Urban Waterscapes: Resilient Planning for Future Sustainable Cities
Around the world, wetlands represent highly important ecosystems providing manifold benefits. In rapidly urbanizing areas such as Kolkata, they are often left undervalued and unmaintained. What are the stories that urban waterscapes tell us about past and present human-nature interactions? If we pay more attention to these, we can surely design our cities better.
Cities are home to 55 percent of the world’s population. A city provides a sense of place, habitat, community and livelihood to people, to long-time residents as much as to every new inhabitant who seeks a sense of familiarity along with security. Historically, every city has its own distinctive features and ecological characteristics. Despite the old saying “Wisdom is the aggregate of knowledge and experience”, in the era of the Anthropocene, we tend to forget the wisdom that can be derived from traditional practices and past experiences.
Kolkata, capital of the state of West Bengal, is one of the Indian megalopolises and home to almost 15 million people. One of the city’s most important environmental infrastructures, the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW), has provided huge benefits to the city for the past centuries. The EKW lie on the eastern fringe of the city, engulfed by metropolitan boundaries from three sides, and a rural area on the other side. It is the only natural flushing system of Kolkata’s sewage. Moreover, it oxygenates the air for its citizens.
From my past experiences of living in the city, I unfortunately know many Kolkata residents who are unaware of the wetlands’ vastness and beauty — and would rather seek to experience ‘nature’ in some countryside faraway from the city.
Past realities: From waste sewage to vegetable gardens
In former times, Kolkata was known as the land of ponds and marshes — as it is a part of the mature delta of the River Ganges. The wetlands are the interdistributary marshes in the delta.
Today’s megacity is located in such a low-lying region, its average elevation is merely around 6 metres above the mean sea level. The East Kolkata Wetlands are located next to what is now known as Kolkata’s Salt Lake City. Historical evidences traced back to 1748 suggest the vastness of the earlier wetland area, which was almost double the present size. As the name suggests, it was once covered with salt marshes located close to the Bidyadhari River, which has now dried up. The salinity of the water resulted from an active tidal motion from the Bay of Bengal. The wetlands, often termed marshlands, ideally were spill-reservoirs of the tidal channels of the Bidyadhari, which opened into the Bay of Bengal through the River Matla; one such channel was extended to the core of the city and served as one major drainage system.
As the settlements proliferated around the 1800s in the ‘city of marshes’, public health was found to deteriorate. In around 1864, British colonial authorities acquired the wetlands for solid waste disposal, and ever since the organic waste from the city dumped here increased the fertility of the fields. The Calcutta Corporation began to pump the city’s sewage through canals to these wetlands. In the 1930s, local communities started to secure their food sources and livelihoods by feeding fisheries with wastewater. Their traditional practices gained experience and the methods improved eventually. The water from the outlets of fish ponds was used to irrigate paddy fields.
This pisci-agricultural activity resulted in a functional informal waste recycling scheme.
Today, according to urbanization research, the East Kolkata Wetlands subsidize Kolkata’s municipal budget by around Rs. 4,680 million annually, which is equivalent to USD 0.1 billion as an ecological subsidy. The city’s waterways are cleaned in less than 20 days by EKW. The wetlands perform as a significant carbon sink not only for Kolkata but on a global scale. This is why the East Kolkata Wetlands are listed as a site of international importance in the Ramsar scheme.
Feeding the city
Over the generations, local fishermen with their traditional knowledge converted the wastelands or swamps into a profitable market area for aquaculture. Apart from that, they also successfully tripled the yield rate of fish production in freshwater compared to any other pond yields: Studies have shown that the volume of annual fish production from these sewage-fed fisheries was 18,000 metric tons in 2008, which was about 44% of Bengal’s fish production.
The remaining land is used for other connected farming practices such as growing vegetables, paddy cultivation, poultry and animal husbandry, generating approximately 150 tons of vegetables per day. Benefiting local people and communities through economic profits, employment and social cohesion, along with environmental contributions, this practice thus represents a sustainable land-use method.
Based on their traditional knowledge and practical experiences, local fishermen communities have developed a way of efficiently using those areas in the wetlands that can be used for farming. After cleaning the ponds, the waste extracted from the wetlands is spread on the embankments between the ponds because it is considered fertile. Local people especially cultivate seasonal vegetables like cauliflower, tomatoes, brinjal etc. in winters, and pumpkin, gourds and many others in summers, mostly for their own daily consumption. Many of these pond systems, called bheris, produce vegetables in excess, which can be sold to the local markets.
The EKW as a functional socio-ecological system
We find a plethora of literature on the environmental relevance of wetlands in general, but there is a need for attention to the wetlands in cities — especially those placed in the Global South and located near deltas, estuaries or coastal areas. Many overly populous and rapidly urbanizing cities in such ‘amphibious territories’ are under serious threat by inundation: The swamps or watery spaces threaten to claim back the cities.
Amphibious landscapes like EKW, which are ecologically volatile and have a long history of community management, require expertise and in-depth knowledge of local communities for their sustainable development.
The planning and conservation approaches to such landscapes need to be designed in a bottom-up way, rooted in the local context rather than being based on any external organization operating through a neo-liberal market agenda.
Through my field observations, in-depth interviews and participatory workshops with local fishermen and farmer communities I have learnt about socio-ecological systems management and climate-change issues from the inside: For instance, the aim of the fishermen is often to produce a high yield and bring in market value, at the same time to avoid market-induced transformations such as the use of chemical fertilizers for fish food. The opposition to such practices is stronger on the side of the older and experienced farmers than on the younger ones’.
Although the East Kolkata Wetlands are an aquaculture site, the sense of place for the communities in the wetlands is beyond just market evaluation. The local communities often use terms and words like ghar (home), ‘own country land in the city’, and the ‘soil of gold’ or ‘waste turned into gold’. Communities feel a particularly strong spiritual belief associated with the place.
East Kolkata Wetlands is a living example of a socio-ecological system, with a fusion of scientific methods and traditional knowledge.
Conclusions for sustainable urban planning
To conclude, it is important to highlight the opportunities connected to wetlands in cities. Urban planning needs an alternative vision for the design of sustainable cities for the future. It requires a holistic approach that is grounded in the local context, and in past and present realities.
The growing aspiration to replicate the Western idea of ‘global cities’ from the North, often results in the landscape becoming disconnected from its own ecological and cultural realities.
Each ecosystem that thrives in an urban environment needs a basic maintenance: The EKW, for instance, would need desiltation from time to time, which requires manual and financial resources. The lack of state subsistence for maintaining the wetlands is leading to the disruption of the healthy flow of the system. Instead, the swampy urban aquaculture site at Kolkata’s eastern fringe is today considered an easy ground for mushrooming real estate markets: Despite their recognition as a Ramsar site, the East Kolkata Wetlands are constantly pressured by issues of land ownership, real estate market and local political power dynamics.
In order to keep such vital socio-ecological landscapes and the benefits they provide alive, the state needs to take over a leading role in their maintenance and protection.
In facilitating such a process, it is crucial to consider all stakeholders associated with the wetlands, including their knowledge and traditions.
Background & Contact
I am a PhD candidate in Sustainable Food Systems at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and a member of the research group ‘Social-Ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems.
For details, check my profile on the University website.
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In my next story on People • Nature • Landscapes, I will share some results and deeper insights from my field study in the East Kolkata Wetlands.
