Story Map from Peri-Cene: A Case Study in Chennai

Chennai’s growth story as an industrial hub (fourth-largest metropolitan area in India) in the last few decades has led to significant urbanisation, drastically altering a complex land/waterscape, making it vulnerable to multiple climate risks, as evidenced recently by the 2015 floods. This was followed by a period of acute water scarcity, leaving the city to fluctuate between too much and too little water, a condition that is expected to get worse.

Historically though, its hinterland ecology has contributed to managing these types of risks that were inherent to its climatic landscape. As the city expands and urbanizes into these hinterlands, can the city develop pathways that can address the twin challenges posed by urbanisation and climate risk? 

We pick three scales — macro, meso, and micro where these themes of urbanisation and climate change entangle, creating both challenges and opportunities. We use maps and images to show the impacts of this growth and the fallout at three sites that are representative of each scale. These scales play a role to tease out how various actors and stakeholders interact with each other and how they work within different governance arrangements at each scale.

 Sriperumbudur, a town about 40 Kms from the city centre of Chennai is somewhat of a poster child for the Chennai growth/periurban story. It has three Special Economic Zones (SEZs) housing global giants like Nokia and Saint Gobain which were set up to create thousands of jobs. Accompanying this is rife real estate speculation that has significantly altered the landscape with gated communities and shopping complexes, with land value skyrocketing around villages that were largely agrarian communities. 

Katchipattu, a hamlet of around 5000 people with largely unemployed or underemployed youth located on the outskirts of this town tells a different story. This community, formerly small-scale farmers and landless laborers have largely been “bypassed” by the tremendous growth in their neighbourhood, and the youth, many with technical diploma degrees, suffer a worse fate. 

The neighbourhood scale is the smallest scale and is usually managed by village panchayats. However, villages like Katchipattu that sit at the crossroads of globalizing forces show other actors and stakeholders in the region can have both direct and indirect impacts on their lives and livelihoods.

Conflict for water has heightened with industries, tankers carrying water to faraway neighbourhoods in Chennai clashing with those still practising local agriculture; furthermore, many industries are the main culprits in polluting water bodies like the one above.

Chennai's built-up density map for the period 2001-2018 shows how towns like Sriperumbudur and Chengalpattu have undergone significant change in the last 20 years. Unlike Kanchipuram and Thiruvallur, which are older towns, the growth in Sriperumbudur has resulted from concerted policies and legislation that have supported the setting up SEZs resulting in conversion of large tracts of land.

Similar to built-up density, the population density map also shows significant change for the towns. This was accompanied by real estate investments in apartments and gated enclaves and schools and colleges, with people moving here for both jobs and lower real estate prices compared to areas in the city.

The site chosen for the landscape scale is a 20 by 10 km grid that is made up of multiple wards within Chennai city limits and village panchayats just beyond, capturing the peri-urban continuum and the wide spectrum of communities and stakeholders the grid encompasses. It also captures the ‘corridor effect’, a symptomatic feature of Chennai’s urban expansion. Chennai is a city built on radial link roads and this naturally lends to these corridors; two such roads, OMR and ECR, form the backbone of this southern corridor and landscape. 

Roughly covering 200 sq.kms, this landscape between Muttukadu on the coast and Siruseri in the hinterlands is one of multiplicities. Multiple ecologies and communities exist at varying levels of fragmentation. The risks and vulnerabilities are also varied and complex.

The potential for flood risk is high along the southern corridor as seen in this map. OMR (Old Mahabalipuram Road) was heavily inundated during the 2015 floods, costing businesses along this stretch billions of dollars.

Areas like Sholinganallur and Siruseri on the IT corridor are most at risk for floods and inundation. There are cascading water bodies uplands that drain into the Buckingham canal and eventually into the Bay of Bengal. However, rapid development in these areas have seen encroachments on channels and water bodies that have given rise to inundation in low-lying areas and roads adjacent to channels. 

The meso scale, sits in between the oft-used micro and macro scales, which are relatively more well defined in terms of administrative boundaries and governance structures. Hence, this scale presents added complexity in terms of the multitude of agencies and administrative bodies that are active at this scale.

Periurbanisation can be seen as a process of being and becoming over time and space. One conception of the peri-urban is to employ ecological boundaries instead of administrative ones that are man-made and rendered porous through multiple processes such as urbanisation. At the macro scale, we explored the idea of using the Chennai watershed (made of up the basins of four rivers that drain through Chennai) that cuts across adjacent state boundaries as well. We asked what conceptions might such a scale add to the discourse on PERI-CENE? However the proposed Chennai Metropolitan Area, four times the present area, covering 3 other districts represents the diverse landscape and hence was chosen to represent the bio-regional scale.

This map shows inter-connected water bodies almost smeared across this vast stretch of land. These water bodies were central to agrarian communities and towns that pre-date the Chennai city timeline. They served as water reservoirs that were used primarily for irrigation, mitigating the climate vagaries resulting from wet monsoons and dry periods after. Many of them have been compromised and encroached upon owing to urbanisation and resulting declines in agriculture, thus compounding the risk of floods in adjacent and downstream areas.

At each of these scales, we will try to come up with adaptive pathways along with other experts and stakeholders. Identifying governance models and case studies that are adaptive/collaborative form the bedrock of such pathways and is at the heart of this exercise. Some of our ongoing projects emulate elements of adaptive governance but also employ design methods to find solutions at each scale. 

Pathway envisaged: Social innovation and Micro-governance

Use of a community gardening initiative to develop social capital amongst disenchanted youth groups and marginalized communities by providing a supplementary source of income and potentially rebuild and rekindle a lost sense of community and arrest social unrest within the community.

Pathway envisaged: Eco-tourism

An earlier project that shows possibilities to intervene in a region that will continue to urbanise. Future policies could use design tools to incorporate “blue-green” and “sponge-city concepts to avoid further social and ecological fragmentation and raise the potential for resilience at such a scale. 

Pathway envisaged: Agro-ecology 

Envisaging food sovereign spaces in ‘poramboke’ lands (‘commons’ attached to water bodies) thereby building climate resilience in the urban and peri-urban geographies involving local communities. 

This would mean re-imagining current food supply chains, shortening them, involving local, marginalised communities, alternative socio-economic models such as FPOs (farmer producer organizations) that will over time ensure food sovereignty and safeguard ecological assets like erys.