Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2020
In the global South, urban infrastructures and environments are marked by significant heterogenei... more In the global South, urban infrastructures and environments are marked by significant heterogeneity and the presence of multiple overlapping systems, configurations and actor networks that keep the city working – water flows, electricity is available, and waste is collected. This occurs in the face of what has been traditionally characterized as failed or incomplete infrastructures and the presence of governance practices that often deviate from formalized norms and policies. However, increasingly academics are arguing that such heterogeneity represents not failure but spaces of possibility and transition. This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings and conceptual ideas that frame urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday. We then outline how the contributions of this Special Issue (SI) reveal the contested, negotiated, and situated nature of everyday urban governance and the multiple ways that politics become spatialized and power shape...
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2020
Inaugurated in 2014, India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) intends to eradicate open defecation in ... more Inaugurated in 2014, India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) intends to eradicate open defecation in urban and rural areas by 2019. In cities, the scheme ranks municipalities for achieving open defecation-free status and other measures of cleanliness. In 2017, Indore was first nationally recognized with the national Cleanest City award. In the weeks before the city was evaluated, it sponsored a number of activities that demolished housing and sanitation infrastructures, singled out the female body for humiliation, and forced residents to revert back to the very sanitation practices the city was allegedly trying to eradicate. This paper traces the differing articulations of power at work between the extension and demolition of the city’s infrastructure. It focuses particularly on latrines, the metrics, and the urban vision to make Indore the Cleanest City, but also gives attention to the additional infrastructures connected to latrine-making and unmaking, including housing. We specifical...
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019
In Delhi, India, the centralized water supply is highly fractured and sporadic, reaching less tha... more In Delhi, India, the centralized water supply is highly fractured and sporadic, reaching less than half of residents on an everyday basis. As a result, urbanites across social groups coproduce water infrastructure through reliance on a host of alternate sources, technologies, and political actors. Such diverse delivery configurations and plural logics do not fit the conventional dualistic framing of urban water governance as either state or private, legal or illegal, and divided along the geographies of formal or informal settlements, however. This article instead shows that everyday water is procured and governed through a “gray zone” of hybrid institutional and infrastructural arrangements. By tracing diverse water regimes across Delhi’s settlements, I show that gray zones are (1) characterized by political assemblages that defy dualisms such as legal–illegal, formal–informal, and public–private; (2) typified by a spectrum of differing legitimacies associated with the practices and (il)legality of water and its infrastructures; and (3) produced through, and productive of, social power relations and embodied forms of intersecting gender, class, caste, and ethno-religious differences in the city. This article demonstrates that gray zones provide a heuristic device to analyze in/formality, infrastructure, and governance in cities of the Global South such as Delhi, contributing to a situated and embodied urban political ecology of water. My findings reveal that gray zones of water have distinct embodied and political ramifications that produce unequal hydrosocial geographies not only within the city but also at the neighborhood, household, and bodily scales. Key Words: Delhi, embodied urban political ecology, feminist political ecology, infrastructure, urban water governance.
