Reimagining the Good City from Ennore Creek
‘Reimagining the Good City’ from Ennore Creek, Chennai’ is a research project funded by the British Academy (April 2022-March 2024). It is framed by the idea of the ‘good city,’ which, since the late 19th Century has been used to describe what is at stake in urban life. Good cities have been purported to be the socio-spatial outcomes of the application of technocratic spatial planning, normative ideals and checklists, universally applied. In countering this, the project suggests that the good city is a contested idea, foregrounding questions of who the good city is good for, who decides, in whose interests, and who is silenced or marginalized in the process.
Rationale
The aim of the project is to piece together the history of industrial development in the Ennore region of north Chennai, its impact on the Ennore wetlands and its human and non-human inhabitants, and the history of the struggle to visibilise and oppose these impacts. It is working alongside fishers and social activists to develop a ‘People’s Plan’ for the eco-restoration of the creek based on multispecies justice, equity and inclusion, in the context of a limited-in-scope, state-led eco-restoration plan that is currently proposed.
Strategy
The project is examining what imagined futures and ideas of the human and the ‘good city’ are implied when thought through the struggles of the fishing communities of north Chennai to secure a future for themselves in the face of industrialisation and globalisation. We hope that the outcomes of our project which draw upon the memories and knowledges of Ennore’s fishers will empower their struggles by helping them influence the various state-sponsored eco-restoration proposals on the table, and also Chennai’s Third Masterplanning process. The fact that the fishers have succeeded in thwarting wholescale industrialization of the wetlands and even prompted a state initiative to restore the wetlands suggests that there is some optimism that the emancipatory potential of the ‘completely urban’ planet lies in the urban littoral. If Chennai’s planners associate the idea of the good city with industrialization and globalisation, can alternative ideas of the good city, mobilized from the life experiences and struggles of those most damaged by it be articulated in a plan, and if so, how, what does that plan look like, and, more importantly, what can it do?
Methods
Using historical, ethnographic, scientific, cartographic and co-design methods, the project is assembling diverse communities of knowledge and practice, including the embodied knowledge of human communities and the agency of non-human species, to reimagine and articulate a restorative, ecological vision of the ‘good city’ from and with Ennore Creek. On the one hand, it involves deepening the archive of historical knowledge of the creek’s industrialisation; on the other, it involves thickening understandings of the multiple and at times contested ways that people of different castes, genders, ages and occupations relate to the creek through culture, livelihood, place, weather and ecology. We are gathering stories of creek people’s memories, present lives and future aspirations, including those that speak to the interests of non-human life forms, and devising a way of incorporating these stories into a plan.
Fishing vessel on Ennore Creek, August 2022. Photograph: Raju K.
Fishing nets on Ennore Creek, August 2022. Photograph: Raju K.
Flyash leakage into Ennore Creek, August 2022. Photograph: Raju K.
Voyalur saltpans, August 2022. Photograph: Bhavani Raman.
Collecting sediment samples, Ennore Creek, August 2022. Photograph: Pavitra Mirjankar.
