Accelerated urbanization across India is exerting unprecedented pressure on water resources. Cities are expanding beyond administrative boundaries, groundwater is being over-pumped, surface water is increasingly polluted, and lakes and rivers are being encroached upon. Most Indian cities, historically agglomerations of villages, were traditionally built around sophisticated water-harvesting infrastructures — from cascading tanks and stepwells to stormwater channels and rooftop rainwater harvesting systems — that allowed communities to manage and conserve water sustainably over generations.
The water crisis today extends well beyond a resource problem of availability and accessibility. It has deepened into an institutional crisis compounded by a crisis of social perception. Water problems are widely misread as purely engineering challenges, solvable by technology alone. Water provision is seen as the government's job, with citizens bearing no responsibility to conserve. Lakes and rivers are treated as politically contested land parcels rather than living ecosystems. These attitudes reflect a broader moral failure of society and its institutions toward water.
Against this backdrop, critical questions arise: How do we reconnect urban residents with water — not merely as a commodity or service but as a living ecosystem? How do we govern water resources across institutional, technical, and social layers, alongside their physical and hydrological dimensions? Answering these questions demands multi-scale, multi-level, multi-actor, and transdisciplinary planning that integrates ecology, heritage, mobility, community engagement, and more.
An international workshop titled "Water and Metropolitanisation," held in Hyderabad, offered precisely this kind of interactive pedagogy — addressing the multiplicity and complexity of urban waterscapes through the lens of one of India's fastest-growing megacities. The workshop was organized by Les Ateliers de Cergy-Pontoise in collaboration with the Government of Telangana and the Musi Riverfront Development Corporation, with support from the French Development Agency (AFD) and the French Embassy in India. The National Institute of Urban Management (NIUM) hosted the event. Full details of the workshop are available here.
Fifteen local and international practitioners and researchers from multiple disciplines and countries were brought together for an intensive program. Their task was to develop ideas and solutions for addressing water scarcity and pollution in Hyderabad, while also preserving the city's mosaic of green urban villages historically organised around water bodies. The workshop offered local authorities innovative, actionable approaches to sustainably manage the city's explosive growth and depleting natural resources through visionary planning and community engagement.
The WforW Session
WforW Foundation, in its online conversation series Wednesdays for Water, organised a session titled "Water and Metropolitanisation: The Case of Hyderabad" as part of its Education Series. The session invited workshop leads and participants to share the concept, process, outputs, and key learnings. It highlighted the dynamic and interconnected nature of water resources, social and cultural memory, infrastructure, governance, and participatory planning. The session recording is available on the WforW YouTube channel here.
The co-pilots of the workshop, Florence Bougnoux and Reena Mahajan, served as the session's main speakers, joined by discussants Sebastian Miguel, Maria Garcia Mendez, and Shashank IVS. Florence Bougnoux is a bioclimatic architect and urban planner with a focus on natural resources, water, and energy. She has worked with Les Ateliers since 2009, leading projects in France, China, Brazil, and India.
Reena Mahajan is an architect and urban planner with over two decades of experience in sustainable urban design and is a Climate Base Fellow based in Paris. She founded Studio Diversity to advance water-sensitive architecture, sustainable mobility, and gender-responsive planning. Sebastian Miguel is an Argentinean architect engaged in visual arts, research, and academic teaching on urban agriculture, social housing, and the remediation of polluted water basins.
Maria Garcia Mendez is an architect and urban planner focused on strategic planning, sustainable mobility, and participatory co-design, and co-founder of Hydra Studio in Madrid.
Shashank IVS is an architect, historian, and educator, founder of Our Love Story Works, and Assistant Professor at ADA College Hyderabad. He also served as an assistant pilot to the Hyderabad workshop.
The session was moderated by Dr. Mansee Bal Bhargava, herself a workshop participant and water professional.
The Water Legacy of Hyderabad
Hyderabad is among the most rapidly growing megacities in the world. Founded in 1591, the city earned the identity of "The City of Water" long before it became known as India's IT capital and a global health hub. Located in a semi-arid region with moderate rainfall and the perennial Musi River flowing through its heart, Hyderabad historically sustained a remarkable cascading water system — thousands of interconnected lakes, tanks, nalas (stormwater channels), and stepwells feeding into the Musi River. Today, more than 3,000 water bodies have either gone extinct or been severely diminished, and the Musi ranks among the most polluted rivers in the country.
