Presentation short abstract

In peri-urban Coimbatore, urbanisation and socio-ecological constraints have undermined regenerative water use, culminating in the drying out of Kousika River. A grassroots movement formed to imagine and materialise hydrosocial (counter) territories to oppose the unsustainable mode of urbanisation.

Presentation long abstract

In peri-urban Coimbatore multiple stakeholders clash over water access. The city’s fringe constitutes an arena of contestation where rapid growth and social-ecological constraints lead to a mode of urbanisation that undermines the regenerative use of the local water resources. The complete drying out of Kousika River is a direct product of these dynamics. Within this context, a grassroots movement formed to counter this development. By mobilising the concept of hydrosocial territory, this study aims at understanding the intricate hydrosocial entanglements that make up Coimbatore’s urban fringe, its water and river management, as well as the exemplary struggle of a grassroots movement that stands in opposition to this unsustainable mode of urbanisation. The study is based on fieldwork including (exploratory) semi-structured interviews and transect walks. The analysis shows how peri-urbanisation creates a spatial regime where rivers and water bodies as well as their hydrological functions are ruptured, appropriated, and transformed. This restructuring of Coimbatore’s peri-urban hydrosocial territory is historically embedded and largely shaped by policy arrangements. Furthermore, the study traces how the local grassroots movement imagines and materialises hydrosocial counter territories. It asserts its territorial claims on multiple scales while leveraging the state’s ambiguity. Hereby, the movement successively extended its hydrosocial territory and achieved large-scale transformation of Coimbatore’s waterscape. By framing local hydrosocial dynamics in the broader theoretical context of urban metabolism, the study goes beyond understanding water flows as merely technical or politically neutral, but highlights how they are socially organised, subject to political struggles, and instrumental for environmental degradation.