Chennai Wetlands Project
The second vertical of Aram Thinai’s work towards building climate resilience in Chennai focuses on the city’s waterscape—an interconnected system of wetlands, marshes, backwaters, and waterbodies that have historically shaped its ecology and livelihoods. Over time, however, rapid urbanisation has systematically disregarded these fragile ecosystems, often at the cost of both environmental integrity and the lives of marginalised communities who depend on them. Chennai’s transformation from a watershed city interwoven with agrarian landscapes into a dense metropolitan region has resulted in profound shifts in land, water, and social relations.
As the city continues to expand, particularly across its peri-urban edges, these patterns of erasure and exclusion risks are being repeated. Wetlands are encroached, water flows are disrupted, and local knowledge systems are overlooked in the pursuit of development. In this context, it becomes critical to pause and reflect on past trajectories, while actively engaging with present transformations to imagine more equitable and ecologically sensitive futures. The waterscape, therefore, becomes not just a site of environmental concern, but a lens to understand questions of justice, resilience, and urban planning.
Through the Wetlands Project, Aram Thinai engages with the Kovalam water basin—one of Chennai’s rapidly urbanising regions—to document and interpret these ongoing changes. The project seeks to build a rich, place-based archive that brings together narratives of disappearing wetlands, shifting land use patterns, and evolving community identities, alongside ethnographic stories from the ground. By translating these insights into accessible and public-facing formats, the initiative aims to make these transformations visible to a wider civic audience, fostering awareness, dialogue, and collective stewardship of Chennai’s waterscapes.
Community Museum
Project
The Community Museum Project is a participatory, art-based initiative that seeks to build civic awareness among children by connecting them deeply with the ecological, social, and cultural narratives of their locality. Anchored in sustained engagement with school students, the project introduces young participants to the layered histories of their neighbourhoods—tracing urban morphology, understanding the transformation of waterbodies and wetlands, and examining shifts in local demographies over time. Through guided explorations, mapping exercises, storytelling, and discussions, children are encouraged to critically reflect on how processes of urbanisation shape everyday life, often producing unequal geographies and narratives of marginalisation.
Parallel to these engagements, the project undertakes a close reading of the locality’s evolving socio-ecological landscape, situating children’s observations within broader questions of environmental change, livelihoods, and cultural memory. This learning is then translated into creative outputs through art-based interventions, where children express their understanding using visual, spatial, and narrative forms. These outputs collectively contribute to the making of a Community Museum—envisioned not as a static display, but as a dynamic, locally rooted repository of knowledge.
Predominantly exploring the potential of public art, the Community Museum becomes a shared space that documents and communicates local ecologies, lived experiences, and community histories. It serves as an evolving archive of place-based memory, fostering a sense of ownership, identity, and stewardship among participants, while also inviting the wider community to engage with and reflect on their changing environment.
Wetland Tour
The Wetland Tour offers an immersive journey through the wetlands, canals, and lakes of the Pallikaranai watershed in South Chennai. The tour critically traces the urbanisation of Chennai by examining how its wetlands and marshlands have been transformed over time. As one of the city’s rapidly peri-urbanising regions, South Chennai provides a powerful lens to understand how unplanned development has reshaped natural landscapes while turning the city into a metropolitan hub. The tour also highlights the complex intersections between wetland conservation, flood mitigation, and systemic social exclusion, particularly the ways in which marginalised communities are often displaced or disadvantaged in the name of environmental protection. Through guided visits to key ecological and urban sites across the watershed, participants gain first-hand insight into the ecological significance, historical transformations, and social realities shaping Chennai’s wetlands today.
Wetland Investigation Studies
The Wetland Investigation Study is conceived as an in-depth, interdisciplinary inquiry into the ecological and infrastructural dynamics of urban wetlands, with a focus on understanding their critical role in flood mitigation and water management. Anchored within the Pallikaranai watershed of the Kovalam water basin, the study examines the interconnections between natural hydrological systems and built infrastructure, mapping how altered water flows, drainage networks, and land-use changes influence flooding patterns. By combining spatial analysis with grounded observations, the study seeks to identify points of stress within the system, including disruptions to water pathways, declining wetland capacities, and vulnerabilities within stormwater infrastructure.
