Professor Lindsay Bremner, Professor of Architecture and Director of Research in the School of Architecture and Cities, and an interdisciplinary and intersectoral team of researchers from India, UK and Canada have been awarded a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research 2022 grant for their two-year project titled ‘Reimagining the Good City from Ennore Creek, Chennai’.
The British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. They invest in researchers and projects across the UK and overseas, as well as bringing together scholars, government, business and civil society to influence policy for the benefit of everyone. Their Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research 2022 Programme aims to support projects which highlight the importance of collaboration between communities of practice, disciplines, capacities and borders.
Ennore Creek is a coastal wetland and backwater of the Kosasthalaiyar River in north Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Rich with mangroves, salt flats, canals and the myriad life-forms that thrive in them, it is home to numerous fishing communities and serves as a buffer against floods and sea level rise.
After the 1950s, when Chennai began associating the idea of the ‘Good City’ with industrialisation and modernisation, Ennore was rezoned for heavy polluting industries. Land-use changes and lax environmental controls resulted in pollution, coal ash leakage and dumping of toxic material into the creek, degrading its ecosystem and impacting the health and livelihoods of its communities.
This project is set to run from April 2022 until April 2024. It will bring together diverse communities of knowledge and practice to reimagine and rearticulate the future of the creek in the interests of local communities, in the context of permanent weather extremes, climate challenges and a state-led creek eco-restoration proposal.
Co-investigators on the project, which will run from April 2022 - April 2024 are historians Dr Bhavani Raman (University of Toronto), and Dr Aditya Ramesh (University of Manchester); anthropologist Dr Karen Coelho (Madras Institute of Development Studies); environmental chemist Dr Asif Qureshi (Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad); community activist and writer Nityanand Jayaraman and K. Saravanan and Pooja Kumar (Coastal Resource Centre, Chennai).
On hearing of the award of the grant, Professor Lindsay Bremner said: “I am incredibly honoured to be able to work alongside an amazing interdisciplinary, intersectoral team on this project. It will be an opportunity to test and develop the practical outcomes of my previous research project, Monsoon Assemblages (ERC, 2016-2021) with a team of scholars and activists committed to social and environmental justice in Chennai.”
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