Contested Good City Stories From A North Chennai Littoral

This article investigates the wilful destruction of Ennore Creek, a littoral wetland system in north Chennai, Tamil Nadu, by a series of shifting statist good city imaginaries expressed in plans, research reports, environmental impact assessments, government orders and court judgements. We show that these media built a powerful scaffold of legally sanctioned and scientifically backed good city narratives that reformulated the creek as a sacrificial zone for sustainable development, economic growth and logistical urbanism. Framed through the analytic of the littoral, we interrogate these developmentalist narratives and the technologies they used to contain or dispossess the fluid materiality of the creek. We then develop the idea of amphibious activism to describe the actions of backwater fishers to care for and resist the further degradation of their life world. We suggest that their activism expresses what Michel Foucault called a practice of liberty. It could not free them from the sets of relations in which they were embedded, but it enabled them to imagine and enact another way of life within them.