Within the Anthropological literature, cities have been conceptualized in a civilizational context. Right from the archaeological records about the Harappan civilization up to the modern industrial towns, urban spaces have been synonymous with surplus. The idea of non-agricultural elite, concentration of power and money, and formation of class-based society has put urban areas in sharp relief with the rural. This prompted earlier anthropologists studying rural–urban contrast in India to conceptualize urban areas in terms of the Great Tradition and to understand the cultural flow between the Great and the Little traditions. However, more recently, in the context of global warming and climate change, cities have been grappling with issues of recurrent flooding on account of excess rainfall. In addition to this, ideas of development and limitless growth have jeopardized the governance infrastructure in cities, leading to urban flooding. “Excess” and “surplus” have now become problems in their own right. Large-scale migration toward urban centers, coupled with governance and poverty planning deficits in cities, has led to encroachment of the floodplains and wetlands in cities, leading to floods. This situation calls for re-conceptualizing cities in terms of spaces that are re-negotiating issues of development, migration, inequality, and governance in the context of climate change and recurrent flooding. Such re-negotiations are riding over certain fundamental questions of political ecology that are now asked globally, but are more important in the context of developing countries like India. Public opinion on issues of urban governance and rights of citizens is being generated through print and electronic media, with an effect of making a hydraulic public. This chapter tries to understand how issues of urban floods are linked to larger issues of development and global climate change and to what extent this has resulted in the making of hydraulic public in Indian urban space.