Introduction: Navigating Blue Infrastructures Along Historical and Political Ecological Realities

Abstract

This introduction lays out the context of the “Urbanocene” within which the current book project locates its relevance. Arguing from the conviction that each city has its own narrative, it explains why it is significant to capture urban micro-political processes across long-term temporal scales by unveiling dominant, counter, and suppressed urban environmental narratives. The empirical context of Kolkata’s “blue infrastructures” is described in detail, including the conceptualization of the phrase itself across its technical, historical, and social dimensions, based on findings derived by combining archival and qualitative research methodologies. The historical urban political ecology (HUPE) framework, cross-fertilizing urban environmental history and urban political ecology, is formulated and introduced. The chapter establishes why HUPE can be considered a robust and comprehensive framework and methodological intervention for capturing urban environmental realities across multiple dimensions. The summary of chapters, which elaborate the application of HUPE to Kolkata’s “blue infrastructures,” demonstrates the relevance of the HUPE framework and its potentials to be implemented at scale.