Abstract
All over the world, animals are drawn to return faithfully to places that no longer exist.
Thom van Dooren 1
Everything is destroyed in the name of development.
Chennai-based environmental activist 2
Near busy roads, waste dumps, and gleaming new office buildings, thousands of birds gather on what is left of the Pallikaranai marshes in Chennai but in ever smaller numbers. In 2019 a legal representation to the Madras High Court called for an immediate cessation of further damage to these wetlands, which form “part of the Central Asian flyway or migration route of water birds that link their northernmost breeding grounds in Russia to the southernmost non-breeding or wintering grounds in West and South Asia, the Maldives and the Indian Ocean Territory”.
3
Among the bird species recorded at Pallikaranai are the IUCN designated “near threatened” spot-billed pelican (
The loss of wetlands across southern India has been a focal point for emerging literature on land grabbing, special economic zones, and new configurations of the state-capital nexus in relation to the transformation of peri-urban landscapes. 4 The historical, geographical, and cultural specificities of land as a form of property present a critical dimension to the unfolding material dynamics of landscape change through the impact of successive colonial and post-colonial political formations. 5 The colonial era planner for Madras, Henry Vaughan Lanchester, for example, had emphasized how the regularization of urban space facilitated the “detection of encroachment” (1947: 19) but of course the primary source of encroachment, if it is understood to be the taking of land, was the British colonial project itself.
The city of Chennai is located in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and has been built over a complex network of seasonal lakes and marshes. The Tamil language has many words for water bodies used to store monsoon rains ranging from the largest
The degraded hydrological landscapes of southern India have become the focus of intense scrutiny. The geographer Pushpa Arabindoo, for instance, refers to Chennai's peri-urban interface as a “heterogeneous mosaic” (2009: 880) that is undergoing a rapid transition towards a form of globalized urbanism. For Arabindoo, the recent flood events in Chennai represent “a state propelled urbanization of disaster” (Arabindoo, 2016: 802). The architectural theorist Lindsay Bremner (2020: 734) develops a conceptual dialogue between “spatial planning as a socio-political instrument, capitalist urbanization and the more-than-human vitalities of the monsoon” as part of an assemblage-based approach to the interpretation of Chennai's hydrological landscapes. In a similar vein, the geographer Malini Ranganathan, in her study of stormwater infrastructure in Bengaluru, articulates a conceptual synthesis between urban political ecology and Deleuzian-informed assemblage theory to articulate an expanded conception of agency (see Ranganathan, 2015). The sociologist Amita Baviskar's use of the term “waterscape” is useful here in emphasizing the dynamic relations between “things, nature, and people” in a formulation that also draws on an extended political ecology standpoint (2007: 4). Baviskar cautions, however, that the self-representation of environmental issues by activists and campaigning organizations should not be taken at face value in order to retain a degree of analytical nuance in the face of “multiple fields of power” (2003: 5052). In this article I adopt a modified urban political ecology perspective, drawing on additional insights from ornithology, the environmental humanities, and other fields.
I introduce the idea of “ecological decay” as a critical entry point to enable a sustained intellectual dialogue between urban political ecology, the environmental humanities, and the ecological sciences. The presence of ecological decay has been elucidated a few times within the conservation biology literature, especially in relation to habitat fragmentation, but the idea can be expanded to encompass a multifaceted set of cultural and material processes. 6 There are clearly conceptual synergies with the identification of “slow violence” à la Rob Nixon, and the gradual disintegration of socio-ecological relations at different spatial scales, as well as thanatological dimensions to ecological disruption and emerging “necro-ecologies” that hold wider epidemiological implications (see Davies, 2018; Nixon, 2011). My use of the term ecological decay connects with specific forms of violence against nature associated with successive colonial and post-colonial transitions, along with the distinctive materialities of capitalist urbanization that can form part of a wider conceptualization of urban environmental change. In this sense, therefore, an emphasis on ecological decay is strikingly different from the kind of interest in “novel ecologies” or “recombinant ecologies” that has become associated with elements of urban environmental discourse in the global North. Rather, the delineation of ecological decay as a multi-scalar process highlights a series of distinct social-ecological developments produced by European modernity rather than a more oblique emphasis on a species-oriented human history under uncritical variants of the Anthropocene thesis or a reductive concern with the search for singular periodicities or starting points.
I begin my article by reflecting on the intersections between migratory flyways and emerging patterns of urbanization. The significance of flyways serves as a starting point for considering the shifting temporalities of global environmental change as a multi-scalar dynamic. I then turn to the specific example of Chennai's Pallikaranai wetlands as part of a wider reflection on the changing waterscapes of the region. I elaborate on the concept of ecological decay to explore the interface between urban political ecology and alternative analytical frameworks. Next, I consider the evolving relationship between ornithology and disparate cultures of nature in Chennai. Finally, I reflect on the ecological dimensions to speculative urbanization on the urban fringe.
