Floating Ground: Wetness, infrastructure, and envelopment in Kochi, India

Abstract

The oceanic city of Kochi on the southwest coast of India is known for its abundance of water and as a hub of tourism and urban development. This abundance of water effects the ways in which urban infrastructures, often designed in the temperate climates of the Global North, can operate, and be maintained. In this article, I suggest that infrastructures such as sewers, roads, and rivers tend to separate water from land, thereby containing one to produce the other. In doing so, they render solid surfaces from which urban infrastructures are imagined. To imagine infrastructure otherwise, I attune to wetness, rather than water. I argue that attuning to wetness as an affective quality, changes the way one conceptualises infrastructure. To bring wetness and infrastructure together, I turn to the concept of envelopment where an object and its atmosphere can be brought into conversation. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kochi during the devastating floods of 2018, this article provides insights into how infrastructures might be reimagined in tropical urban settlements.