In recent years, emerging scholarship has advanced embodied approaches to urban water in/security... more In recent years, emerging scholarship has advanced embodied approaches to urban water in/security, inequality and infrastructure. This new literature is broadly informed by political ecology studies of water, which critique depoliticized approaches to water scarcity, insecurity and inequality and give attention to the socially differentiated experiences of the urban waterscape. Recent interventions to bring feminist and embodied approaches to water's urban political ecology analyse the site and scale of the body as critical for understanding everyday urban water access and inequality. Drawing from these frameworks, I summarize three contributions of an embodied urban political ecology approach for addressing water in/security. These include analytical approaches that give attention to 1) the scale of the body within multi-scalar approaches to water, 2) intersectionality and gender/class/race/ethno-religious relations in shaping patterns of water inequality and insecurity, and 3) everyday practices and politics, in relation to both governance and citizens, that reveal under-theorized dimensions of water insecurity and inequality. Embodied approaches to urban water insecurity are poised to expand and deepen work on the everyday politics and lived experiences of insufficient, insecure, and unequal water that profoundly shape urban life for city-dwellers. Access Full Article at the following link: https://rdcu.be/br04f
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018
State quantifications of Delhi’s water supply proclaim some of the highest levels of access in ur... more State quantifications of Delhi’s water supply proclaim some of the highest levels of access in urban South Asia. However, accompanying such representations are a number of discrepancies and ambiguities, suggesting an appearance of legibility is produced in the absence of data and key calculations. This paper examines the co-production of both knowledge and ignorance with regard to the city’s water, showing how their entanglement serves to powerfully shape both urban biopolitics and diffuse modalities of state power. First, I demonstrate that the appearance of legibility is maintained through fragmented measurement and bureaucratic practices that build material ambiguity into the system. Secondly, I examine the political, discursive and material effects of such illegibility, which include outcomes that are both arbitrary in nature (inadvertently allotting more water to one area versus another) and well as more deliberate (attributing blame for water wastage and loss to the very popul...
Clark-Decès/A Companion to the Anthropology of India, 2011
... and attempted to enact Delhi's First Master Plan, calling for a hygienic a... more ... and attempted to enact Delhi's First Master Plan, calling for a hygienic and properly ordered city (Baviskar 2003:91; Verma 2003). ... For example, a study by the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group (CERAG) analyzes the informalities associated with solid ...
Scholarship engaging with (northern) urban theory from the south has troubled the core of urban s... more Scholarship engaging with (northern) urban theory from the south has troubled the core of urban studies. At this critical juncture, we argue that it is important to clarify core propositions and call attention to points of convergence and dissonance amongst advocates of ‘the southern urban critique’. We briefly review foundational arguments for this scholarly community, then outline three distinct iterations of the source of this critique: the south is empirically different; EuroAmerican hegemony works to displace a diversity of intellectual traditions; and the postcolonial encounter requires the critical interrogation of research practices. We then consider whether the southern urban critique is an argument for the study of a distinct southern urbanism, an ontological position about the socio-spatial contingency of all theorisation or a tactical strategy for calling attention to marginalised places and ideas to be superseded by an urban studies of a world of cities. We hope our eff...
This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal n... more This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal neighborhoods and infrastructures in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies, which lack official entitlements to networked infrastructures such as water and sewerage. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to critical infrastructure studies, I show how gendered social relations, subjectivities, and the unequal experience of urban liminality are tied to accessing water and its fragmented infrastructures beyond the network. In particular, liminal infrastructural space is produced in unauthorized colonies through not only these neighborhoods’ quasi-legal status and unequal access to urban water, but also through gendered discourses and the socially differentiated ways water infrastructures are co-produced, managed, and made livable by residents. As water is primarily accessed beyond the network via tubewells and tankers, I demonstrate how these fractured modalities ultimately constitute gendered ...
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2020
In the global South, urban infrastructures and environments are marked by significant heterogenei... more In the global South, urban infrastructures and environments are marked by significant heterogeneity and the presence of multiple overlapping systems, configurations and actor networks that keep the city working – water flows, electricity is available, and waste is collected. This occurs in the face of what has been traditionally characterized as failed or incomplete infrastructures and the presence of governance practices that often deviate from formalized norms and policies. However, increasingly academics are arguing that such heterogeneity represents not failure but spaces of possibility and transition. This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings and conceptual ideas that frame urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday. We then outline how the contributions of this Special Issue (SI) reveal the contested, negotiated, and situated nature of everyday urban governance and the multiple ways that politics become spatialized and power shape...
