Water Urbanities

Water has been a determining factor of urban and civilisational development, which is particularly obvious in South Asia: Emerging against challenging climatical conditions and a limited access to water, cities of the Indian subcontinent have also been the stage of an urban life that placed water at the center of its cultural, religious, economic and political systems. This volume proposes to look at space and spatialisation processes of water as a solution developed by the urban to answer the dilemma of life-providing and death-giving waters. It is in the articulation of built spaces, salvific narratives and political discourses, as well as religious and social practices that water places became, during a phase that can be referred to as “water turn,” a central element of urbanity in South Asia. Wonderment served as strategical spatial and rhetorical tool to render the exceptional, and paradoxical, qualities of water.