(opnieuw)Leren Omgaan met Water. Versterking van de Sociaal-Ecologische Configuratie van de Brahmaputra chars in Assam (India)

The accelerating pace of contemporary urbanization, characterized by its homogenizing tendencies and technocratic planning paradigms, has increasingly distorted unique regional socio-cultural and ecological balances. The devastating impact of the blatant disregard to context, both cultural and natural, is nowhere more evident than in riverine landscapes, where a historically persistent impulse to regulate, control, and engineer natural systems has led to environmental degradation, social displacement, and a diminished capacity for resilience in the face of global warming. As the planetary consequences of global warming become more tangible, there is an urgent imperative to amend our relationship with nature. This research challenges the prevailing paradigm of dominance over nature (specifically rivers) and instead proposes an approach rooted in coexistence, adaptation, and reciprocal stewardship. In this context, examining communities that embrace traditional and vernacular settlement practices while leveraging the inherent assets of the dynamic landscapes offer valuable insights into settling with/in riverine landscapes. The Brahmaputra floodplains represent an expansive, mutable terrain where land and water are in constant flux. This fluid environment gives rise to char-chaporis (shifting river islands and riverbanks) that defy conventional territorial classifications and administrative simplification of nature and people. Historically inhabited by mobile populations (locally known as charuas) whose subsistence practices are intricately attuned to the seasonal rhythms and shifts of the river, these landscapes have nurtured a culture of settling-on-the-move. However, contemporary development interventions, driven by state-led infrastructure agendas, seek to stabilize and territorialize these fluid landscapes, often at the cost of displacing populations and dismantling indigenous logics of cohabitation with the river. This study constitutes an urgent call for local planning agencies, designers and practitioners to question the widespread application of conventional planning paradigms and critically examine their impact on riverine landscapes, where such approaches are fundamentally severing the deep-rooted relationship between communities and the landscape they inhabit. The lessons from the charscapes act as forms of remembering to recover suppressed spatial knowledge and advocate for speculative futures aligned with the intrinsic logics of the territory.