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2020
Inaugurated in 2014, India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) intends to eradicate open defecation in ... more Inaugurated in 2014, India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) intends to eradicate open defecation in urban and rural areas by 2019. In cities, the scheme ranks municipalities for achieving open defecation-free status and other measures of cleanliness. In 2017, Indore was first nationally recognized with the national Cleanest City award. In the weeks before the city was evaluated, it sponsored a number of activities that demolished housing and sanitation infrastructures, singled out the female body for humiliation, and forced residents to revert back to the very sanitation practices the city was allegedly trying to eradicate. This paper traces the differing articulations of power at work between the extension and demolition of the city’s infrastructure. It focuses particularly on latrines, the metrics, and the urban vision to make Indore the Cleanest City, but also gives attention to the additional infrastructures connected to latrine-making and unmaking, including housing. We specifical...
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019
In Delhi, India, the centralized water supply is highly fractured and sporadic, reaching less tha... more In Delhi, India, the centralized water supply is highly fractured and sporadic, reaching less than half of residents on an everyday basis. As a result, urbanites across social groups coproduce water infrastructure through reliance on a host of alternate sources, technologies, and political actors. Such diverse delivery configurations and plural logics do not fit the conventional dualistic framing of urban water governance as either state or private, legal or illegal, and divided along the geographies of formal or informal settlements, however. This article instead shows that everyday water is procured and governed through a “gray zone” of hybrid institutional and infrastructural arrangements. By tracing diverse water regimes across Delhi’s settlements, I show that gray zones are (1) characterized by political assemblages that defy dualisms such as legal–illegal, formal–informal, and public–private; (2) typified by a spectrum of differing legitimacies associated with the practices and (il)legality of water and its infrastructures; and (3) produced through, and productive of, social power relations and embodied forms of intersecting gender, class, caste, and ethno-religious differences in the city. This article demonstrates that gray zones provide a heuristic device to analyze in/formality, infrastructure, and governance in cities of the Global South such as Delhi, contributing to a situated and embodied urban political ecology of water. My findings reveal that gray zones of water have distinct embodied and political ramifications that produce unequal hydrosocial geographies not only within the city but also at the neighborhood, household, and bodily scales. Key Words: Delhi, embodied urban political ecology, feminist political ecology, infrastructure, urban water governance.
In recent years, emerging scholarship has advanced embodied approaches to urban water in/security... more In recent years, emerging scholarship has advanced embodied approaches to urban water in/security, inequality and infrastructure. This new literature is broadly informed by political ecology studies of water, which critique depoliticized approaches to water scarcity, insecurity and inequality and give attention to the socially differentiated experiences of the urban waterscape. Recent interventions to bring feminist and embodied approaches to water's urban political ecology analyse the site and scale of the body as critical for understanding everyday urban water access and inequality. Drawing from these frameworks, I summarize three contributions of an embodied urban political ecology approach for addressing water in/security. These include analytical approaches that give attention to 1) the scale of the body within multi-scalar approaches to water, 2) intersectionality and gender/class/race/ethno-religious relations in shaping patterns of water inequality and insecurity, and 3) everyday practices and politics, in relation to both governance and citizens, that reveal under-theorized dimensions of water insecurity and inequality. Embodied approaches to urban water insecurity are poised to expand and deepen work on the everyday politics and lived experiences of insufficient, insecure, and unequal water that profoundly shape urban life for city-dwellers. Access Full Article at the following link: https://rdcu.be/br04f
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018
State quantifications of Delhi’s water supply proclaim some of the highest levels of access in ur... more State quantifications of Delhi’s water supply proclaim some of the highest levels of access in urban South Asia. However, accompanying such representations are a number of discrepancies and ambiguities, suggesting an appearance of legibility is produced in the absence of data and key calculations. This paper examines the co-production of both knowledge and ignorance with regard to the city’s water, showing how their entanglement serves to powerfully shape both urban biopolitics and diffuse modalities of state power. First, I demonstrate that the appearance of legibility is maintained through fragmented measurement and bureaucratic practices that build material ambiguity into the system. Secondly, I examine the political, discursive and material effects of such illegibility, which include outcomes that are both arbitrary in nature (inadvertently allotting more water to one area versus another) and well as more deliberate (attributing blame for water wastage and loss to the very popul...
