, this is also the story of the constitution of the social geographies of the city through large-scale relocations, specifically of the urban poor, a process through which the morphological boundaries between land and water in urban peripheries have been blurred or reinscribed. Water is thus a critical dimension of not only the physical but also the social production of urban space, and continues to shape give substance to class and caste geographies in globalizing cities. Changes in relative values of urban land and water, as well as the politics of municipal administrative units and finances, have powerfully determined the spatial placement of the urban poor in and around the city and the emerging relationships between the citizen and the state.

Close examination of how “urban nature” has been shaped in Chennai reveal anomalies, contradictions, and reversals, suggesting that policy shifts are not always teleologically arranged, but often comprise arbitrary and convenient measures glossed into ecological rationales, or sometimes simply reflect the incoherence of environmental governance in
globalizing cities.

Karen Coelho is a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies in Chennai, India, where she focuses her research on urban governance and reforms. Prof. Coelho received her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Arizona, Tucson in 2004 and has since been the recipient of the Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship, awarded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and an Independent Fellowship with SARAI, The New Media Initiative, a programme of the Center for Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Her current project is titled: "Leaky Sovereignties: An Ethnography of Neoliberal Reform in an Urban Water Bureaucracy."

Organized by the Institute for Advanced Study, the Global Cultures Group of Quadrant and offered in conjunction with the Geography Coffee Hour.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/quadrantcal.php