Flyways and avian displacements
Three of the ten global flyways for migratory birds pass through India. Each of these flyways consists of a “specific sequence of sites” separated by multiple geographical barriers over vast distances (Myers et al., 1987: 19). Although summer breeding grounds at higher latitudes are widely dispersed there is a seasonal funnelling effect towards a much smaller number of “stop off” locations and wintering sites towards the equator and the global South (see Lawrence et al., 2022). A flyway can be conceptualized as an intricate intersection between different organisms that transcends a mere geographical pathway. It comprises a set of material traces and temporalities that marks the outcome of immense forms of evolutionary complexity and behavioural adaptation over time (see Dufour et al., 2020; Newton, 2008; van Dooren, 2014; Wilson, 2010). The disruption of migration routes through southern India involves not only birds but many other organisms, including the complex cultural landscapes that have evolved in relation to the presence of birds and water. In the pre-modern era, for example, the accumulated excreta of migratory birds were assiduously collected from seasonal lakes to be used as fertilizer in agriculture (see Bhaskar and Vencatesan, 2015).
The destruction of migratory sites creates additional kinds of threat since “the successful functioning of the system as a whole rests on the continued functioning of each link in the chain” (Myers et al., 1987: 19). In the 1930s, for instance, the biologist Frederick C. Lincoln used advances in banding studies (also referred to as “ringing” in the UK and elsewhere) to show that birds “are so strongly influenced by their ancestral lanes of migration that they will continue to follow them even though conditions en route or on the wintering grounds may become distinctly adverse to their welfare” (Lincoln, 1935: 10). 7 Examples of contemporary threats to migratory birds en route to their wintering sites include the destruction of coastal wetland stopover sites and the proliferation of energy infrastructure installations, including wind power generators next to migratory bottlenecks such as the Bab el-Mandeb straits of Eritrea, Djibouti, and Yemen and the Red Sea coast of Egypt. 8 In India, the scale of habitat destruction is immense with every wetland site under a degree of threat. The first-ever comprehensive overview of the conservation status of India's birds, published in 2020, which draws on data provided by more than 15,500 birdwatchers and 10 million individual observations, found that more than half the species had undergone a significant decline over recent decades. 9 Indeed, the data reveals “declines within declines” with migratory waterbirds affected to a greater extent than other resident species associated with aquatic habitats. Migratory birds have typically low reproductive rates—in part through the effects of seasonal movement—meaning that threats to adult birds can have catastrophic consequences for the population as a whole.
Many of the migratory stop-off points or final destinations in the global South are located in estuaries, wetlands, and littoral zones facing some of the most rapid processes of landscape change. These migratory sites attract huge numbers of birds, creating additional forms of vulnerability to hunting, predation, or other forms of disturbance. 10 Climate change is adding further pressures on migratory birds through the impact of seasonal shifts so that birds may arrive back in their breeding grounds too late to find sufficient food since the spring burst of insect activity has already occurred. This so-called “phenological mismatch” has the potential to cause widespread disruption for birds, especially those that are reliant on daylight changes for the timing of journeys (see Lawrence et al., 2022). Changing patterns of rainfall and other climatic shifts may affect the suitability of various sites along migratory routes. And there is now increasing evidence that some species appear to be abandoning or altering their migration patterns altogether in response to climate change (see Howard et al., 2020; Visser et al., 2009). Avian flyways constitute an intricate pattern of other-than-human mobilities that has become increasingly fractured into vulnerable remnants or refugia marked by multiple forms of spatial displacement and temporal disorientation.
Ecological decay in the Pallikaranai wetlands
On a late January morning in 2019 I approach the Pallikaranai wetlands and take up an inobtrusive position on the western edge of the marshes. Amid the urban haze and incessant traffic noise, there are flamingos, spoonbills, and sandpipers; lines of black-winged stilts (
Pallikaranai, Chennai (2019). Photo by Matthew Gandy.
Analysis of aerial photographs suggests that in the mid-1960s the Pallikaranai marshlands extended across 5500 hectares but had fallen to under 600 hectares by the mid-2010s, leaving an increasingly vulnerable island or “ecological refugium” within the rapidly expanding metropolis (see Figure 2). The immediate causes of this rapid decline include: the gradual detachment of the marshes from the numerous “feeding channels” within its 235 square km catchment area; the on-going illegal abstraction of water; the large-scale dumping and burning of refuse that has been underway since the early 1970s, including major municipal disposal sites; the operation of sewage treatment plants; the construction of new highways, including better connections to the international airport; the deliberate use of fire to destroy ecologically sensitive areas and create “urbanizable” land; and, above all, various forms of development including informal lakeside settlements, slum resettlement schemes, “stylish residential projects” and hi-tech industrial complexes. 12
Location and declining extent of the Pallikaranai wetlands. Sources include Azeez et al. (2007) and data collected by the Care Earth Trust. Cartography by Philip Stickler.
