Lalitha Kamath

In this comparative and collaborative collection of essays we work through contemporary and historical practices of governing urban waters in Philadelphia and Mumbai. Taken together, the essays in this collection argue that events of enduring harm visited upon racialized, marginalized citizens are produced through slow bureaucratic processes of aversion, ambiguation and ambivalence, perpetuated in and through regulatory regimes, water quality standards, legal discourses and everyday practices in the city. These practices entangle racialized and poorer populations in situations of durable and everyday harm and are central to the creation, maintenance and reproduction of vulnerable and disposable human and non-human life in the city.

This is the story of one man’s self-making through the making of a city. Starting off as associates of the well-known gangster Dawood, dreaded ‘dons’ Hitendra Thakur and his brother enabled explosive growth at the peripheries of Mumbai through the 80s and 90s by grabbing land, controlling water supply, and building chawls and apartments. With the onset of neoliberal governance and decentralisation reforms, however, we see a negotiation with the changing ideals animating urban India. Self-making of Thakur progressed through the merging of both business and governance interests: standing for assembly elections, and building an empire based on real estate, education, hotels. Today, the gangster turned benevolent patriarch of a rising city is (fondly and fearfully) called “Appa” (father) by all. City-making moved in tandem with the formation of a political party by Appa, formulated on the plank of ‘bahujan vikas’, a promise of inclusive progress for minorities and backward castes, along with the determined wooing of private investors, and the marketing of Vasai Virar as a real estate destination. By 2009, the transformation of both Thakur and Vasai Virar was rendered complete by the formation of the democratically elected Vasai Virar Municipal Corporation. With this, the former don became the business tycoon cum ruling patriarch and Vasai Virar was projected as the next “smart city”.

At the core of both narratives of powerful transformation is the performance of masculinity – one that is personalised and imbued in city governance networks and spaces. Recent writings on political strongmen in South Asia view their politics as muscular, with its appeal rooted in the concept of ‘mardangi’ or manliness, harking back to masculine ideals of honour, valour, and strength. In this essay, however, our study of strongman politics reveals how muscular posturing frames new city-wide domains of neoliberal infrastructure, cultural spectacle, and inclusive gender representation in electoral politics. This makeover from a ‘goonda’ to a more ‘genteel’ masculinity is geared toward representing a strongly aspirational middle class identity, which  is not a unilinear, stable transition, as it reveals  frequent slippage back into violence. This has strong bearing upon how urban residents experience themselves as men/women in the city, how they perform and negotiate their gendered identities. See:
https://cafedissensus.com/2017/05/15/smuggler-city-to-smart-city-masculine-city-making-on-the-urban-periphery/

Over the last two decades, the state-led production of space, as part of worlding cities, has introduced new structural violences into the lives of poor groups in Durban, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro, and has met with resistance. Three main mechanisms have been adopted to produce space: infrastructure and mega-projects; redevelopment, and; creating exception regimes for ‘slums’. The paper elucidates the nature of the state that enacts structural violence through worlding processes, to be simultaneously ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. It is ‘strong’ in its bid to open up new spaces for capital accumulation that integrate specific economic circuits, classes and groups ‘globally’ while weak in its responsibility to protect and strengthen the life chances and claims of poor groups/spaces.

Cities in India are moving towards commercially viable models of urban water and sanitation delivery to fill the widening gap between demand and supply. Cost recovery through upfront beneficiary contributions is increasingly becoming a key consideration in the provision of piped water and sewerage. This paper examines the Greater Bangalore Water and Sanitation Project, a project that aims to extend piped water from the Cauvery to over two million residents in peri-urban Bangalore. The paper critically evaluates the project and makes four interlinked arguments: (1) Upfront payments from citizens have not guaranteed timely and satisfactory service. (2) The project's financial model is disconnected from actually existing settlement and urbanisation patterns, thus delaying water delivery and undermining accountability. (3) The project's highly centralised decision-making process has resulted in low political buy-in and public acceptance. (4) Modifications to the original financi...