Mumbai’s storm water drainage system is rapidly transforming as incidences of heavy rainfall rise. Its transformation is built on the idea of conserving the city’s ‘rivers’ that were lost to urban development. While this move to recuperate a heritage of rivers seems like a step in the right direction, Mumbai’s drainage system was largely cobbled together over time through piecemeal interventions in an estuarine landscape. This article shows how by engineering a history of rivers, the city’s planning authorities set in motion an agenda to train the expansive estuarine and improvisational systems into governable riverine channels contained within the state’s developmental visions. It focuses on one major channel, the Mithi, to show how the rationality of disaster preparedness, the emergent calculus of carrying capacities, as well as infrastructure are braided into constructed ecological histories to inscribe a new hydrological order on the city. For Mumbai’s engineers, these changes introduce new scalar logics and alter the nature of the drainage assemblage. Mithi’s transformation is emblematic of how articulations of nature, technology and urban development are emerging from the anxieties of climate change.
随着强降雨事件的增加，孟买的暴雨排水系统正在经历迅速的改造。它的改造建立在保护消失在城市发展中的城市“河流”这一理念之上。虽然这一河流遗产修复的举措似乎是朝着正确方向迈出的一步，但孟买的排水系统基本上是长期以来通过对河口景观的零敲碎打的干预逐渐拼凑起来的。本文展示了城市规划当局如何利用河流的历史启动一项议程，将广阔的河口和临时系统驯化成包含在国家发展愿景中的可治理的河道。我们聚焦于一条主要的河道，米提河 (Mithi)，展示了备灾理念、承载能力的突现计算、以及基础设施如何被纳入构建生态历史中，为城市书写新的水文秩序。对于孟买的工程师们来说，这些变化引入了新的标量逻辑，并改变了排水组合的性质。米提河的转变是一个象征，表明关于气候变化的焦虑带来了自然、技术和城市发展的交汇。