2 Sustainable flows between Kolkata and its peri-urban interface Challenges and opportunities Jenia Mukherjee Introduction That over half of humanity now lives in towns and cities is the most complex socio-economic phenomenon of the twenty-first century. In slightly over two dec- ades, from 2010 to 2030, another 1.5 billion people will be added to the popula- tion of cities; by 2030 that fraction will be increased to 60 per cent.1 Although urbanization has occurred since ancient times in human history, the most impor- tant ways in which the urbanization processes today are different from urban transformations of the past include the scale, the rate, and the shifting geography of urbanization (Seto et al. 2013: 4). Urban growth in the coming decades will take place primarily in Asia (China and India in particular) and Africa (especially Nigeria). The developing world has already entered into the high-growth, rapid- transition phase of the urbanization process, marked by numerous problems and challenges including the swelling of slums and squatter settlements; lack of city- wide infrastructures for services such as housing, health and sanitation; privatiza- tion and commercialization of infrastructures; city development plans based on the logic of foreign capital; the widening gap between the rich and the poor; and the changing nature of the rural–urban divide. Scholars argue that one of the crucial aspects of the contemporary urbanization process in the developing world is the emergence of what is defined as the ‘peri- urban’ or semi-urban interface, where rural and urban features tend to coexist increasingly within cities and beyond their limits (Allen et al. 1999; Allen 2003, 2009; Shaw 2005). Various recommendations are being made to incorporate this new concept into both theory and practice (planning). These include the appli- cation of the urban–rural gradient paradigm as a powerful organizing tool for studying urban ecology and initiatives to come up with a specific approach to be applied in environmental planning and management (EPM) of these areas (Allen 2003: 147). The peri-urban constitutes an ‘uneasy’ phenomenon, usually characterized by either the loss of ‘rural’ aspects (loss of fertile soil, agricultural land, natural land- scape and so on) or the lack of ‘urban’ attributes (low density, lack of accessibil- ity, lack of services and infrastructure, and so on) (Allen 2003: 136) and recent urban expansion or sprawl in the developing countries. Interestingly enough, if we 34 Jenia Mukherjee look into the pages of history, we find that the sharp disconnect between the urban and the rural is only a recent occurrence, first appearing as late as the early twen- tieth century. Densely packed housing and central institutions within the defen- sive walls of the city, and residential settlement spreading far beyond that limit (a phenomenon that we might today call sprawl), was a pattern found frequently in the Near East, Asia and medieval Europe (Boone and Modarres 2006; Elmqvist et al. 2013). The layout of other ancient cities (like those of the Khmer of early medieval Cambodia, the classic Maya of Central America, and some pre-colonial African societies) was marked by a different type of sprawl or area spread, where residences were interspersed among agricultural plots in an extensive low-density continuum surrounding central institutional buildings and monuments (Evans et al. 2007; Scarborough et al. 2012; Simon 2008; Elmqvist et al. 2013). Ecosystem services, mainly in the form of agriculture, within these greater cities or broadly defined urban boundaries provided a major share of the city’s subsistence. The disconnect between the urban and the rural, or the urban infrastructures and the wider ecosystem of the city, was imagined in the nineteenth century and built in the twentieth century (see introduction), the Chicago School of urban soci- ology being one of the chief proponents. Cities came to be considered as separate entities detached from their peripheral areas; the interactions, flows, links and linkages between the two, which formed a vital component for the sustenance of both, were neglected and ignored. To know, understand and consider the great variation of urban histories, rather than depend on and draw from mere generalizations and universal theories, it is relevant and beneficial to use a historical perspective across a large space–time scale. This approach prompts a researcher to take a case-study-based approach to exploring specific trajectories of urban development, the evolution of a par- ticular urban space, the interaction between the city and its periphery, and the changing realities as history proceeds. I am a student of history and an inhabitant of Kolkata, one of the three megacities of India with a population