Chakrabarti, D., Sengupta, U., Dusa, S., 2025.

WASH infrastructure adaptations v. peri-urban aspirations: Complexities of planning, provisioning, and implementing within the lived realities of Global South cities

This paper critically examines the persistent challenges of WASH infrastructure provisioning in
the peri-urban areas of Kolkata, India, through the lens of planning in the cities of the global
South (Watson, 2009) and complexity theories (Sengupta, Rauws & de Roo, 2016). Despite the
dynamic, self-organising nature of these rapidly expanding city peripheries and the inherent
aspirations of their inhabitants for improved living conditions (Roy, 2009), conventional urban
planning often remains a hierarchical and linear process. This research illustrates a striking
imbalance between top-down planning intentions (interventions?) and the realities of
implementation beyond the established urban governance peripheries, leading to significant
infrastructural gaps and socio-spatial marginalisation.
We contend that to eUectively address the uneven geographic development and deep-rooted
inequalities in peri-urban areas of the global South (Roy, 2003; McFarlane, Silver & Truelove,
2017), planning must move beyond its traditional technocratic agenda to genuinely engage with
the panarchic dynamics of multi-level interactions (Gunderson & Holling, 2002). This paper
particularly aligns with the call's emphasis on planning by critically engaging with how planning
practices and implementation mechanisms have remained inequitable historically and
continue to marginalise impoverished peri-urban communities, in the case of Indian megacities
(UN-Habitat, 2016; Roy, 2011). Theoretically, we attempt to develop a framework that
reconceptualises peri-urban governance in the context of Indian cities as complex adaptive
systems where grassroots infrastructural adaptations and the aspirations of marginalised
communities are seen not as deviations, but as emergent phenomena that hold the potential to
evolve current development processes towards more equitable transformations (de Roo, 2018).
This necessitates developing planning approaches that are iterative, adaptive, and capable of
recognising and amplifying the non-linear, self-organising capacities (Sengupta, 2017) already
present at the local scale, ensuring that future transformations are genuinely grounded in the
lived experiences within these dynamic zones of growth.