Clark-Decès/A Companion to the Anthropology of India, 2011
... and attempted to enact Delhi's First Master Plan, calling for a hygienic a... more ... and attempted to enact Delhi's First Master Plan, calling for a hygienic and properly ordered city (Baviskar 2003:91; Verma 2003). ... For example, a study by the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group (CERAG) analyzes the informalities associated with solid ...
Scholarship engaging with (northern) urban theory from the south has troubled the core of urban s... more Scholarship engaging with (northern) urban theory from the south has troubled the core of urban studies. At this critical juncture, we argue that it is important to clarify core propositions and call attention to points of convergence and dissonance amongst advocates of ‘the southern urban critique’. We briefly review foundational arguments for this scholarly community, then outline three distinct iterations of the source of this critique: the south is empirically different; EuroAmerican hegemony works to displace a diversity of intellectual traditions; and the postcolonial encounter requires the critical interrogation of research practices. We then consider whether the southern urban critique is an argument for the study of a distinct southern urbanism, an ontological position about the socio-spatial contingency of all theorisation or a tactical strategy for calling attention to marginalised places and ideas to be superseded by an urban studies of a world of cities. We hope our eff...
This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal n... more This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal neighborhoods and infrastructures in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies, which lack official entitlements to networked infrastructures such as water and sewerage. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to critical infrastructure studies, I show how gendered social relations, subjectivities, and the unequal experience of urban liminality are tied to accessing water and its fragmented infrastructures beyond the network. In particular, liminal infrastructural space is produced in unauthorized colonies through not only these neighborhoods’ quasi-legal status and unequal access to urban water, but also through gendered discourses and the socially differentiated ways water infrastructures are co-produced, managed, and made livable by residents. As water is primarily accessed beyond the network via tubewells and tankers, I demonstrate how these fractured modalities ultimately constitute gendered ...
Recent work on cities of the global South has focused on what Schindler (2014) calls " multiplici... more Recent work on cities of the global South has focused on what Schindler (2014) calls " multiplicities of governance regimes, " or the coexistence of plural modalities, rationalities, and practices of everyday governance that involve a diverse range of state and non-state actors and institutions (. This scholarship has focused most distinctly on pluralizing the logics, spaces, and practices of environmental and infrastructural governance across a range of cities. In relation to water governance and service provisioning, Schwartz et al. (2015: 31), for example, examine the " meshwork " in which the actors of water provisioning embody both state and non-state identities and use such identities in various sites of governance to develop everyday institutions of regulation in Greater Maputo. Jaglin's work utilizes the concept " delivery configurations " to reveal the complex assemblages of key actors, officials, authorities with the materiality of the built environment that shape the heterogeneity of actually existing configurations of governance and infrastructure on the ground. Ranganathan (2014) examines the seam of the state by which informal and formal public authorities converge in the provisioning of water by the so-called " water mafia " in Bangalore, alongside and interwoven with other governance regimes. These studies demonstrate the plural logics, contradictions, and tensions present in everyday environmental and infrastructural governance, examining services and infrastructures " beyond the networked city " (Coutard and Rutherford, 2016) to include a wider array of practices, materials and strategies of regulation. This session aims to contribute to this body of work by rethinking and pluralizing diverse everyday governance configurations through a variety of geographic and interdisciplinary lenses, including urban political ecology, assemblage thinking, and anthropologies of the state (among others). We encourage paper submissions that provide critical empirical and theoretical insights into building a more diverse, robust, and nuanced analysis of urban everyday governance. Whilst the indicative references have predominately focused on cities in the South, we equally welcome cases from the North. Potential areas of inquiry include but are not limited to: Critical examinations of the power and politics of diverse everyday governance modalities in shaping uneven urban geographies, differing spaces of the city, and/or uneven consequences and lived experiences for diverse social groups Investigations of meshworks and diverse delivery configurations of services and infrastructures, and their implications on thinking through everyday governance
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