Terai trajectories: Layering design action in the plains of Nepal

Abstract

Monsoon rains transform the hundreds of dry, meandering gravel chan-nels running through Nepal’s Terai plains into powerful flows of water and sediment. Following the mid-twentieth-century displacement of the Terai’s Indigenous peoples and transformations of forested plains into farmland, ef-forts to confine and control these flows multiplied.¹ Monsoon flood disaster has since become the norm across this landscape that has always flooded. The widespread building of embankments between settlements and water flows has become an almost singular response as institutions fail to respond beyond patchwork post-disaster relief. The plains are now crisscrossed by a growing network of chronically failing flood-control embankments: ‘There are two types of embankments: those that have breached and those that will.’² Breached embankments are either rebuilt in place or pushed towards flows to ‘protect’ more land from flooding. This cycle continues; the future becomes ‘thinkable only as extrapolation from what-is’.³ Two possible futures in Theliya, a small village separated by one