Infrastructural concealment: everyday festival economies and riverine ecologies in Kolkata

Urban infrastructures are often celebrated within marketised development logics for their promise of equitable access while concealing ecological harm. This paper examines whether and how ecological degradation is integral to infrastructural modernisation, showing how infrastructures that promise improvement and inclusion simultaneously normalise harm within everyday urban life. Drawing on ethnographic research in Kumartuli, Kolkata (India), an artisanal neighbourhood renowned for Durga Puja idolmaking along the polluted Hooghly River, the paper traces how infrastructural interventions framed as heritage preservation and urban improvement intensify material flows and degrade river ecologies while concealing this harm beneath narratives of progress. The analysis situates Kumartuli’s engagements with water infrastructures and seasonal festival economies within broader urban political ecology and hydrosocial debates, illustrating how infrastructures operate as socio-technical overlays that transform riverine ecologies while facilitating festival-driven metabolic intensifications. It argues that concealment is systemic, relational and constitutive of infrastructural processes, positioning infrastructural modernisation as a mechanism through which ecological harm is rendered acceptable and less perceptible by embedding degradation within the material and discursive logics of improvement. While grounded in Kumartuli, the paper offers conceptual insights relevant across Global South urban contexts where infrastructural expansions intersect with degraded water commons and persistent ecological strain.