Waste Boundaries
Tanuj Kohli
The project situates itself in the anthropocentric landscape of The East Kolkata Wetlands in India where urban sprawl, wasteland, farmland, and ecology collide.
Through history Kolkata has flourished because of the symbiotic relationship with its productive lands. With the city producing sewage waste, the wetlands would transform it into food through waste cultivation. The main protagonists of this system are the local fishing and agricultural communities who today face increased labour precarity due to their lands being exploited by contradictory legislative policies super imposed over a fluid wetland territory.
The spatial intervention is positioned around the physical relics of this juridical dispute between private development and environmental conservation policies: the abandoned real estate developments petitioned for demolition and a large waste landfill that lays on the convergence of the city and wetland, infiltrating the daily lives of the human and nonhuman agents that rely on it.
By creating alliances with the local cooperatives and NGOs a collective protocol is put forth called “The Dhapa Mile Charter” aiming to renegotiate the objects of dispute and temporally occupy them to create a network of communal infrastructures.
The strategy of gardening is implemented across the abandoned sites to begin remediating the land in favor of the local actors, promoting the commoning of resources and knowledge exchange while an elevated scaffold adjacent to the landfill begins to mediate the interface of waste flows and horticultural production at a safe distance for the villagers.
While this proposal is not a solution to the colonial territorialization of Kolkata’s hinterland, the strategy aims to confront the overlapping policies by working within its constraints to delegate a new state of exception for the local community. Incentivizing a more inclusive dialogue for future action and synergising a temporal co-existence with the changing conditions of this dynamic fluid landscape.