ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the edges of urban waterways as intra-urban peripheries where dynamic processes of place-making and appropriation occur. Chennai’s Buckingham Canal has undergone shifting valuations in the city’s urbanization history since its construction by the British as a navigation channel in the late 1800s. Having degenerated into an urban drain after the 1950s, it was revalorized in the 2000s through new eco-restoration visions. This dynamic ignored other histories of the canal including those of informal settlements and small-scale industries that had grown along its banks, offering working-class families a foothold in the city, and who now face eviction. This chapter draws on multi-sited ethnography in three canal-bank settlements to describe the shifting trajectories of opportunity, challenge, and threat that water’s edge urbanism offers.