The loss of marshlands across Chennai and the blockage of numerous creeks have contributed towards a series of devastating flood events. Following the floods of 2002, for example, there has been an increased concern with the need to protect wetlands as part of the city's natural floodplain. The unfolding dynamics of environmental destruction led to the rise of new civil society organizations such as the Save Pallikaranai Marsh Forum. Serious flooding in residential districts adjacent to the Pallikaranai marshlands brought nature conservation and flood control discourses into dialogue at state level for the first time. Eventually, in 2007, some 317 hectares in the southern part of the marshlands were declared a “forest reserve” under the colonial era legislative framework of the Tamil Nadu Forest Act of 1882 (see Azeez et al., 2007). The legal recognition of the site's ecological importance has had little impact, however, since the political dynamics of land use operate under a clientelist mode of capitalist urbanization that has been underpinned since the 1990s by the increasing impact of land speculation, special economic zones, and other neo-liberal policy instruments (see, for example, Arabindoo, 2016; Bremner, 2020; Wyatt, 2013). After the devastating floods of 2015, in which around half the city was submerged, there was renewed attention on the Pallikaranai marshlands and the degradation of the city's natural floodplain. Yet flood events also create a variety of new “entry points” for speculative urbanization. 13 Rather than floods providing a pretext to protect the remaining wetlands, the extensive disruption and property damage can serve to reconfigure or even accelerate the underlying dynamics of land acquisition. The threat of flooding can facilitate a “politics of cleansing” that enables action against forms of encroachment by the poor but not, of course, various kinds of encroachment by the rich (see Coelho and Raman, 2013). 14 Similarly, the figure of the “citizen” is repeatedly framed in contrast with that of the “encroacher,” who by virtue of their marginality has no legitimate claims over urban space.
Pallikaranai has been described by ecologists as a “mosaic of aquatic grass species, scrub, marsh, and water-filled depressions” that forms part of the city's natural flood defences and also replenishes aquifers that remain vital for the city's water supply (Azeez et al., 2007: 6). We can detect the growing influence of global biodiversity discourse at the marshlands from the 1990s onwards with the use of “red lists” and other internationally recognized categories of endangerment. Ecological contestations over Pallikaranai have evolved within a distinctive set of global parameters for conservation biology that lie in tension with the veracity of local sources of knowledge and expertise (see Choy, 2011). The influence of international agencies such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature, founded in 1948, illustrates a degree of continuity with colonial geometries of power and knowledge, not least through the reliance on Linnaean taxonomic nomenclature for the study of biodiversity.
The “ecological management plan” for Pallikaranai put forward by the Sàlim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History in 2007 calls for walls, fences, and a “patrolling path” to prevent “unauthorized activities” (see Azeez et al., 2007: 24–26). Yet this reserve-oriented approach to conservation, marked by the use of securitized barriers, is extremely difficult to implement in an urban context. The scientific aspiration to manage the marshland as a kind of ecological exclusion zone lies in tension with the history of the site, including remnants of pre-colonial cultures of nature, as well as the accelerated momentum of regional urbanization. A shift in emphasis towards the conservation of urban wetlands rather than their elimination also denotes a change in aesthetic modes of engagement as poorer users, including longstanding waterside communities, find themselves in potential conflict with wealthier visitors, including middle-class walkers and nature enthusiasts, who now wish to exert greater control over the site (see D'Souza and Nagendra, 2011).
It is widely acknowledged that the key interventions to save the wetlands should have taken place decades ago. In ecological terms, Pallikaranai has been characterized as “virtually dead” and “full of toxins” derived from refuse dumping, waste burning, sewage disposal, and contaminated storm water runoff. My own observations suggest that although the marshlands have been extensively damaged the ecosystem is certainly not dead. But can a site such as Pallikaranai ever be fully restored? The ecologist and environmental consultant Jayshree Vencatesan, for instance, believes that Pallikaranai can be saved and that the marsh “is trying to recover” in a clear example of “nature's resilience”.
15
In contrast, other environmental activists suggest that “the area has lost its ecosystem” thereby implying that its earlier environmental state can never be regained.
16
How should we interpret discourses of ecological restoration or resilience in this context? In its current state there is plainly still
The Pallikaranai wetlands are gradually drying out since so many of the “feeding channels” have been blocked within the wider catchment area. On-going water abstraction by private operators (despite a legal ban introduced in 2002) is also contributing to the drying out of the marshes. The drier soil conditions favour invasive plants such as the shrub
The remains of the Pallikaranai wetlands can be characterized as part of a decaying landscape marked by multiple forms of habitat fragmentation. As used within conservation biology the discussion of “ecological decay” highlights the gradual effects of declining connectivity between ecosystems. 17 I use the concept of ecological decay here in a broader sense to denote not just biodiversity decline but also disappearing cultural landscapes marked by the unravelling of multiple forms of socio-ecological connectivity. The cyclical dynamics of waste dumping and water abstraction at Pallikaranai illustrate metabolic dimensions to the extractive frontiers and environmental sinks of capitalist urbanization. In this sense, the marshlands can be conceived as a landscape of metabolic displacement produced through a series of interrelated environmental and social externalities. The financialization of ecological decay forms part of the evolving dynamics of capitalist urbanization on the urban fringe as various kinds of commons, wetlands, or wastelands are rendered “urbanizable”. New kinds of environmental inequalities have become imprinted into the urban landscape that juxtapose toxic spaces of ecological decay with emerging prestige settings for water oriented eco-restoration projects. The concept of ecological decay extends to different fractions of capital operating at different spatial and temporal scales, encompassing both localized forms of environmental degradation and generic dimensions of global urbanism. In the 1990s, the Pallikaranai marshes were a focus of slum resettlement schemes as marginalized communities evicted from other sites in the city were relocated to flood-prone land in the vicinity of garbage dumps and sewage treatment works (see Coelho, 2022; Coelho and Raman, 2013). This earlier use of wetland sites for “human disposal” contrasts with an emerging emphasis on upgrading riparian locales for high-end speculative developments.
