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Pipe Politics, Contested Waters
Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
About this book
Winner, 2014 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences
Despite Mumbai's position as India's financial, economic, and cultural capital, water is chronically unavailable for rich and poor alike. Mumbai's dry taps are puzzling, given that the city does not lack for either water or financial resources. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters, Lisa Björkman shows how an elite dream to transform Mumbai into a "world class" business center has wreaked havoc on the city's water pipes. In rich ethnographic detail, Pipe Politics explores how the everyday work of getting water animates and inhabits a penumbra of infrastructural activity—of business, brokerage, secondary markets, and sociopolitical networks—whose workings are reconfiguring and rescaling political authority in the city. Mumbai's increasingly illegible and volatile hydrologies, Björkman argues, are lending infrastructures increasing political salience just as actual control over pipes and flows becomes contingent on dispersed and intimate assemblages of knowledge, power, and material authority. These new arenas of contestation reveal the illusory and precarious nature of the project to remake Mumbai in the image of Shanghai or Singapore and gesture instead toward the highly contested futures and democratic possibilities of the actually existing city.
Despite Mumbai's position as India's financial, economic, and cultural capital, water is chronically unavailable for rich and poor alike. Mumbai's dry taps are puzzling, given that the city does not lack for either water or financial resources. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters, Lisa Björkman shows how an elite dream to transform Mumbai into a "world class" business center has wreaked havoc on the city's water pipes. In rich ethnographic detail, Pipe Politics explores how the everyday work of getting water animates and inhabits a penumbra of infrastructural activity—of business, brokerage, secondary markets, and sociopolitical networks—whose workings are reconfiguring and rescaling political authority in the city. Mumbai's increasingly illegible and volatile hydrologies, Björkman argues, are lending infrastructures increasing political salience just as actual control over pipes and flows becomes contingent on dispersed and intimate assemblages of knowledge, power, and material authority. These new arenas of contestation reveal the illusory and precarious nature of the project to remake Mumbai in the image of Shanghai or Singapore and gesture instead toward the highly contested futures and democratic possibilities of the actually existing city.
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Yes, you can access Pipe Politics, Contested Waters by Lisa Björkman in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Indian & South Asian History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Publisher
Duke University Press BooksYear
2015Print ISBN
9780822359692, 9780822359500eBook ISBN
9780822375210Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Embedded Infrastructures
- One: “We Got Stuck in Between”: Unmapping the Distribution Network
- Two: “The Slum and Building Industry”: Marketizing Urban Development
- Three: “You Can’t Stop Development”: Hydraulic Shambles
- Four: “It Was Like That from the Beginning”: Becoming a Slum
- Five: “No Hydraulics Are Possible”: Brokering Water Knowledge
- Six: “Good Doesn’t Mean You’re Honest”: Corruption
- Seven: “If Water Comes It’s Because of Politics”: Power, Authority, and Hydraulic Spectacle
- Conclusion: Pipe Politics
- Appendix: Department of Hydraulic Engineering
- Notes
- References
- Index