Mumbai’s storm water drainage system is rapidly transforming as incidences of heavy rainfall rise. Its transformation is built on the idea of conserving the city’s ‘rivers’ that were lost to urban development. While this move to recuperate a heritage of rivers seems like a step in the right direction, Mumbai’s drainage system was largely cobbled together over time through piecemeal interventions in an estuarine landscape. This article shows how by engineering a history of rivers, the city’s planning authorities set in motion an agenda to train the expansive estuarine and improvisational systems into governable riverine channels contained within the state’s developmental visions. It focuses on one major channel, the Mithi, to show how the rationality of disaster preparedness, the emergent calculus of carrying capacities, as well as infrastructure are braided into constructed ecological histories to inscribe a new hydrological order on the city. For Mumbai’s engineers, these changes introduce new scalar logics and alter the nature of the drainage assemblage. Mithi’s transformation is emblematic of how articulations of nature, technology and urban development are emerging from the anxieties of climate change.

随着暴雨发生率的上升，孟买的雨水排放系统正在迅速转变。它的转型建立在保护城市发展中失去的城市“河流”的理念之上。虽然恢复河流遗产的举措似乎是朝着正确方向迈出的一步，但随着时间的推移，孟买的排水系统主要是通过对河口景观的零碎干预而拼凑起来的。本文展示了如何通过设计河流的历史，该市的规划当局启动了一项议程，将广阔的河口和即兴系统训练成包含在该州发展愿景中的可治理河道。它侧重于一个主要渠道 Mithi，以展示备灾的合理性、承载能力的紧急计算、以及基础设施被编入构建的生态历史中，为城市刻上新的水文秩序。对于孟买的工程师来说，这些变化引入了新的标量逻辑并改变了排水组合的性质。Mithi 的转变象征着自然、技术和城市发展的关联如何摆脱气候变化的焦虑。