2026 Anthropology Annual Lecture – Amphibious City: Stormwater Drains and the Making of Gray Futures

Join us for the Anthropology Annual General Lecture where invited lecturer, Nikhil Anand will present Amphibious City: Stormwater Drains and the Making of Gray Futures.

Drawing on six years of research in Mumbai, Nikhil Anand examines how urban land-making has intensified climate risk and why city officials resist new climate solutions.

Nikhil Anand is the Silvers Family Presidential Professor of Anthropology, and Interim Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on cities, infrastructure, state power and climate change, and addresses their relations by researching the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water.

Full Event Description from Nikhil Anand:

In this talk I describe how experts and residents inhabit the increasingly uncertain terrain of Mumbai, a city that has been staged in the amphibious volumes of its landseas. I begin the talk by describing the ongoing histories and technologies of desiccation – a process through which the sodden materialities of the city are dried and flattened by landfill and reclamation projects. These projects, I argue, constitute the climate of the city; a climate in which urban planning, not only intensifies inequality and dispossession. It also renders more established populations vulnerable to the rising seas, storms and hurricanes of climate change. Recognizing the risks that are intensified by the failing paradigms of desiccation and drainage, why do urban administrators and engineers working in the city continue to pursue these projects in a climate changed present? Why do they remain unwilling to imagine and design a city otherwise? I conclude the talk by describing the ways in which engineers insist and defend the making of a future that is not green, but “predominantly grey.”

Please note: The event venue is a Scent-Free environment. Smoking is not permitted in any area of the building or within a nine-metre radius of any entrance/exit of the building.