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Long abstract:

This paper focuses on riverfront and floodplain development in three cities in India: Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Varanasi. The Sabarmati riverfront in Ahmedabad (Gujarat State) has become a ‘model’ that other cities seek to follow as part of ‘smart city’ concepts or other urban development approaches. Notwithstanding many unfinished or halted riverfront development projects, the Indian government plans to undertake similar development in a large number of cities. Using a cultural political economy heuristic, to which we add a materiality focus, we investigate the cultural/performative dimension of water infrastructure, its institutional/political dimension, and its economic/investment dimension as different but related components of state rule. We argue that in the arena of urban planning, broadly understood, futures are not only imagined but also engineered in the form of riverfront and floodplain infrastructure – hence imagineering. Simultaneously, riverfronts and floodplains themselves are arenas where the combined cultural, political and economic dimensions of governance and development play out. While all three dimensions are present in all situations, in Ahmedabad infrastructure as investment for economic growth stands out, in Lucknow the contestation of political (party) identities is prominent, while Varanasi has embarked on 'river centric development for a spiritual economy'. The paper emphasises the performative dimension of water infrastructure in processes of (urban) governance and development, ranging from aspirations of modernity to cultural and political identity.