The wider implications of ecological decay, beyond biodiversity decline, extend to public health as well as flood protection. The breakdown in communal water management practices and the ubiquity of wastewater has led to increased numbers of mosquitoes (see Sundaresan, 2011). A proliferation of shallower, disconnected, and heavily polluted water bodies within the urban landscape has become a source of epidemiological menace, especially for poorer communities living nearby. In these hyper-fragmented hydrological landscapes, there are no fish or other predators likely to co-exist with mosquito larvae in water-filled puddles, detritus, or old tires. Where larger water bodies persist there are complex chains of ecological disturbance including the presence of invasive fish such as tilapia (
The loss of urban wetlands has often been framed in terms of different forms of “encroachment,” a term that retains a decidedly neo-Malthusian timbre. In a Chennai context, the discourse of encroachment has involved “a selective stigmatization of property-less subaltern settlers on the edges of urban water bodies” (Coelho, 2018: 25). Seven villages near to Pallikaranai are dependent on the marshlands for their livelihoods through activities such as fishing, reed cutting, and the grazing of animals (Azeez et al., 2007). Pallikaranai has long served as a water source for surrounding communities as part of an intricate multi-species commons that has persisted through both the colonial and post-colonial period until the surge of development pressures in the 1990s. The last of the paddy fields were abandoned in the 1980s and early 1990s instituting a gradual dislocation of different socio-ecological dimensions to the existing landscape.
19
Many of these former paddy fields and other types of common lands in the vicinity of the marshlands have been sold to land brokers. The remaining
The political framing of “encroachment” needs to be contextualized in relation to pre-existing forms of caste-based inequalities. It is noteworthy that the Pallikaranai marshlands had been characterized as a “backward” area until comparatively recently (Azeez et al., 2007: 70). The question of caste remains a neglected dimension to studies of land acquisition within peri-urban Chennai and elsewhere. Longstanding intersections between social hierarchies and ethnic difference have persisted to produce extreme forms cultural and material marginality. Coelho and Raman (2013: 157) refer to a “new urban untouchability” that is being “produced through sequestering ever larger masses of city residents, predominantly of the lowest castes, into ghettos in hazardous and ecologically fragile peripheral areas, thereby reproducing the spatial, ecological, and social geographies of caste discrimination”. The on-going significance of caste exposes the analytical limitations of an environmental justice discourse that is framed by the operation of “liberal legalism” in relation to the intensifying environmental threats experienced in the cities of the global South (Ranganathan, 2022: 259). An emphasis on racialized forms of abjection takes our interpretation beyond class-based analysis to provide a fuller sense of the ideological import of “bourgeois environmentalism” in an Indian context. The question of “blackness” serves as a spatial metaphor as well as a corporeal instanciation of urban inequality at the unliveable interstices of the urban realm (see, for example, Simone, 2016). Indeed, the analytical conjunction between caste, race, and class has long preoccupied scholars examining the political dynamics of Indian societies. Or as Nevedita Menon shows, “caste determines labour in India” (2019: 138), and by extension, the degrees of exposure experienced by marked or stigmatized bodies to the full gamut of corporeal and economic precarities. The marshland communities of Chennai formerly engaged in agriculture and fishing have been progressively sucked into the bottom tiers of the urban labour market in fields such as construction, domestic service, and security.
Ornithology and the post-colonial public sphere
The growing popularity of birdwatching in Chennai has been a key element in the upsurge of interest in urban nature, not only within India but across many cities in the global South. In a recent interview, the president of the Madras Naturalists’ Society, K.V. Sudhakar, explained that “our aim has been to introduce more people to the joys of birdwatching. When we begin a conversation about conservation and protection, it is important to involve the public for it to be a people's movement” (cited in Poorvaja, 2020). The field of grassroots ornithology has gradually morphed from being a predominantly elite concern towards a wider popular engagement with nature as part of a hybrid English and Tamil language public sphere. 20 Manifestations of this shift include the annual “bird race” held since 2007 in which teams of birdwatchers across the city try to spot as many species as possible (Poorvaja, 2020). The growing significance of “citizen science” within Indian ornithology has produced new configurations in global knowledge production. Over the last five years, for example, there has been a ten-fold rise in the number of individual observations sent by Indian birdwatchers to the eBird database run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Factors behind the growing interest in birds in Chennai and other Indian cities include an expanding middle class, rising real incomes, and the increased affordability of sophisticated digital cameras and other kinds of optical equipment. A culture of on-line sharing of observations and expertise has contributed to the emergence of a “digital public sphere” in relation to urban ornithology.