of 10 million plus.2 In this chapter, I explore the complex interactions between Kolkata and its peri-urban interface (PUI) since the days of their inception during colonial times. Considering primary historical sources, including official documents, reports, let- ters, extracts, maps and plans, I argue that the city and its PUI co-evolved as consciously constructed spaces following a hegemonic discourse of domination/ subordination, the latter functioning as an output and input, produced and required by the city. The British tamed its natural ecology (in the forms of creeks, swamps and marshes) into waterscapes (i.e. extensive canals connecting the city with its hinterland) to accomplish colonial capitalist motives of revenue generation, unintentionally giving birth to the eastern sewage-fed wetlands that in turn emerged as the space for the informal, ‘untamed’ practices of marginal peri- urban communities. Post-colonial urban planning narratives in the immediate post-independence period were strategically constructed to tame the untamed, legitimizing rapid urban sprawl at the cost of the peri-urban wetlands, for seek- ing capital/financial gains. With the popularization of ‘sustainable development’ Sustainable flows between Kolkata and its PUI 35 followed by ‘sustainable urbanization’, like many other developing cities, its ‘environment’ had to be incorporated within the ambit of urban planning of Kolkata, paving the way for state/municipality-led ‘urban environmentalism’ that increasingly built upon capital-intensive beautification schemes and pro- jects securing resources for capitalist restructuring within the neoliberal regime (Bose 2013), the untamed scapes and practices being rapidly tamed. However, state-led environmentalism received both acceptance and rejection from the middle class, whose vision sometimes collaborated with the authoritarian vision of the beautification and development of the city but also sharply col- lided against it, the Kolkata wetlands case being the strongest manifestation of this aspect. Though the city is being increasingly untamed by ‘authoritar- ian environmentalism’ validating mega-urbanization at the cost of wetlands and supporting ecosystem resources and affecting urban–peri-urban linkages, it is yet extremely important to understand the production of the city through these complex dynamics and dialectics of taming and untaming theories and practices embedded in the pluralities of Kolkata’s environmentalisms. Overview and objectives The sustenance of Kolkata heavily depends upon its interaction with its PUI, mostly in the form of wetlands in the eastern part of the city3 that act as a transi- tional zone, an urban–rural continuum for a rapidly urbanizing space. The prox- imity of the wetlands to the city and their interdependence is what sustains them. The East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW) are the world’s largest resource recycling ecosystem, fully managed by local inhabitants using inter-generational knowl- edge. They recycle around 600 million litres of sewage and wastewater generated by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) every day. The canals, artificially excavated during the colonial regime with the triple purpose of facilitating trade, transportation and drainage, carry and dump sewage water into the wetlands. The wetlands in turn provide ecosystem services and livelihood opportunities to the peri-urban poor, who sell their surplus produce in city markets. Most importantly, unlike most other populous cities Kolkata does not have a separate sewage treat- ment plant; the wetlands as a natural sink (often regarded as the ‘natural kidney’ of Kolkata) provide free services which would have otherwise cost the city around US$ 80 million per annum. In spite of this, the PUI is significantly dwindling in size, heavily interrupt- ing the ecological balance and threatening the socio-economic benefits for both wetlands and city. Kolkata has urbanized rapidly with an east-centric bias during the post-independent period,4 at the cost of her wetlands. Initiatives from environ- mental scientists and civil society advocacy groups played a crucial role in hav- ing EKW put on the Ramsar list of Wetlands of International Importance (www. ramsar.org) in 2002, which has helped to protect the remaining 12,500 hectares of wetlands from further encroachment. Although the EKW enjoy legal protec- tion through court orders, legislation and international conventions, conversions from wetlands to estates is still taking place. Over the last ten years there has been 36 Jenia Mukherjee Figure 2.1 Sustainable flows between Kolkata and its PUI. a sharp escalation of conversions, and a quarter of the surviving wetland area remains under severe threat. This spatial transformation