pipe polit ics , contested waters

Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai lisa Björkman

PIPE POLIT ICS , CONTESTED WATERS

PIPE POLIT ICS , CONTESTED WATERS

Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai

Lisa Björkman Duke University Press Durham and London 2015

© 2 0 1 5 D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Ame rica on acid- free paper ∞Designed by Courtney Leigh BakerTypeset in Minion by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication DataBjörkman, Lisa, [date]– author.Pipe politics, contested waters : embedded infrastructures of millennial Mumbai / Lisa Björkman.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.isbn 978-0-8223-5950-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)isbn 978-0-8223-5969-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)isbn 978-0-8223-7521-0 (e- book)1. Water- supply— India— Mumbai. 2. Waterworks— India— Mumbai. 3. Infrastructure (Economics)— India— Mumbai. 4. Mumbai (India)— Politics and government. i. Title.hd4465.i5b57 2015363.6'10954792— dc232015010921

Cover art: Photo by Lisa Björkman.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the American Institute of Indian Studies, 2014 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

F O R C A R O L B R E C K E N R I D G E

Awarded theJ O S E P H W . E L D E R P R I Z E

I N T H E I N D I A N S O C I A L S C I E N C E S

by the American Institute of Indian Studies and published with the

Institute’s generous support.

Contents

Ac know ledg ments ix

Introduction: Embedded Infrastructures 1

one“ W E G O T S T U C K I N B E T W E E N ”

Unmapping the Distribution Network 21

t wo“ T H E S L U M A N D B U I L D I N G I N D U S T R Y ”

Marketizing Urban Development 62

three“ Y O U C A N ’ T S T O P D E V E L O P M E N T ”

Hydraulic Shambles 82

four“ I T W A S L I K E T H A T F R O M T H E B E G I N N I N G ”

Becoming a Slum 98

five“ N O H Y D R A U L I C S A R E P O S S I B L E ”

Brokering Water Knowledge 128

six“ G O O D D O E S N ’ T M E A N Y O U ’ R E H O N E S T ”

Corruption 165

seven“ I F W A T E R C O M E S I T ’ S B E C A U S E O F P O L I T I C S ”

Power, Authority, and Hydraulic Spectacle 198

Conclusion: Pipe Politics 227

Appendix: Department of Hydraulic Engineering 235

Notes 237 References 267 Index 277

Ac know led g ments

Th e idea for this book emerged in 2004 during a gradu ate seminar with Pro-fessor Carol Breckenridge, an early mentor whose deep aff ection and curiosity for the city of Mumbai was contagious. Over the following years the pro ject came to life under the guidance of my advisors and mentors at the New School for Social Research, especially that of Vyjayanthi Rao, Timothy Pachirat, San-jay Ruparelia, Michael Cohen, Arjun Appadurai, and Victoria Hattam, each of whom infl uenced the pro ject in distinct and im por tant ways.

I owe tremendous thanks to the American Institute of Indian Studies (aiis) for their consistent support for my research over the years. Fieldwork in Mum-bai between 2008 and 2011 was made possi ble by an American Institute of Indian Studies Ju nior Research Fellowship, and Hindi training in Jaipur was supported by language fellowships in 2004 and in 2007–8. I would like to thank Elise Auerbach, Philip Lutgendorf, Purnima Mehta, the aiis trustees, as well as the extraordinary faculty at the aiis Hindi Language Program in Jaipur. Early support for this pro ject was provided by a New School India China In-stitute Fellowship in 2006, and a New School for Social Research Dissertation Fellowship in 2007–8. I am grateful to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai for providing affi liation during the period of my fi eldwork, and to the Institute of Advanced Studies in Lucca for providing a warm and welcoming work environment in 2011. Much of the writing of this book took place while I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, which off ered an intellectually invigorating and exceedingly pleasant atmosphere in which to read, think, and write.

x Ac know ledg ments

At Duke University Press I owe par tic u lar thanks to Miriam Angress and Susan Albury, who have worked with me on this book since 2012. Th e three external reviewers that Miriam recruited to read the manuscript provided tre-mendously valuable feedback. I would like to extend my gratitude as well to Brian A. Hatcher and to two anonymous reviewers from the American Insti-tute of Indian Studies’ Elder Prize se lection committee for their very insightful comments and suggestions. Th ank you as well to Bill Nelson for his help with the diagrams, and to Dave Prout who prepared the index.