Part of the Pallikaranai wetlands was designated as a birdwatching reserve in 2010 as a populist gesture by the Tamil Nadu first minister but this distinctive mode of engagement with nature has its own history within an Indian context. There is widespread evidence of pre-colonial interest in birds, especially in the fields of art, poetry, and hunting. Advances in ornithological illustration occurred under the Mughal Empire, for instance, and especially in the Court of Jahangir, where the intricate artworks of Ustad Mansur (active from around 1590 to 1620) exhibit a hybrid aesthetic, including lines influence derived from the European renaissance (Ali, 1980). During the nineteenth century, under the tightening grip of British colonial rule, various forms of “ornithological reconnaissance” emerged as part of an advancing taxonomic frontier lying at the interface between the natural sciences and the colonial state apparatus (see Kumar, 2017). One of the key ornithological works of the period, Thomas C. Jerdon's
Chennai has a highly fragmentary NGO landscape marked by diverse relations to the state, to scientific discourse, and to wider political aims. Differences in terms of class, caste, and language intersect with varied and often conflicting epistemic vantage points. 23 The “hobbyist” outlook of the Madras Naturalists’ Society, for instance, formed in 1978, contrasts with the Care Earth Trust, set up in 2000, who have produced a series of reports about Pallikaranai on behalf of the Tamil Nadu government. 24 The Madras Naturalists’ Society prefers to be seen as non-political, partly because of worries over the loss of permission to visit key sites. In contrast, the Care Earth Trust operates as an environmental consultancy, and presents itself as a science-led organization with a “research capacity,” producing a variety of studies or reports yet is perceived by its detractors as being positioned very close to the state, and to the Tamil Nadu forest department in particular.
In 2019 a new Tamil language environmental organization called Suzhal Arivom was created which is devoted to raising awareness of the Pallikaranai wetlands and other sites with organized walks for people living nearby. Suzhal Arivom has also been involved in protecting birds from poachers at Pallikaranai (even though the hunting of birds in the wetlands has been illegal since the early 1970s) and is clearly more interventionist than other ornithological groups in the city (Bharathi, 2021). The regular birdwatchers of Suzhal Arivom report decline in the number of birds at Pallikaranai which they attribute to the disturbance of migratory pathways as well as the on-going damage to the marshes due to dredging, road building, and other activities. The presence of Suzhal Arivom and other grassroots interventions signals not only increased interest in urban nature but also more “eyes on the marsh” in terms of efforts to protect birds from the growing threat of organized poaching for commercial gain. 25
For many older residents, the rate and scale of recent landscape change are especially poignant. 26 Elements of nature are entrained in a kind of post-colonial nostalgia for fading remnants of the recent past, evoking a Madras of childhood memories rather than the globalized metropolis of contemporary Chennai. A form of “ecological nostalgia” can be traced to earlier stages in the post-colonial era marked by a complex intersection between individual and collective forms of memory (see, for example, Angé and Berliner, 2020). An elegiac mode of recalling the past is marked by a sense of profound loss within living memory that also stems from a sense of unease towards personal complicity in the environmental effects of modernity (see Rosaldo, 1989). We can delineate a distinctive kind of post-colonial melancholy, that is especially prevalent among secular or Anglophile elites, and which contrasts with the emergence of populist Dravidian discourse. Certainly, the post-1967 populist duopoly of alternating control over the Tamil Nadu state apparatus by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All-India Anna DMK (AIADMK) emerged partly out of a reaction against the post-independence political settlement and a pervasive disdain for ruling elites (see Wyatt, 2013).
Some of Chennai's middle-class nature enthusiasts appear more interested in birds than people. A form of ecological misanthropy is directed towards various forms of encroachment in the absence of any wider critique of capitalist urbanization. There is little recognition, for example, of how various forms of eco-restoration or other waterside developments are integral to the wider dynamics of environmental destruction (see Coelho and Raman, 2013). Even under more ecologically sensitive variants of encroachment discourse, the question of illegality is overwhelmingly framed through a middle-class lens, reinforcing existing disparities in terms of “time, resources, education” and “social capital” (Sundaresan, 2011: 76). The rise of new forms of urban environmentalism in India is heterogenous and unstable: some of the existing characterizations of environmental activism may have to be revised in the light of recent patterns of mobilization to protect urban biodiversity and the emergence of alternative metropolitan cultures of nature, including the growing significance of a distinctive Tamil public sphere in relation to environmental politics.
Speculative designations
The scale of urbanization in Tamil Nadu has accelerated significantly since the early 1990s with the increasing influence of the World Bank and new intersections between local and global capital, to produce a distinctive conjunction of neo-liberalism with clientelist forms of political populism (see Figure 3). 27 The political scientist Andrew Wyatt, for example, has referred to the emerging socio-political configuration in Tamil Nadu since the 1980s as a form of “technocratic populism” that has been aligned very effectively with the wider emphasis on liberalizing the Indian economy (see Wyatt, 2013: 373). Tamil Nadu, with some 57 special economic zones, has experienced one of the fastest economic growth rates in India (see Vijayabaskar, 2013). The second master plan for Chennai, published in 2006, states that one of its objectives is the “preservation and conservation of ecologically sensitive areas” but this clearly lies in contradiction with the wider aims of the document to facilitate rapid urban development and the better utilization of “vacant” or economically unproductive land (CMDA, 2006: 111). Indeed, the World Bank has specifically encouraged the abandonment of existing irrigation systems across Tamil Nadu to free up more agricultural land for development (see Arabindoo, 2016).