In response, the Telangana government launched a massive Rs 56,000 crore-plus initiative through the Musi Riverfront Development Corporation to transform a 55-kilometre stretch of the degraded river. The Telangana government, working through the French Development Agency, approached Les Ateliers with a brief on this riverfront development project. Three round tables conducted over three months, drawing on local and international expertise in river regeneration, sponge city design, and community water governance, produced a significantly different perspective on the 55-kilometre corridor. Experts raised concerns that the riverfront was being addressed in isolation, without adequate upstream and downstream discourse, and called for a multi-scale, multi-level, multi-actor, and transdisciplinary approach to what they reframed as Musi River Ecosystem Regeneration.
The Workshop Process
Les Ateliers de Cergy-Pontoise is a non-governmental organisation that brings together an international association of professionals, scholars, and decision-makers in the field of urban development. It organises workshops conceived as platforms of design, creativity, and cross-cultural exchange, providing local decision-makers with international perspectives and innovative proposals for strategic urban challenges. With over 100 workshops conducted worldwide, Les Ateliers challenges conventional approaches to urban learning and planning. More information is available here.
For the two-week "Water and Metropolitanisation: The Case of Hyderabad" workshop, 15 participants representing seven countries volunteered their expertise. They engaged in intensive and immersive field studies, focus groups, expert talks, surveys, and participatory observations alongside local stakeholders. After several days of collective background work, the participants formed three teams, each tasked with developing localised, strategic, and innovative proposals for Hyderabad's water ecosystems toward a resilient future.
The Workshop Proposals
Team 1: The Aquapolis — Hyderabad, a City of Water
Team members: Avinash Kumar (planner, India), Sebastian Miguel (architect and urbanist, Argentina), Dr. Mansee Bal Bhargava (water worker, India), Hugo Rubio (engineer, France), Isabel Nanga (architect and woodworker, Angola).
Team Aquapolis envisioned Hyderabad as a decentralised, water-based, climate-resilient, and biodiversity-rich city. The concept of Aquapolis sought to reclaim Hyderabad's historic identity as "The City of Water." It drew on the profound presence of water bodies — lakes, nalas, the river, wells, and groundwater — in the city's dense urban economy, and expressed hope that even a wounded ecosystem could aspire to a sustainable and resilient future.
The concept also drew from Hyderabad's identity as "The City of Pearls": the lakes as pearls, the nalas as the threads linking them, the Musi River as the main necklace, and the polis as the shell that holds it all together. It was further inspired by the words of the city's founder, Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah: "Make my city full of people, like you keep the river full of fish." The Aquapolis vision responded: now that the city is full of people, let us return the river full of fish.
An online survey conducted by the team found that people value clean, natural water bodies as heritage and spaces for interaction, and strongly fear the destruction of these ecosystems. The team proposed a sponge city model incorporating water treatment parks, nature-based solutions along nalas, citizen-led garbage management systems, electric waste collection vehicles, and real-time water sensors for community monitoring.
Team 2: The Water Speaks
Team members: Akil Amiraly (water management researcher, France), Laila Melaz (urban planner, France), Pratik Devi (architect and urban designer, India), Maria Garcia Mendez (architect, urban planner, and illustrator, Spain), Srinivas G. Murthy (urbanist, architect, and academician, India).
Team Water Speaks adopted an ecology-first approach linking public health, mobility, and ecosystems. The team's premise was that water is not separate from us: 70 per cent of the human body is water, and it is the river that supplies water to our bodies and receives it back.
They proposed three strategic lines: first, clean and connected water bodies through domestic wastewater treatment and nature-based solutions; second, green-blue corridors along nalas to enable permeability, flood prevention, and urban agriculture; and third, active mobility and quality public space along the Musi, including a bicycle network and tramway rather than a highway.
The team also proposed "Houses of Common Waters" as community anchor points for co-design and local participation.
