A Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology, Delhi University, Mahima Malik has been researching informal dwellings along rivers flowing through cities. Her thesis focuses on consequences of riverfront development projects on the lived, as well as sensorial, experience of built river environments. Designed as an ethnographic narrative, her research is currently focused on the collection of stories and local myths based on rivers that are passed down through the generations among select communities. In the past she has worked with everyday user communities of the River Yamuna in the national capital of Delhi, looking at how social interactions produce multiple, and often conflicting, imaginations of the riverbed. Her larger purpose is to humanize dynamic river experiences and discover the ever-flowing hope in dwelling alongside rivers in spite of competing political interests surrounding the building of urban riverfronts.