Change in built-up area in the Chennai metropolitan region, 1991–2015. Data sources include Mathan and Krishnaveni (2020). Cartography by Philip Stickler.
The sequestration of land by force or stealth has been a focal point for critical studies of “land grabbing” although most of these studies have been focused on rural areas rather than peri-urban zones (see Edelman et al., 2013). A number of scholars have explored the dynamics of “accumulation by dispossession,” building in particular on David Harvey's reworking of Marx's interest in “primitive accumulation,” in order to extend the analysis of land grabbing to the peri-urban fringe in India and elsewhere (see, for example, Bannerjee-Guha, 2010; Özsu, 2019). Yet some commentators find that Harvey's conceptual formulation pays insufficient attention to the full range of actors involved, and especially to that of the state. Under the alternative formulation “regimes of dispossession,” advanced by Michael Levien, emphasis is placed on the increasingly significant role of the state as a land broker for private investors under the shifting political contours of a post-Nehruvian developmentalism (see Levien, 2017). As Vijayabaskar (2013) shows, “the veiled threat of compulsory takeover by government, non-recognition of interests in land due to a lack of clear title, and the takeover of ‘wastelands’ and ‘dry’ lands using misleading classificatory systems—all reflect the power of the state backed by privileged interests” (p. 327). Yet the role of the state as a major land broker within Indian urbanization does not necessarily translate into an enhanced capacity to shape urban space. Although the state is very present it does not have the strategic capacity to handle systemic forms of environmental risk such as flooding. Indeed, Sundaresan reminds us that the institutional apparatus of the state does not necessarily act “in any coherent manner towards any common purpose” (Sundaresan, 2011: 75–76). The characterization of the recent Chennai floods as “natural disasters” is in part an ideological manoeuvre to deflect scrutiny but it is also a tacit acknowledgment of governmental incapacity to coordinate different aspects of the urban process. These different facets of state activity (or anxiety) illustrate both the capital-state nexus, as it relates to speculative urbanization, and also emerging areas of strategic concern in relation to flood protection, water supply, and other fields.
The socio-spatial transformations associated with Indian urbanization unsettle existing conceptions of a putative transition to capitalism. The Indian experience of what Shapan Adnan refers to as “dispossession without proletarianization” diverges from classic accounts in Marxist theory and highlights the multiple modalities of modernity engendered by different forms of capital accumulation, especially in the post-colonial context of the global South (see Adnan, 2017). The divergence from the classic teleology of industrial modernity generates an intense heterogeneity of life chances and capitalist forms that is partly reflected in the emergence of distinctive modes of populist political mobilization in the face of widening and pervasive inequalities (see Sanyal, 2007; Wyatt, 2013). Clearly, the rural, and its agricultural underclass, has not disappeared but persists in a bifurcated form, not least through patterns of migrant labour to support the metropolitan economy.
The urbanization of Tamil Nadu presents extreme forms of socio-ecological heterogeneity that are especially apparent in Chennai's peri-urban landscapes. As the sociologist Vivek Chibber shows, the “universalization of capital” is entirely consistent with “great heterogeneity and hierarchy” (2013: 285). The urban studies scholar Solomon J. Benjamin, for instance, refers to “different forms of capitalization” and the operation of “multiple logics” in the sense that capitalist urbanization is not a unitary process but better conceived as an inchoate juxtaposition of simultaneous developments. 28 Similarly, Gajendran (2016: 127), deploying a modified neo-Marxian framework, uses the term “primitive accumulation through brokerage” as part of his conceptualization of the peri-urban transition. In Gajendran's formulation, two aspects stand out: the multiplicity of capitalist interests and the multifaceted processes of environmental degradation.
The concept of ecological decay enables us to consider the particularities of urban wetlands in relation to the multiscalar dynamics of speculative urbanization. In particular, an emphasis on the multiple facets of environmental degradation signals the potential for an enriched dialogue between urban political ecology and other analytical insights (see Gandy, 2022a). Karen Coelho, for instance, drawing on an urban political ecology framework, refers to the remnants of the Pallikaranai marshes as an “urban hybrid” (Coelho, 2018: 21; see also Phadke, 2011). But over what scales or temporalities can the hybridity metaphor be applied? Is this a hybrid form derived from a blend of rural and urban elements, or a staggered temporal juxtaposition of different socio-ecological relations? Malini Ranganathan's synthesis of “second wave” urban political ecology with assemblage theory opens up the possibility for a conceptually enriched analysis of speculative urbanization on the urban fringe. Yet Ranganathan cautions over the complex interface between extended conceptions of agency and viable modes of critical intervention. She uses the term “recombinant socionatural assemblages” to stress an extended conception of agency in relation to “a frenzy of ‘unauthorized’ settlement and speculation in wetlands” (p. 1303). Her use of the term “recombinant” differs, however, from the emergent emphasis on “recombinant ecologies” within resilience-oriented discourses in the global North. Indeed, the urban political ecology literature has only recently begun to grapple with the full complexities of agency in the fragile peri-urban ecologies of the global South.
