Why Inhabited Sea?

Nikhil Anand, Anuradha Mathur + Dilip da Cunha (Co-PIs)

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 landcentric 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. Intense rain, the proliferation of impermeable surfaces, high tides, and clogged drains together produced a massive disaster in a city built on landfill. 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.

Rather than begin with a terrestrial human problem (flooding or sea level rise, for example), our aspiration is to revisit this work through a transdisciplinary research between natural and social science researchers, architects, designers and artists working and living with wetness in Mumbai. 

Concerned about the future possibilities for Mumbai, we ask: What is the Inhabited Sea we call Mumbai made of? How is it being inhabited? And how might an attention to these practices of habitation generate new paradigms for governing wet cities of our present and future? 

We had originally intended for the projects featured here to be presented to publics and experts in Mumbai and Philadelphia in live exhibitions and seminars. When this was not possible on account of the COVID 19 pandemic, we moved these events online. Our thanks to Nupur Mathur for designing the website that both exhibits these materials and also the three live seminars during which we presented these projects.