Rendering Chennai Coastal

Chennai, like most cities, is layered with multiple histories and its people live across diverse geographies. Yet in the current historical juncture, the story of Chennai’s socio-ecological and infrastructural changes has become knowable primarily as a story about its coast. I argue that ‘coastal chennai’ as an analytical category indexes multiple forms of toxicity--planetary climate toxicities, environmental pollution from industrial effluents, and the political economic inequalities structuring fishing economies and the social life of coastal communities. In other words, thinking about how Chennai is framed as a coastal place in the present historical juncture draws our attention to how the coast is constructed as the exemplary space where the toxic effects of climate change, industrial toxics, and toxic socio-political structures come to settle.

Scales of Attention: 

Global climate discourse around coastal cities articulates an argument which redraws the world into comparable units based on geography, albeit through the unit of “elevation from sea-level”. These discourses frame coastal cities as places where climate risks meet with dense urban and industrial development along the shore. Places formerly seen as distinct are suddenly comparable within this framework of coastal cities--New Orleans and Chennai; Houston and Mumbai; and so on. 

The reports produced by the World Bank(2007), IPCC (2019) and World Economic Forum (2019) focus on the threats faced by coastal cities around the world due to climate change. Some key arguments they make are that coastal cities across different continents are comparable as places which are at less than 10m above the sea-level or “low elevation coastal zones”. As global emissions of greenhouse gases goes up, they estimate that by 2100 the global mean sea level rise could go up by 1 meter. The figure of the 1 meter rise in sea-level, estimated through several models, key among them “Digital Elevation Modelling”, underpins the estimations of how much risk coastal cities are facing. Per these reports, with 1m rise in sea-level these coastal cities are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change such as flooding, extreme weather events, salinity in water tables and so on.A complex host of processes combine to produce these effects. 

What notions of toxicity are brought to the fore when places are framed as ‘coastal cities’ within a global urban coast? Seen through the global climate discourse, Chennai is faced with planetary climate toxicities and the threat of extreme weather events that have to do with its geography--of being at low elevation levels from sea-levels. 

But there are also other hegemonic imaginations of Chennai as a coastal place, and which evoke other meanings of toxicity when taken into consideration. One dominant and hegemonic policy discourse that is transforming the extended East and West coastline of India is the national government’s policy of Sagarmala. It is simultaneously a geo-political and economic project that frames India’s coastline as a ‘string of pearls’ or nodes in a project of port-led industrial development. Seen from this perspective, Chennai as a coastal place is economically valuable due to its proximity to the sea, ability to facilitate industrial processes of cooling, discharge of water, and as a holding place for industrial labor at its coasts. As such it highlights the toxic processes through which techno-legal projects of infrastructure building work to dismantle coastal ecologies and lives, while also producing new mucky social relationships mediated by industrial materials, land, water and people. 

The question for an ethnographer of the coast is what happens when the discourses around Chennai as coast as a climate vulnerable place due its geography, interacts with national policies of economic growth of coastal places? Often these are analyzed as mutually distinct discourses--for example, critics have argued that the national policy Sagarmala ignores the climate risks and toxicities. My question is slightly different; when seen from the perspective of the politics (epistemic, material) of infrastructure on the coast, how do climate discourses and national economistic discourses shape each other? (to be fleshed out through ethnography in my dissertation chapter)

Chennai’s residents engage with both these two global and national/regionally scaled imaginations of Chennai as coastal through their own articulations of the city and its coast. An urban ecological narrative articulated by environmentalists places water as central to city-making and renders visible the toxicities flowing through the city. These activists respond to the threat of Sagarmala, by drawing on climate discourses and methodological tools used in climate reports to argue that the coastline is at risk and should not be further built on. GIS visualizations that circulate in climate change reports at the global level are increasingly circulated within the city-level public discourses. (See examples of this in the photoessay) In emphasizing ecological functions of the coast and arguing for protecting of these ecologies, the discursive effects of the reports is to provide an argument for evictions of the urban poor and fishing communities who are arguably living in sites which are vulnerable to climate change. Meanwhile fisher groups who have historically lived in the near-shore regions along the coromandel coast articulate ideas of belonging to the coast based on their identity and social relations which mediate where to live, fish, and move. Their imaginations of the coast, and the call for imagining Chennai as coastal is a call for attention to their marginalization from the city’s history. It points to the toxic processes through which the political economy of fishing and urban development marginalizes artisanal fishers.

Overall, I argue that the politics of place-making, as seen from the vantage point of rendering Chennai coastal, demonstrates the epistemic and material politics of what is toxicity.