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. This land-centric enterprise and imagination has generated a series of human designed “natural” disasters all over the world. What might an attention to water reveal about the future of Indian cities? At our Online Talk #SeasideStories, environmental anthropologist Dr Nikhil Anand focusses on the multidimensional relationship between cities and water in India, and looking at the impact of climate change on India’s coastal communities, suggests that climate change is demanding a fundamental rethinking of urbanisation itself.

About the speaker: Dr Nikhil Anand is an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on cities, infrastructure, state power, and climate change. His award-winning first book, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Politics in Mumbai (Duke University Press 2017), examines the ways in which cities and citizens are made through the everyday management of water infrastructure. Alongside Anuradha Mathur (Weitzman School), he is currently the PI for Inhabited Sea (www.inhabitedsea.org), a transdisciplinary collaboration that proposes to reimagine the futures of coastal cities in the climate-changed present. Dr Anand has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University, a Masters in Environmental Science from Yale University, and a B.A. from Reed College.