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.