Designing the edge, erasing the river: Sabarmati Riverfront and the dissonance between ecology and planning
Across India, old black-and-white images of the Sabarmati River are often juxtaposed with vibrant photos of the modern Sabarmati Riverfront. This visual contrast is frequently showcased as a model of development, with the Sabarmati Riverfront serving as a blueprint for over a hundred proposed riverfront projects nationwide. These images are used to forge an implicit public consensus on a singular idea of development—shifting from a messy, evolving relationship between land and water to a rigid, one-time design intervention. The notion of regulating the unregulated has been deeply embedded into public consciousness—especially among city makers, planners, and designers. Urban rivers across India are undergoing a dramatic transformation, not only in terms of their land-water composition but in the very way we understand and define them. Here, we focus on one critical aspect of that transformation: the river’s edge.
Throughout history, rivers have been central to the development of human civilization—revered as ecosystems, lifelines, and carriers of intrinsic value. In the layperson’s mental map, a river is seen as a landscape with or without flowing water, delineated by the two banks between which water flows, either permanently or seasonally.
Land is measured in dimensions and area; water, in volume and velocity. Land is often monetized for its economic value, while water is rarely appreciated for its ecological worth—even though the value of land often hinges on the presence of water. Real estate along riverfronts stands as a clear testament to this disparity, as does the importance placed on groundwater in determining land value.
Despite this, little attention is paid to what defines a river: its edge. The riverbank—the line where water typically flows—is a transition zone, or riparian area, that connects aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. But in the context of development, this line has been repurposed as a definitive border between land and water—often stripped of its ecological meaning.
When planning turns this natural, dynamic boundary into a rigid administrative line, it disregards the ecological continuity between land and water. The Sabarmati Riverfront illustrates this redefinition starkly. Despite numerous studies on its design and impact, there has been limited reflection on how we arrived at its current ‘edge’. How was the line chosen? What was our original understanding of the river—and what should it offer today and tomorrow?
The River’s Edge: A Line of Separation
We all learned about the water cycle in school—evaporation, condensation, precipitation, collection. But in reality, the cycle is far more complex, involving infiltration, percolation, runoff, transpiration, and more. In most riverfront projects, however, only the ‘collection’ aspect is considered, reducing rivers to mere storage tanks. This anthropocentric interpretation extracts one moment from the hydrological cycle and builds a fixed identity around it.
In the case of the Sabarmati Riverfront, the design focuses on maintaining a tank of stored water, regulated by the high flood level, to prevent urban flooding and provide reserve supply. Land reclamation over an 11-kilometre stretch on both sides was a key driver of the project. Yet, this was downplayed during environmental clearance and oversold in political discourse—portraying Ahmedabad as the new Paris, Vienna, or London.
We are drawn to simplification, but as Einstein warned, “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” In simplifying rivers, we have overlooked the fundamental question: what is a river? By replacing the original, fluid edge with a new, hard one, we have redefined not just the river’s form but its function. The river is no longer a dynamic ecosystem but a controlled, bordered, designed entity.
Inserting a River: A Line of Suppression
This obsession with drawing and enforcing the line has turned separation into suppression. The river’s seasonal flow is now regulated by upstream and downstream sluice gates. Its natural variability—what Paul Klee might call “taking a line for a walk”—has been eliminated.
Sabarmati’s redefinition into a static waterbody misses the essence of riverine nature. The result? Frequent flooding, stagnant water, dying fish, invasive algae, and untreated sewage pouring into what is now being called a “lake.”
Le Corbusier once described the Sabarmati as a “picturesque spectacle” of life—dyers, buffaloes, donkeys, and birds sharing the riverbed. He captured its immersive nature, yet failed to grasp the deeper truth: it is not just the river, but the wetness—the fluid, shifting relationship between land and water—that gives it identity.
The new riverfront design fixes that edge, hardens it, and elevates it with eight-meter retaining walls and highways. The vocabulary of land dominates so much that planners cannot comprehend water as a system or acknowledge the people living around it.
Riverfront, as conceptualised by Bernard Kohn, Bimal Patel:
Historical Human Dependency
Historically, the Sabarmati was not a mere river—it was a maidan, a public ground, deeply tied to the city’s cultural and political life. From Uttarayan kite festivals to cattle fairs, the riverbed was a vibrant public space, its edge defined by seasonal rhythms. Even Gandhi viewed it as a democratic gathering ground.
Ahmedabad’s rise as the “Manchester of India” saw industries flock to its banks, extracting both water and labour. In the 1960s, people washed clothes on its shores, blending water with daily life. These overlapping landscapes—social and ecological—blurred the lines between land and water. That fluidity is now gone.
Line of/for Separation and Suppression?
The Sabarmati Riverfront erased that fluidity. Bernard Kohn, who first conceptualized the project, had envisioned the edge as a space for interaction—a socio-cultural ecosystem. Bimal Patel’s later design replaced that vision with a rigid, aestheticized version of the river, inspired more by Europe than by Ahmedabad. The result is a river turned into a year-round lake, artificially filled with Narmada water, lined with concrete, and flanked by roads.
This transformation is more than just visual. It is ecological colonization—water grabbing, land grabbing, and people displacement. Despite heavy critique from urbanists, ecologists, and communities, the Sabarmati model is now being replicated across India. Ironically, even after a decade, no major revisions or improvisations have been made. Instead, we witness a rigid imitation of a flawed template.
Instead of framing rivers as either dry or flooded, we must understand them in terms of wetness. As Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha propose in their Ocean of Wetness framework, wetness is everywhere—varying by degree across clouds, soil, air, animals, and plants. The hard line that separates land and water is a human imposition, a design choice that ignores nature’s fluid boundaries.
Sabarmati, once a river governed by rain and seasonal flow, was miscast as a ‘dry’ river—only to be reinterpreted as a permanent waterbody. If we accepted it as a temporal, fluctuating state within the hydrological cycle, we might design differently—allowing for cohabitation instead of separation, flexibility instead of rigidity.
Separation excludes; negotiation invites. Designing with wetness in mind means designing for all: humans and non-humans, elites and the excluded.
Way Forward
Rivers are not static infrastructures—they are living systems, shaped by continuous negotiation between land and water. The Sabarmati Riverfront imposed a top-down solution that is now difficult to undo. The project was supposed to address flooding, create real estate, and generate public space. Yet flooding persists, land remains unsold, and the space is largely inaccessible to the majority.
Empirical evidence confirms ecological failure. The river is among India’s most polluted, with untreated sewage and industrial waste regularly discharged. The so-called public space is exclusionary—divided by class, caste, gender, and even species. If we discriminate among humans, is it surprising that we also discriminate between domestic and stray animals?
We need a renewed understanding of the river's edge—not as a line of separation, but as a site of interaction, fluctuation, and life. Pedagogy and practice in architecture and planning must engage with water not as a commodity but as an ecosystem. The climate (water) crisis demands it.
Let us listen to the river. Let us allow its edge to become a shared space—not a boundary, but a bridge.
---
Dr Mansee Bal Bhargava is an Entrepreneur, Researcher, Educator, Speaker, Mentor. More info on her are at: www.edc.org.in, www.wforw.in, www.mansee.in. Parth Patel is an independent Scholar Urban Designer based out of New York and seeking opportunities on gamification in urban design initiatives
Comments