Work

Reassembling narratives of risk in the urban margins

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: This article examines flood risk as an emergent assemblage rather than a fixed or universally agreed-upon condition. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper traces how flood risk materializes through contingent relations among human actors, hydrological processes, infrastructures, legal categories and competing temporal imaginaries. Rather than treating planners, experts and residents as stable groups with predetermined interpretations, the analysis follows how these provisional formations are continually reconstituted as they align with different visions of urban futures. Planners stabilize a heritage-oriented redevelopment imaginary, while disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) regimes regard the area as a high-risk zone. Squatter residents assemble the riverbanks as an urban sanctuary through everyday practices and selective downplaying of flood events. Foregrounding these relational processes, the article contributes to a temporally attuned understanding of urban risk, demonstrating that flood risk is not an external technical reality but an emergent effect of heterogeneous relations that shape and are shaped by competing futures-in-the-making.

Source: Environment and Urbanization

DOI: 10.1177/09562478261423925

Authors: Rachana Upadhyaya, Alejandro Barcena

Institutions: King's College London, International Institute for Environment and Development, University of Bristol

Language: English

Topic: Flood Risk Assessment and Management

Subfield: Global and Planetary Change

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,650