How do households of a majority experience and innovate their responses to monsoon’s wetness in (un)making Mumbai’s urban life and ecologies?
This question is framed amidst dire climate warnings and calls for urgent climate adaptation to futureproof South Asian cities. These have largely advanced spatial imaginaires in the form of large infrastructural assemblages and even en-masse relocation of vulnerable populations. Political economy approaches have argued that ‘architectures of extraction’ undergird the extractive values of such imaginaries where urban environments are recast in elite grammars of containment, displacement and dispossession perpetrating a bourgeois environmentalism. Concurrently, ontological approaches have called for prioritizing multiple moments of wetness in the depth and volume of sectional grounds to reimagine infrastructures for holding monsoon’s wetness. Hardly coincidental, the singular logics of sand and water that permeate these conceptualisations are unable to explain the processes and outcomes of urban majority’s lives who do construct a mirror image of the very things they oppose.
I argue that the rhythms of ingress and egress of muddy waters and wet muds weave into the accretion and erosion of Mumbai’s majority lives to shape multifarious logics, and, often invisibilized, architectures of (ex)foliation (ae). ae is a heuristic device to inquire into the weave of these multiple logics, and how they come to suture urban form. In unraveling spatial, material and aesthetic logics that undergird weaving and suturing, ae insists, as it were, on moving beyond a nature-culture dualism to articulate the grounds of the political for a decolonial and democratic praxis of climate change action.