Degraded wetlands have often been designated as “wastelands” or “vacant lands” to facilitate their appropriation for other uses. Indeed, this has effectively become public policy across much of India. In the case of Tamil Nadu, for example, Jennifer Baka has shown how the emergence of what she terms a “wasteland governmentality” has been facilitated by the rise of specific actors such as “land brokers” who enable the state to convert vast tracts of ostensibly “empty” space into more profitable use (Baka, 2013). The Chennai 2011 masterplan, for instance, makes a distinction between “urbanizable” and “nonurbanizable” land in anticipation of the city's further expansion. This dynamic of shifting categorizations, promulgated by strategic planning, generates a mix of uncertainty and expectation.
The modern concept of “wasteland” was an integral element in the colonial project and the characterization of Indigenous land use practices as both “inefficient” and “inferior” to the logic of spatial rationalization under European modernity (see, for example, Baka, 2013; Gidwani and Reddy, 2011; Vijayabaskar, 2010). Marshes, wetlands, and other water bodies were classified as “wastelands” by colonial authorities since they did not generate revenue (see Vencatesan, 2006). Influential colonial administrators such as the botanist Dietrich Brandis, who promoted “scientific forestry” in India, repeatedly called for the “better utilization of wastelands” (see Brandis, 1883). The simplification of existing waterscapes dominated the colonial hydrological imaginary, including calls for the straightening of rivers to prevent “the stagnation of water and percolation in the intervening land” (Viswanathan, 1931: 44). The architect and planner Henry Vaughan Lanchester, for instance, who published
The shifting definitions of “urbanizable land” illuminate how urban wetlands have oscillated between different regimes of use, ownership, and control marked by continuities as well as disjunctures between pre-colonial, colonial, and successive post-colonial configurations. Raman (2019), for example, notes how the “complexity and fluidity” of the land acquisition process in peri-urban Chennai stems from a range of factors such as restricted rights of access, disruption of irrigation systems, and proliferating future uncertainties that may contribute towards individual decisions to relinquish ownership. Furthermore, the breakdown in communal water management practices, based on the use of seasonal rain-fed sources of water, has disproportionately affected poorer communities who can least afford alternatives such as the construction of wells to access ground water (see Vijayabaskar and Menon, 2018). As Sundaresan shows, drawing on the experience of Bengaluru, the urban wetlands “ceased to be a commons, because the local communities of concern ceased to exist” (2011: 76). With the loss of “irrigation communities” (p. 76) the associated cultural and material landscapes have gradually disappeared. The seasonal complexities of the boundaries between marshland and former paddy fields add to existing uncertainties over property rights (see, for example, D'Souza, 2006; Raman, 2019). Indeed, the seasonality of urban wetlands has contributed towards a degree of confusion or even deception in relation to land sales with the underlying hydrological risks only revealed during flood events (see Arabindoo, 2016; Ranganathan, 2015).
Speculative urbanization has also been facilitated by the circulation of more detailed information about the price of land (see Chakravorty, 2013). Indeed, various attempts to clarify land titling, including the digitalization of information, have tended to benefit more powerful actors such as global IT concerns since making land “legible” forms part of a globalized dynamic towards enabling lucrative development opportunities on the urban fringe (see Benjamin and Raman, 2011). Improved information about urban wetlands fosters a contradictory dynamic: on the one hand there is a circulation of more detailed knowledge about the ecological significance of these sites and on the other hand there is better access to data on land prices. These two discursive fields—ecological indicators and price signals—clearly lie in tension with one another.
Conclusions
The conceptual terrain of Indian environmentalism has been shifting since the mid-1990s in response to a combination of factors: the impact of urbanization and the rise of the new middle class; the articulation of alternate post-colonial modernities that move beyond the secular Nehruvian technocratic model; and the destabilization of various essentialist cultural tropes. Influential formulations such as the “environmentalism of the poor” thesis, advanced by Ramachandra Guha and others, with roots in an idealized rurality, have been characterized as a “new traditionalist discourse” that lies in tension with alternative perspectives such as political ecology (see Agarwal,1999; Sinha et al., 1997). The scale of socio-ecological transformations on the urban fringe has necessitated a different set of conceptual tools that is alert to global aspects of capitalist urbanization but also able to make sense of the particularities of peri-urban landscapes. A multi-scalar and multi-species framework is especially apposite for the ecological dynamics of urban space, including what van Dooren (2014) refers to as the “avian entanglements” associated with migratory networks and their associated cultural landscapes.
My elaboration of the concept of ecological decay highlights a conceptual dissonance between global North and South. The emphasis on novel or recombinant ecologies within the cities of the global North, as part of a wider paradigm of urban environmental resilience, sits uneasily within the metropolitan landscapes of the global South where the scale of ecological devastation is often more intense, where the colonial legacy of modernity is more pervasive, and where the epidemiological implications of ecological disequilibria are more severe. Furthermore, the word “decay” emphasizes the presence of ecological decomposition rather than recomposition, in which the emergence of necro-ecologies represents a set of life-diminishing dynamics rather than the coming-into-being of alternate urban ecologies marked by new kinds of abundance. The word decay also connects with interest in decomposition as a focal point for the interpretation of crime scenes, bringing a forensic standpoint into dialogue with other epistemological approaches (see Gandy, 2022b). In order to understand the plight of urban wetlands in Chennai we need an expanded urban political ecology framework that can illuminate lines of causality and responsibility for environmental devastation, spanning a sequence of interrelated developments under European modernity and emergent post-colonial socio-ecological formations.