Team 3: Edu Tarala Muchkunda Samrakshakulu — Guardians for 7 Generations of Musi
Team members: Asim Khanal (urban planner and researcher, Nepal), Florent Chiappero (architect and urban designer, France), Gita Goven (architect and sustainability specialist, South Africa), Judith Christiana (grassroots implementation manager, India), Sneha Parthasarathy (architect, India).
Team Guardians for 7 Generations focused on integrating cultural memory with regenerative practice to ensure long-term stewardship of Hyderabad's water systems. Their slogan was "Swachh Hyderabad, Swachh Pani" — Clean Hyderabad, Clean Water.
The team argued that a network of beautiful, well-connected water bodies that have sustained and inspired generations must be reconnected and regenerated. They explored how the city's water network could be reinterpreted as both a sociocultural and environmental asset — a contemporary grey-blue-green infrastructure regenerating people, planet, and prosperity across seven generations.
Their water vision for the city was stated in three plain words: No Smell. Swim. Drink. Advocating a systems approach, they proposed leveraging existing water infrastructure alongside placemaking, and using education, awareness, and knowledge transfer as core tools of transformation.
Cross-Cutting Themes and Strategic Outcomes
The workshop generated creative, forward-looking proposals and established a collaborative platform bringing together elected officials, local stakeholders, civil society, businesses, and communities to address Hyderabad's most pressing water challenges. Critically, the three teams were not in competition and were not tasked with producing a master plan. Instead, they offered complementary lenses and approaches, using demonstration sites spanning a single lake, a neighbourhood, and the full length of the Musi River.
Five themes cut across all three proposals: ecology before economy; decentralised action with tools and agency at the neighbourhood level; water identity, pride, and loss; mobility and permeability treated together to create walkable, green, connected spaces; and shared governance and co-ownership.
Ideas proposed for immediate deployment included a water ripple application for real-time community monitoring of water quality, a Smell-Swim-Drink timeline to track restoration progress in accessible language, and Houses of Common Waters as local custodianship centres.
The proposals were presented at a public restitution attended by senior government officials and leading practitioners in urban development. The workshop output has been compiled and published in a synthesis document titled "Water and Metropolitanisation: A Bioclimatic City of Lakes — Hyderabad Comes Full Circle as Health Capital of the World," available here.
Shortly after the workshop concluded, the Government of Telangana issued an order establishing 50-metre no-construction zones and 100-metre restricted development zones along the full length of the Musi River — a direct reflection of the buffer zone logic advanced in the workshop proposals. The state also adopted an action plan encompassing stewardship programmes, walkable routes, interpretation centres, digital monitoring tools, and long-term mapping of buffer zones to revitalise Hyderabad as a bioclimatic legacy city.
Way Forward
The Water and Metropolitanisation workshop in Hyderabad is a testament to why planning through pedagogy is essential to responsible urban development. Disciplines traditionally linked to city-building — architecture and planning — still lack robust water education. In this context, multi-transdisciplinary and participatory approaches to urban planning become not optional but necessary.
Water conversations are the first step toward water conservation. The Hyderabad workshop offers a replicable model for intersecting multidimensional expertise — local and international — with institutional willingness to make water everybody's business. Water and ecology education must be brought into schools and colleges far more robustly than is currently the case.
Workshops, public art, and alternative courses are valuable tools for restoring water memory and building initial momentum, but the gap in formal water education remains large and urgent. Only when that gap is filled will the real dimensions of the water crisis be properly identified and addressed.
---
Saksham is a postgraduate student at the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal.
Dr. Mansee Bal Bhargava is an entrepreneur, researcher, educator, speaker, and mentor. More about her work is available at: https://www.mansee.in | https://www.edc.org.in | https://www.wforw.in | https://www.woder.org
Wednesdays for Water is an initiative of the WforW Foundation, a think tank and citizens' collective. Its mission is to make water everybody's business through dialogue, debate, and connection between water worries and water wisdom. Contact: wednesdays.for.water@gmail.com | hello@wforw.in | https://www.wforw.in.
Acknowledgements: The authors acknowledge the contributions of all session speakers, discussants, workshop organisers, participants, and jurors. Full details and reports of the workshop are available here.
Comments
Post a Comment
NOTE: Hateful, abusive comments won't be published. -- Editor