Th is book benefi ted tremendously from the insights of an extraordinary community of interlocutors in Göttingen, at the Max Planck Institute and at the Center for Modern Indian Studies. I am especially grateful to Nathaniel Roberts and Uday Chandra, each of whom read the manuscript in its entirety, and whose critical engagements have been an extremely enjoyable source of provocation and insight— thank you. I would also like to thank Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Anderson Blanton, Devika Bordia, Jayeel Cornelio, Ajay Gandhi, Radhika Gupta, Weishan Huang, Annelies Kusters, Sumeet Mhaskar, Srirupa Roy, Roschanack Shaery, Shaheed Tayob, Sahana Udupa, Lalit Vachani, Peter van der Veer, Rupa Vishwanath, and Jeremy Walton for their encourage-ment, feedback, and suggestions.

Th e book has benefi ted as well from the generosity of friends and colleagues over the years who have off ered their thoughts on vari ous ideas and chap-ter draft s. I am especially grateful to Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, Amita Bhide, Noelle Brigden, Patton Burchett, Michele Friedner, Andrew Harris, Giam-mario Impullitti, Devesh Kapur, William Mazzarella, Colin McFarlane, Sav-itri Medhatul, Lisa Mitchell, Philip Oldenburg, Anastasia Piliavsky, Anupama Rao, Mark Schneider, Simpreet Singh, Neelanjan Sircar, Rahul Srivastava, Natascha van der Zwan, and Leilah Vevinah. Many of the ideas and formu-lations presented here were tested out during the marvelous series of Water Workshops between 2006 and 2014 at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, graciously hosted by Steve Caton. Among the many partic-ipants and interlocutors who off ered provocative and insightful feedback, I wish to extend par tic u lar thanks to Jessica Barnes, Namita Dharia, Gareth Doherty, Tessa Farmer, Toby Jones, Martha Kaplan, Mandana Limbert, Benja-min Orlove, Catarina Scaramelli, Anand Vaidya, and above all to Steve Caton.

Th e research for this book was made both possi ble and pleas ur able by the tremendous generosity and open- mindedness of a great many people in Mum-bai. For their advice, guidance, and assistance during my fi eldwork in Mumbai, I wish to extend thanks to Amita Bhide, Anita Patil- Deshmukh, Medha Dixit, Leena Joshi, and Deepak Dhopat. My deep and heartfelt appreciation goes to

Ac know ledg ments xi

the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai’s Department of Hydraulic Engineering (particularly those of the M- East Ward), whose engineers and staff not only made this book possi ble, but whose extraordinary graciousness, patience, and unshakable good humor made the research im mensely enjoyable as well. I am especially grateful to S. R. Argade, S. R. Bidi, R. B. Bambale, D. P. Joshi, A. N. Kadam, N. H. Kusnur, V. R. Pednekar, S. M. Shah, and T.V. Shah, who provided invaluable feedback and critical comments on vari ous chapters and ideas presented here. Countless interlocutors and research participants in Mumbai will remain anonymous; the thanks I express here can only hint at the debts I incurred and at the depth of my gratitude.

In 1991, in conjunction with India’s liberalizing economic reforms that year, the chief minister of Maharashtra announced a plan to transform the city of Bombay into a global fi nancial ser vice center modeled on Singapore— and to let the market do much of the work. Animated by an international policy discourse recommending market solutions to all manner of po liti cal, social, and material confl ict, a co ali tion of Bombay’s planners, politicians, landown-ers, and business elites put markets to work in arbitrating long- standing po liti-cal confl icts over access to urban land and resources— confl icts on which a generation of urban development planning had faltered. Institutionalizing a new set of regulatory instruments and market mechanisms, liberalization- era policymakers enlisted private- sector participation in the city’s transformation. Th e years since have seen Mumbai gripped by a fever of construction, de mo li-tion, and redevelopment: working- class neighborhoods and older built forms are making way for shiny new malls, offi ce towers, mega- infrastructure proj-ects, and luxurious residential compounds, while sprawling townships of low- income housing sprout up along the urban periphery.

Yet the dazzling de cades of urban development and roaring economic growth have not been without cost: Mumbai’s transformation has presided over the steady deterioration— and sometimes spectacular breakdown—of the city’s water infrastructures.1 Water troubles plague not only the more than

IntroductionEmbedded Infrastructures

2 Introduction

60  percent of city residents now reported to live in slums (where basic in-frastructural ser vices like municipal water supply are oft en both legally tenu-ous and practically unreliable),2 but city elites too have seen their taps grow increasingly erratic and prone to drying up. Well- heeled Mumbai residents increasingly supplement spotty taps with piecemeal purchases and deliveries, while private- sector actors resort to infrastructural self- provisioning, hiring transport companies, digging wells, and investing in enormous on- site water recycling plants and fi ltration systems. Every day hundreds of water tanker trucks drip their way along Mumbai’s traffi c- clogged streets, delivering water to slums and up- market hotels alike. For their part the city’s major po liti cal parties—in high- profi le displays of antimigrant one- upmanship— have taken to blaming erratic pipes on the city’s poorest residents themselves (accusing them of overburdening the city’s infrastructures with their very presence) as well as on one another (for supposedly allowing the poor to plunder the pipes in a clientelistic exchange for votes). Th e tanker trucks, parched pipes, and po-liti cal theatrics fuel the imaginations of Mumbai’s legions of news reporters, who respond with a steady stream of oft en fanciful stories about “ water mafi as,” “thieving plumbers,” “patron- politicians,” and “corrupt engineers.”

