Engineering hydro-anxiety: agrarian urbanisation and water in peri-urban Delhi

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper traces water-related social concern, or hydro-anxiety, on Delhi’s rural periphery. It follows Matthew Gandy’s assertion that ‘the history of cities can be read as a history of water’, even as it expands the urban to encompass its extensions, including the surrounding rural belt. Building on community-engaged research, the paper describes the persistent anxieties around water since the 1950s, even as their specific articulations have changed in terms of both abundance and sensory qualities. Relating the shifts with local responses to the state’s civil works since the mid-1960s, it argues that as these villages become incorporated into urban systems, historical relations with water are brought within the patchy and uncertain ones that characterise engineered hydrologies of the Global South. The paper contributes to the debate on urban change in the metropolitan shadow by empirically underlining the agrarian entanglements of peri-urban experiences.