Listening To The Land, Water And Trees In City-Making

In the making of a city with tall towers, wide expanses of commercial areas, swanky gated complexes and retail outlets, metro networks and airports, complete with busy thoroughfares, traffic congestion, and ceaseless neon signs, what do the trees, water, and the land that have stood there for centuries say? This is a question that governments, planners and private capital hardly ever pause to think about and reflect upon. Their approach and motivation to planning and building a city are driven by the mutually dependent twin lenses of economic efficiency and profit maximisation. At some stage, though, the land, water, and trees force us all—they who build and profit and the rest of us who live and work—to face the question.

Engineering Marvels And Urbanisation

Planning and making cities, especially in the neoliberal economy, focuses on what engineering marvels can be manufactured—the tallest towers, the longest tunnels, viaducts below acres of forests, turning floodplains of rivers into real estate, bending rivers to fit an airport, landfilling creeks and coastal areas, constructing the longest road in the sea, and putting the fastest train on rails between two cities. These are legitimate engineering achievements, especially for a nation that seized its own future barely 80 years ago.

But, as the tunnel boring machines and the massive cranes crank to work round-the-clock, lacerating the land and trees and water in their path, the engineering marvels must be countered with questions from other disciplines, in this case primarily ecology and sociology. This has acquired an urgency now. Redevelopment is redefining Mumbai in ways that are quite unprecedented, its tentacles devouring land and water in every nook and corner of the city. And development, especially of Third Mumbai and Fourth Mumbai, is reiterating the mistakes of urbanisation in Mumbai in newer greenfield areas.

In Pen, Uran, and beyond across Raigad, at least 124 villages, along with acres of green cover and water networks, are marked out to be erased across 323 square kilometres to build Third Mumbai. The state agency, Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), set up in January 1975, which acquired a mojo all its own in the past two decades, has signed an agreement with Singapore’s Surbana Jurong to shape the master plan for this Mumbai. Mapletree Investments, the global real estate development, investment, and capital management company also headquartered in Singapore, is on board and expected to bring in Foreign Direct Investment of more than $1.1 billion.

Ecological Cost Of Development

How ironic that the global firm is called ‘Mapletree’. In all of the plans and the furious pace of making this city, none of the agencies involved are clear about how many trees—the real ones that have their home in the earth—will be cut without a trace. At least the MMRDA should have had an idea, but it apparently does not. Across the Raigad expanse run rivers and streams all flowing westwards into the Arabian Sea, such an intricate network that the water map looks like a fine tapestry in blue. The Savitri, Kundalika, Amba, Patalganga, Balganga, Kaal, Ulhas, and Shilhar and their tiny tributaries, flowing for centuries, are to be bent or obliterated to fit the master plan.

Already, in the second ‘Mumbai’, or Navi Mumbai, the international airport has devoured roughly 98 hectares (242 acres) of mangroves, levelled a 90-metre-high hill, among others, and diverted the Ulwe River and modified the Gadhi River flow. Who counted the true and complete ecological cost of the airport whose Phase 1 alone cost Rs 19,650 crore in monetary terms? The cumulative impact of altering and decimating the ecology has raised flooding concerns in surrounding areas besides displacing thousands of people whose land it used to be.

How will urban development, or redevelopment, be sustainable if the people are not heard and the trees, land, and water are not listened to? On paper, in plan documents, anything can be made to look sustainable and even ecologically sound; now AI makes this task even easier. After all, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s plans for the Versova-Bhayandar coastal road extension confidently stated that the nearly 46,000 mangroves to be cut would be compensated by planting them in the lush hills of Chandrapur 800 kilometres away.

Planning With Nature

On the ground, nature keeps its own counsel and demands its space. So, planning and building mega structures and cities without listening to the land, water, and trees is not an option.

How do we listen? This calls for a conscious adoption of the philosophy of listening, an art that we in cities have lost in the din of economy, productivity, efficiency, revenue, and profits. It means governments, planners and engineers, and private capital must look beyond anthropocentrism or the humans-are-superior approach to city-making, actively learn about the incredibly complex natural ecosystems and incorporate the learning into plans, accept that the natural systems and non-humans are not merely passive elements to be dominated by plans, and shift positionality from “building by conquering nature” to “building with nature”.

Pause in planning the grand plans to listen to and understand what the temperament of the land is, respect the water in all its forms and spaces, recognise the mycelium network that trees offer and sustain so much around them, and recognise the rights of the natural ecosystem. In short, ecological literacy that comes from deep listening should become the starting point of planning, and all urban plans of development and redevelopment must be nature-based. It can no longer be the economy-versus-ecology binary; that was a false binary in any case and now belongs to history. Nature-based planning is the only way forward, whether it is redevelopment of a neighbourhood or the development of another ‘Mumbai’.

Smruti Koppikar, an award-winning senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and can be reached at smruti@questionofcities.org.

Published on: Thursday, August 27, 2026, 09:57 PM IST