City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay

2 ideas

1. Reclaimed land keeps returning to water

   Filling in creeks, marshes and mangroves to make land removes the natural channels that once absorbed and drained monsoon water. When very heavy rain falls, the water goes back to its old paths, and the flooding is worst on the land that was built over. The July 2005 deluge, when roughly 944 mm of rain fell in a day and the choked Mithi river overflowed, shows the ecological debt of three centuries of reclamation coming due.

2. The cotton boom as a speculative engine

   When the American Civil War cut off Southern cotton in the early 1860s, Bombay became a main alternative supplier, and huge sums of money flooded into the city. The windfall set off a speculative frenzy, including the share mania and land-reclamation companies such as the Back Bay scheme, which collapsed when the war ended in 1865. A far-off war turned a port town into a capital-rich city, and much of its built fabric came from money raised in a bubble.

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