The Infrastructure That Needs Care: Reclaiming Urban Commons through Nature-based Solutions
Nature-based Solutions are more than green infrastructure. Nidhi Batra argues that many urban wetlands, creeks and open landscapes are also commons and that restoring them means rebuilding relationships, stewardship and care.
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly being planned as part of urban resilience. But many wetlands, creeks, bundhs and open landscapes now being rediscovered as NbS are actually fragments of older urban and peri-urban commons. Their ecological functions were sustained through relationships between people, water, land and biodiversity. If NbS are to succeed, cities must learn not only to design them, but to care for them.
In Gurugram, a restored rainwater creek can be many things at once. It can hold water during heavy rainfall, support vegetation and biodiversity, and provide a shaded route through the city. For a woman working outdoors, it can offer a place to pause. For a domestic or gig worker, it can provide a more comfortable route or a few minutes of shade. For someone watching birds and moths, it can become a valuable habitat in an increasingly built-up landscape.
These are not incidental benefits. They are central to what makes NbS different from conventional infrastructure.
The IUCN definition is important here: NbS address societal challenges effectively and adaptively while simultaneously providing benefits for human well-being and biodiversity. Adaptability is therefore not an optional refinement. It is a defining feature.
A concrete drain can be designed to a specification, handed over and periodically repaired. A living system cannot. Plants grow, die and regenerate; soils change; water flows respond to rainfall and development; species colonise or disappear. An NbS therefore needs time to mature, observation to understand its performance and continuous adjustment.
Above all, it needs care.
What if our NbS are actually commons?
This raises a more fundamental question: What kind of landscapes are we actually restoring?
A wetland, creek, bundh or peri-urban open space may appear today as an undeveloped or degraded parcel. Yet many such landscapes were once commons in practice. They stored water, supported livelihoods, enabled recreation and carried cultural meanings. Because people’s lives were connected to them, these landscapes were also sustained by local knowledge, informal rules and everyday stewardship. Urbanisation is disrupting both the landscapes and these.
A bundh may remain while its catchment is built over. A creek may survive while sewage is mixed into its flows. Construction debris can fill a wetland as surrounding land acquires development value. What was once a shared ecological landscape becomes “vacant land” in the language of planning.
A johad in Kadarpur village, now within Gurugram’s municipal limits. As village livelihoods and everyday relationships with the commons change, waste accumulates and the lake becomes increasingly vulnerable to encroachment and future redevelopment. © Sehreeti Developmental Practices Foundation
The physical common survives, but the process of commoning disappears.
This is particularly visible in peri-urban India, where land-use change can happen almost overnight. Livelihoods that connected people to commons disappear, new populations arrive without the same relationship to the landscape, and the ways in which these places are valued and cared for change.
NbS restoration therefore often begins with landscapes whose ecological functions and social relationships have both been eroded.
Participation means rebuilding relationships
This is why participation cannot be an add-on to NbS.
A commons perspective asks: Who has a relationship with this landscape? Who used it before? Who uses it now? Who has lost access? Who benefits from restoration? And who will care for it afterwards?
The contemporary urban commoner may be an informal woman worker using a shaded corridor, a resident benefiting from reduced flooding or groundwater recharge or the nature enthusiast observing the return of birds, insects and other biodiversity.
A Gender Equality, Disability and Social Inclusion (GEDSI) lens makes these differentiated relationships visible. It asks not simply whether people participated, but whether different groups can access, influence and benefit from the landscape — and whether some face disproportionate risks or unpaid responsibilities.
A community awareness walk along the restored creek in Gurugram, bringing local residents, landscape architects and designers together to understand the creek as a Nature-based Solution and build a shared relationship with the restored landscape. © Sehreeti Developmental Practices Foundation
Participation must therefore extend across the NbS lifecycle: understanding the landscape before design; incorporating different forms of knowledge into planning and planting; involving users during implementation; and creating mechanisms for monitoring, maintenance and adaptation afterwards.
But participation should not mean transferring municipal responsibilities to unpaid community labour. If stewardship is expected, the time, knowledge and care involved must be recognised and resourced.
Designing and managing a living system
Once NbS are understood as socio-ecological systems, the implications for delivery become clear.
Planning must begin with the landscape: its catchment, ecological processes, history and current patterns of use. Participatory mapping, transect walks, time-use studies and accessible design processes can reveal what conventional site surveys miss.
MEL must then look beyond what has been built. Our work on urban water NbS has shown the need to combine hydrological and ecological indicators with social and institutional evidence, including access, use, stewardship and stakeholder feedback. Scientific monitoring and community observation together can show where an intervention is working, where it is not and how it needs to adapt.
Procurement and O&M must follow the same logic. If procurement ends when construction ends, it is poorly matched to a living system. If O&M means only cleaning, pruning and replacing dead plants, it misses the ecological processes that make NbS function. Municipal systems therefore need the capacity to procure, monitor and manage NbS across their lifecycle rather than relying indefinitely on NGOs, CSR initiatives or other third parties.
From projects to living urban systems
The opportunity before Indian cities is bigger than simply “mainstreaming NbS”.Nature is not something missing from our cities that can simply be added through projects. Much of it is already there — in fragmented wetlands, creeks, bundhs, river edges and peri-urban commons. A creek is not a failed drain. A wetland is not vacant land. A bundh is not merely flood infrastructure. A peri-urban common is not land waiting for its highest-value development. They are living socio-ecological systems.
Recognising this changes everything. Participation becomes part of stewardship rather than a one-off consultation. Biodiversity becomes a core measure of performance. Procurement and O&M must account for change over time, while MEL becomes a tool for learning and adaptation
And care becomes part of the infrastructure itself.
Urban resilience will depend on rebuilding relationships between people, water, land, biodiversity and the more-than-human world. NbS offer an opportunity to do that — but only if we move beyond building projects and start nurturing systems.
The infrastructure we need may be green and blue. But more importantly, it needs to be alive, adaptive and cared for.