The architectural theorist Lindsay Bremner (2020: 746) identifies the operation of two “modernist hydrological imaginaries” in the Chennai metropolitan region: firstly, a preoccupation with the control of water, exemplified by the construction of storm water sewers; and secondly, the use of Pallikaranai and other wetlands as environmental sinks for the disposal of various kinds of waste. We can widen this notion of a hydrological imaginary to encompass a series of further conceptualizations: the earlier pre-colonial modification of monsoon waterscapes to enable the use of water throughout the year; the modernist phase of landscape simplification and its colonial counter imaginary framed by the organic city of Geddes; and in a contemporary context, the emergence of various alternative imaginaries spanning a renewed emphasis on rainwater harvesting, wetland reclamation, or even the mooted future reliance on additional desalination plants. 29 These multiple hydrological imaginaries suggest an aura of uncertainty over the future relationship between the city and the socio-ecological modalities of everyday life.
The recent shift of emphasis from the elimination of water bodies towards various forms of “eco restoration” marks a significant kind of post-colonial counter-narrative to modernist hydrological imaginaries (see Coelho and Raman, 2013). Yet piecemeal eco-restoration efforts for lakes in southern India have often amounted to little more than fragmentary or transitory interventions within an increasingly modified wider landscape (see Nagendra, 2010). Ecological arguments have been increasingly used as a pretext to prevent marginalized communities from living near water. Hydrological components of the landscape that might once have been eliminated to make way for development are now the focus of a very different kind of environmental discourse that promotes lucrative waterside residential projects.
The loss of Chennai's lakes, marshes, and watercourses reveals a clear disjuncture between a variety of stated policy aims and the stark realities on the ground. The continuing destruction of the Pallikaranai wetlands illustrates how legislative protections—if they exist at all—may be effectively ignored. The remnants of the once extensive marshes have endured into the twenty-first century more through inefficiency than design since clientelist politics can act as a brake on more dynamic forms of globalized urbanism (see Wyatt, 2013). In the latest phase of legal and political contestation, there have been urgent efforts underway to secure a RAMSAR designation for the remains of Pallikaranai wetlands as a site of international significance. 30
The protection of Pallikaranai would involve “disassembling urbanism” in its current form, as Mukul Kumar has recently articulated in relation to “disassembling coal” and its wider social and environmental impacts in Tamil Nadu (see Kumar, 2021). In a similar vein, Malini Ranganathan, in the context of her study of water infrastructure in Bengaluru, reflects on how urban environmental politics might be “reassembled” through the incorporation of a wider range of knowledge and non-human actors. Yet Ranganathan rightly questions the implications of an emphasis on distributed forms of agency since “it is not immediately obvious how a distributed notion of agency could be implemented in the day-to-day functioning of stormwater engineers, state actors, residents, and other urban citizens” (p. 1315). An on-going theoretical challenge for urban political ecology is how extended conceptions of agency might be combined with collective forms of action.
Scientific knowledge about urban nature in Chennai remains patchy at best, with birds far more extensively studied than most other forms of biodiversity. But what are the implications of an “ornithological bias” for the conceptualization of urban nature? How might an ornithological lens compare with the botanical emphasis that has dominated key strands of urban ecology in many other cities? Unlike plants, for example, questions of site vulnerability linked to migratory flyways take on a different significance as part of a larger set of processes. Similarly, a focus on macaques, snakes, or street dogs raises a very different sets of issues in relation to urban nature, both in terms of ethical relations to non-human others and also the socio-ecological complexities of urban space. 31
It is not my intention in this article to suggest that a clear “solution” to the loss of the Pallikaranai wetlands exists — the city has certainly had its fair share of external viewpoints and interventions over the years, up to and including the aftermath of the recent floods. Furthermore, I am doubtful whether existing nature conservation paradigms provide any straightforward response to the immensely complex challenge of attempting to control land use in one of India's most dynamic and fast-growing metropolitan regions. Yet the consequences of inaction are readily apparent, not least through the increasing frequency and severity of major flood events, along with observable declines in birds and other forms of biodiversity. My tentative suggestion is that a conceptual dialogue between urban political ecology and a multispecies urbanism, in which the place of non-human life is fully recognized, might offer a set of analytical tools better suited to the dynamics of contemporary urban environmental change.
Highlights
Migratory flyways are being disrupted by multiple processes of habitat destruction at a global scale.
Many wintering sites for migratory birds lie in zones of rapid urbanization within the global South.
The protection of urban wetlands is a focus of increasing concern within Chennai's environmental politics.
The concept of ecological decay can enrich intellectual dialogue between urban political ecology, the environmental humanities, and the ecological sciences.
An expanded urban political ecology framework can extend to multi-species conceptions of urbanization in the global South.