he state of the Leh is reflective of the strain of development that our cities are currently obsessed with: a condition in which building, construction, infrastructure and engineering have become instinctive solutions to every problem. Urban flooding in Leh during the monsoon has become a recurring—almost predictable—phenomenon for citizens of Rawalpindi. Every year, the administration’s response follows the same pattern: reactionary dredging and desilting drives; violent anti-encroachment operations; and the mobilisation of emergency services. After the flood has caused loss of life and property, disrupting daily routines, development authorities return with their playbook of solutions. At the top of that list are infrastructure interventions: building service roads along the banks of the Leh; diverting the Leh before it enters Rawalpindi; and promises of stricter enforcement against dumping in the nullah and encroachment.

The instinct is to treat urban problems as deficiencies of infrastructure rather than failures of urban systems and governance.

What these grand plans of construction continue to ignore is nature and the ecosystem. Within these schemes, and among many of their advocates, there is little understanding of the Leh as part of a larger ecological system.

Leh is a water system shared between Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Three of its major tributaries originate in the Margalla Hills. They join Leh just ahead of Katarian Bridge, at the administrative boundary between the two cities. Leh then passes through Rawalpindi before flowing into the Soan River, linking the urban landscape to the wider drainage system of the Potohar plateau. It is part of the natural system through which rainfall and runoff move across the Potohar landscape: it shapes the landscape; moves water downstream; supports groundwater recharge; enables rain-fed agriculture; and when intense monsoon runoff exceeds the capacity of channels, causes floods.

Leh is no longer recognised as a living water body. In the common imagination, it has become a nullah: a drain carrying murky, smelly, undesirable water. The technocratic imagination offers an equally reductive understanding. Here, the Leh is a problem waiting to be solved and an opportunity waiting to be unlocked through engineering and infrastructure: dredging, cementing, fencing its banks and building service roads along it to create another route between Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

Leh is a naturally flood-prone stream. Its basin has steep upstream terrain, receives intense monsoon rainfall and funnels water from the Margalla catchment into the Rawalpindi basin. The problem is not that the Leh floods. The problem is that we have built a city that is increasingly incapable of accommodating the water when it does.

Where authorities see floods as a problem to be fixed, people experience a much more layered set of hazards and vulnerabilities. During heavy monsoon rains, there is the immediate hazard of flooding. But outside the monsoon, there are the everyday health and living hazards produced by heaps of solid waste, untreated sewage and wastewater flowing through the middle of the city.

A detailed study by Daanish Mustafa, an urban geographer and water-hazard researcher, found that the flood victims along the Leh have a much greater range of choices for dealing with flood hazards than policymakers. The solutions they propose range from creating pocket parks and active greenbelts along the Leh banks to imagining it so free of pollution that it could once again sustain fruit trees.

This is an imagination of the Leh that current projects and solutions emerging from city authorities fail to capture: a Leh allowed again to be a live stream; a Leh lined with porous land, tree-covered and densely vegetated areas that give water room to swell and shrink; a Leh that supports active use and accessibility for residents through parks and public spaces; a Leh that supports vegetation, habitats and ecosystems of birds and animals; a Leh that symbolises Rawalpindi.

At the centre of this imagination is a different way of perceiving the water body: not as a drain to be controlled but as a natural living system; not an obstruction to development but as a system given the right of passage through the city.

Flood management should make room for water rather than trying to move water faster through a narrow-constructed channel. Green infrastructure offers an alternative to engineering that treats the waterway as a problem to be contained.

Giving Leh’s banks over to green, vegetated areas is not an overly aspirational solution. It is a tested approach to river and stream rejuvenation and can be part of a sensible intervention for managing urban flooding. When vegetation and active green areas are maintained, like parks in the city, it establishes care, regulation and ownership. It indicates that the land is being managed, monitored and used for a defined purpose. That may deter encroachment, dumping, illegal uses and informal construction, while signalling stewardship over both the land and Leh.

A first step towards this vision—allowing the nullah to become a stream again—is to stop dumping untreated sewage into it. That can begin upstream, in Islamabad, which sends its waste downstream into Rawalpindi.

The current state of Leh also reveals another dimension of the problem: equity. Just as the city does not treat the Leh as a dignified stream with an ecological function, it does not appear to treat the lives of the people living along its banks with similar urgency. Repeated loss of life and property and disruption to the daily lives of residents in Rawalpindi’s flood hotspots have become an accepted consequence of the way the city has developed.

The question then is not simply how to stop Leh from flooding. It is what kind of relationship the city wants to have with Leh—and by extension, with the people who live alongside it.

The writer completed her master’s in urban management from Pratt Institute, New York, on a Fulbright scholarship. She now leads the Sustainability Lab at atomcamp, working at the intersection of climate change and cities.