12 January 2026
Every June, when the monsoon collapses into the valley, the puddles of Kathmandu come alive. When the light hits them just right, they reflect a topsy-turvy world—an inverted image of a city suspended between aspirations and abandonment. In those muddy mirrors, one can glimpse the Kathmandu that failed to become—the city imagined in the urban masterplans—with flyovers, riverside parks, and planned settlements. And there is the Kathmandu that is becoming potholed, flooded, and slowly submerged. The puddles of the valley, therefore, do more than just collect rain. They also gather contradictions. They reflect not just buildings and wires, but the slow drowning of the city beneath the weight of its own development.
We know that the floods of the Kathmandu valley are not just monsoonal events; they are outcomes of the processes nearly half a century in the making. As the valley continues to expand, what was once a seasonal worry for the riparian settlements has now become the general mood of the city—a quiet, shared anxiety. And as much as we fear the rivers, we also fear the flood mitigation measures handed down by the courts. A snap judgment, albeit being contested, requiring a 40-metre clearance from the riverbanks, sounds bold and even visionary. On paper, it appears to be a long-overdue intervention to save the valley from seasonal inundation. But such aspirations from the planners backed by the judiciary are troubling in their own right. They suggest a failure to come to terms with the urban reality of Kathmandu—a city that is in the making through compromise, encroachment, and necessity. Planning that does not reckon with reality is not vision, it is mere aspiration. And such aspirations, like floodwater, tend to flow downhill, washing away those with the least to hold on to.
Drowning in floodwater
On the banks of the valley’s river, entire settlements have been living in a state of protracted precarity, not just with the threats of rising rivers, but also from the shifting tides of legality. Families who have lived by the major rivers of the valley, such as the Bagmati, Bishnumati, or Manahara, for decades now are labelled as encroachers, and their settlement marked for demolition. These people are not newcomers anymore—they have grown roots in a city that refuses to acknowledge them. When courts declare a wide clearance from the riverbanks, it is not just people’s dwellings that get cleared. It is also people’s lives, communal networks, entire informal economies, and rights and aspirations of urban living. The same people who were invisible to urban planners for decades are suddenly hyper-visible, as obstacles to be removed for the greater good of flood prevention. Ironically, these settlements exist precisely because the city never planned for them. They are products of a vacuum, of the absence of affordable housing, of post-conflict migration, of land speculation that priced the poor out and pushed them to the margins. Now, they are being pushed again while they have adapted to the very gaps that urban governance left behind.
In the present-day Kathmandu valley, it is not only informal settlements that are at risk. Flooding is no longer confined to the riparian geography of the valley. The city’s sprawl into the surrounding hillocks, once considered safer, higher ground, has brought new dangers. These ‘formally’ planned neighbourhoods, often built without adequate stormwater management systems, now face an unexpected menace: high-velocity urban stormwater rivers that barrel through the paved streets and inadequate roadside drains during heavy rain. Residents of the valley who live on hillsides now find themselves staring out their windows at sudden torrents, wondering how they ended up living in the path of a man-made river. In Kathmandu, it seems, elevation no longer guarantees flood salvation. Water has found its way through the cracks and gaps in the urban planning.
Drowning in urban plans
As much as Kathmandu is drowning in floodwater, it is equally drowning in urban plans. Since the 1960s, development blueprints for the valley have emerged with almost ritualistic regularity, each deluged with a vision of order, growth, and modernity. From various government departments to non-governmental organisations, the city has been imagined and reimagined in countless ways. With the establishment of the Kathmandu Valley Development Authority (KVDA), the production of visionary documents has only intensified, which are filled as much with zoning maps and satellite images as with imagined visions of desired urban living. And since 2017, when the local government assumed the reins of local development, every municipality has sought to have its own master plan and its own preferred future.
Beneath these technocratic diagrams often lies something more subtle: an aesthetic longing. Many of these plans are shaped not just by infrastructural needs but by an idealised memory of the urban past of the valley. An image drawn from its age-old heritage, its temple squares, its ordered settlements, and its harmony with the landscape. There is a yearning to return to a city that was once clean, cultural, and ‘authentically’ urban, in a way that feels lost in the current sprawl. This nostalgia animates many aesthetic guidelines, conservation projects, and event building bylaws.
Yet the vision of the valley, as it once was, or as we wish it once was, often ignores the complexity of what it has become. The result is a paradox, while the valley expands chaotically in form, it is governed by a shrinking imagination, one that clings to romanticised visions of heritage while the ground beneath is slowly submersed in flood waters. If flood water is the visible failure of infrastructure, urban plans are the paper trail, of institutional confusion and contradictions. A deluge of diagrams trying to recover a past while ignoring the mess of the present.
Reflections in the Puddle
In the end, the puddles of the valley reflect more than just its crumbling facades vis-à-vis its renewed heritage. These muddy mirrors also reflect a city suspended between aspiration and abandonment. Kathmandu valley suffers not because of a lack of planning, but from an overabundance of aspirational visions untethered from the daily realities of people who live in this city. If Kathmandu is to live with water—and that is what we must do—then the planning must begin at the scale of a puddle. A grounded way forward starts small, with stormwater systems that work at the neighbourhood level. With local governments empowered not just to imagine grand visions, but to repair, maintain, and adapt. It starts with acknowledging that both the formal and informal city are part of the same ecosystem. And expertise lies more in lived experiences than in policy documents. Most of all, it requires a shift in perspective, to see that the puddles are not just a nuisance but signals. A mirror. A place where the city’s contradictions surface. Because no matter how big the visions of the cities are, it begins at the ground level, where puddles form.