Mumbai’s dry taps are puzzling. Th e city is India’s fi nancial and commercial capital, accounting for some six percent of gdp, 40  percent of foreign trade, and over a third of the country’s income tax revenue.3 With a per capita income almost three times the national average, Mumbai boasts real estate values that can rival those of Manhattan. Th e city, in other words, suff ers no dearth of fi -nancial resources with which it might redress infrastructural shortfalls; indeed municipal rec ords suggest that a signifi cant proportion of the city’s water and sewage bud get regularly goes unspent. As for water, city engineers explain that there is no aggregate water shortage in Mumbai, where per capita availability (as well as estimated levels of leakage) is on par with that of London (if not quite that of New York).4 With no shortage of resources, how might Mumbai’s fi tful taps be made sense of?

Th is book is about the encounter in Mumbai between liberalizing market reforms and the materially and symbolically dense politics of urban infrastruc-ture. While above- ground landscapes have been rapidly reconfi gured by “world class” city- building eff orts,5 market reforms to facilitate the transformation have wreaked havoc on the city’s water pipes. Th e just- in- time arbitrage tem-porality of market exchange has resulted in geographies of built space— and thereby of water demand— that deviate wildly from what is projected (and per-mitted) by the city’s development plan and control rules. Th e city of Mumbai is thus characterized by a growing incongruence between its above- ground form

Embedded Infrastructures 3

and its below- ground fl ows, with the result that its water pipes have become increasingly volatile. As engineers explain, there is no aggregate water shortage in the city of Mumbai; the challenge rather is how to make water fl ow to the unpredictable (and constantly changing) location of demand. Th e result has been an improvised, constantly fl uctuating, oft en unreliable, and little under-stood confi guration of water fl ow in the city. In contemporary Mumbai water is made to fl ow by means of intimate forms of knowledge and ongoing interven-tion in the city’s complex and dynamic social, po liti cal, and hydraulic land-scape. Th e everyday work of getting water animates and inhabits a penum-bra of infrastructural activity—of business, brokerage, secondary markets, and sociopo liti cal networks— whose workings are transforming lives and reconfi g-uring and rescaling po liti cal authority in the city. Indeed Mumbai’s illegible and volatile hydrologies are lending infrastructures increasing po liti cal salience just as actual control over pipes and fl ows becomes contingent upon dispersed and intimate assemblages of knowledge, power, and material authority. “Pipe poli-tics” refers to the new arenas of contestation that Mumbai’s water infrastruc-tures animate— contestations that reveal the illusory and precarious nature of the pro ject to remake Mumbai as a world- class city and gesture instead toward the highly contested futures of the actually existing city of Mumbai.

World- Class City

Th e pro ject to transform Mumbai into a global fi nancial ser vice center mod-eled on Singapore must be considered in light of broader macroeconomic, ideological, and intellectual trends of recent de cades. “Th e period of urban revolutions has begun,” wrote Henri Lefebvre (2003: 43) a half- century ago, turning Marxist orthodoxy about the reor ga ni za tion of industrial production in cities on its head,6 insisting instead that the production of urban space was itself becoming the primary means by which cap i tal ist accumulation was ad-vancing. Lefebvre’s insight was itself revolutionary, inspiring a generation of thinking on the relationship between global pro cesses of urbanization and the universal movement of capital. Neo- Lefebvrian urban geographers have thus theorized how structural inequalities and macro- level cap i tal ist power geom-etries have underpinned the historical production of highly uneven patterns of “planetary urbanization” (Brenner 2013; Merrifi eld 2013) as well as inequitable distributions of resources (Harvey 2001; Swyngedouw 2004).7

While neo- Lefebvrian thinkers have drawn attention to planetary patterns of urbanism as global capital’s “spatial fi x” (Harvey 2001), po liti cal economists of “global cities” have emphasized the renewed importance of cities to new forms

