For over two hundred years, coastal settlements have been dried and made brittle so as to make them fit for modern habitation. Reclamation schemes, sea walls and drainage channels have made desirable urban land across time and space.
In recent years, scholars have pointed to how this land-centric enterprise and imagination has generated a series of human designed “natural” disasters all over the world.
The Mumbai floods in July 2005 were one such event. The floods submerged parts of the city, killing over 5000 people in the span of the twenty-four hours.
In their research and proposal following the Mumbai floods, since published as Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (Rupa 2009), architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha called for reimaging and reimagining Mumbai as a relentlessly wet terrain. They speculated that Mumbai is an estuary that works between two wetnesses: the monsoons and the sea. And asked: what might it mean to design Mumbai amidst these two gradients of wetness?
Inhabited Sea returns to these provocations a decade after they were first published. Supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s India Research and Engagement Fund, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the Interdisciplinary Program in Climate Studies at IIT Bombay, the School of Environment and Architecture, Marine Life of Mumbai, CAMP and Haverford College, the projects assembled here aim to produce a paradigm shift for how the relations between land and water are imagined and designed in coastal cities in the coming years.
Mumbai’s coastline is a glorious 149-km home. And its shores are portals between the deep sea and human settlement. In the middle is this space that is visible only at low tide: the intertidal zone. A shared space that is revealed only as the water ebbs, with its inhabitants building a civilization until the tide rolls back in.
This project focuses on the Intertidal region of Mumbai’s shores, to document the extraordinary proliferation of life that is nurtured in this anthropogenic landscape. This story is about the landscape, habitat and everything that this meeting of land and sea does to it. We do so for two reasons.
First, the documentation of the intertidal – species, tidal, human usage – is sparse and sitting in science journals, away from the human stakeholders of the shore. And two, the city has somewhere lost its connection with the ocean. This reflects in the apathy of the citizens towards everything that the ocean represents – whether it’s the garbage that’s thrown out on the shore, the fishing industry that is undergoing irreversible change or the animals that share the city with us, the creatures of the intertidal zone.
This apathy, or maybe the lack of empathy towards the shore needs to be addressed if this city has to move towards a sustainable way of life.
Information about species, about the environment is usually seen as the prerogative of scientists, something that does not concern or make sense to the average citizen. It seems like someone else’s knowledge base or responsibility and hence, someone else’s to protect.
We attempt to take the intertidal conversation outside science circles and bring it to people with narratives, interesting use of storytelling to tell people about the animals that share their cities with them. Show them the surprising forest in their backyards. To break the notion that marine creatures like corals, bright and busy crabs, swaying anemones and oh dear lord, coral, are a construct of deep seas or pristine beaches. To show them that these wondrous creatures live right here, a few minutes from their busy, polluted living spaces.
We focus on this space, where the land meets the sea.