4 Introduction

of global economy, with cities said to play a crucial role as “command posts” (Sassen 1991) in spatially dispersed but eco nom ically integrated international economic systems.8 While large- scale industrial production is moving out of urban centers, global cities theorists argue, producer services— banking, fi nance, education, high- tech, entertainment, real estate— are moving in. Th ese kinds of extremely profi table ser vice industries cluster in urban areas, where they benefi t from, among other things, the extremely dense material networks of infrastructural connectivity (electricity, fi ber optics, airports, water pipes) that cities have to off er. Th e idea that national economic fortunes lie in the extent to which a country’s economy is linked— through its cities—to global networks of fi nance and commerce has inspired planners, policymakers, business interests, and funding agencies the world over to formulate strategies for making cities attractive to transnational service- sector fi rms and competitive in the global marketplace for investment. Recent de cades have thus witnessed the alignment of state- and private- sector actors in a bid to build “entrepreneurial” internation-ally competitive global cities, either (as in Dubai or Pudong) by creating cities from scratch or (as in Mumbai) by transforming existing urban landscapes in such a way that global fi rms might be inclined to set up shop there.9

Th e globally mobile development discourse and policymaking framework exhorting countries to reconfi gure cities to attract international investment capital— and to use market mechanisms in doing so— has met with both schol-arly and pop u lar critiques pointing to the negative distributional eff ects and demo cratic defi cit seen to inhere in the global city pro ject.10 Th e imperative to attract global investment capital, it is argued, renders urban infrastructures and built spaces more responsive to the imperatives of global fi nance and business than to the needs of resident citizenry. In this way macroeconomic shift s become inscribed in the fabric of the city itself, leading to sociospatial segregation and deepening in e qual ity. Liberalization and globalization is thus charged with undermining the material and ideological basis of a “modern infrastructural ideal” (Graham and Marvin 2001: 35) by unbundling the rela-tionship between citizens and cities. While global city infrastructures might provide connectivity among spaces that are relevant to the new economy (the it parks, gated communities, airports, and call centers), it is argued that they do so to the exclusion of people and places that liberalization and globaliza-tion has rendered eco nom ically obsolete: the defunct factories, the working classes and their housing, and the hazy world of urban informality and illegal-ity commonly known as the “slum.”

Th ese kinds of metanarratives about what liberal capitalism does to urban space seems to fi t well with much of what we see in Mumbai. It is precisely

Embedded Infrastructures 5

through these kinds of large- scale eff orts to reconfi gure urban environments with massive investments in urban infrastructure, Harvey (2001) tells us, that surplus capital fi nds its “spatial fi x.”11 Th e infrastructurally mediated devalua-tion of eco nom ically unproductive urban spaces like slums is precisely what allows for their profi table de mo li tion and redevelopment. Dry taps in poor neighborhoods can apparently be explained by the logic of capital, whose work-ings will likely soon see such neighborhoods razed and reconfi gured for some higher- value use; this is all part of capital’s creative- destructive tendency.12 In-deed Sassen (2010: 85) notes that economic deregulation to attract investment is of a piece with informalization in the lower echelons of the economy and society— part of the same global movement of capital.13 Capitalism is infi nitely adaptive, Marxists might say; relations of production have simply been recon-fi gured and reworked in Mumbai in this par tic u lar way. All these informal infrastructural arrangements— these “mafi as” of tankers and plumbers— are all just doing their part to advance the universalizing impetus of capital.14

Marxist po liti cal economy accounts have been critiqued by scholars, partic-ularly postcolonial theorists, who note that infrastructures cannot be described as splintering in cities like Mumbai since such cities never approximated any modern, networked ideal in the fi rst place. Contemporary infrastructural and spatial disjunctures are better explained, it is suggested, by looking at how pat-terns of rule and relations of governance with roots in a colonial past continue to inform contemporary patterns of citizenship. Th eorists have described how colonial administrative divisions of populations into “citizens” and “subjects” have contemporary manifestations in the ways that postcolonial socie ties have been governed since in de pen dence (Chatterjee 2004; Mamdani 1996). In contemporary Calcutta, for instance, Chatterjee details how “population groups” constituting the urban poor are not treated on par with “proper” citi-zens, whose claims to infrastructure and urban amenities are made in a lan-guage of demo cratic citizenship right. Chatterjee (2004, 2013) suggests that because the lives and livelihoods of the urban poor hinge on “illegal” occupa-tions of land and “informal” commercial and productive activities, the preser-vation of a formal legal structure has precluded the extension of formal rights to things like shelter and water to the slum- dwelling poor, who— unable to make legal, rights- based claims— resort to negotiation for substantive goods and entitlements from the state.

While Chatterjee explicitly positions his formulation as a response to Bene-dict Anderson’s (2006) theorization of a universal ideal of civic nationalism (Anderson’s “imagined community”), his argument joins those of Scott (1998), Ferguson (1990), Escobar (1995), and Simone (2004) in off ering a critique of

6 Introduction

the Eurocentric and universalizing assumptions of generations of urban plan-ners and development professionals more generally. Th e imperialist designs of “high- modernist” social order, Scott suggests, have repeatedly failed to “im-prove the human condition” because they have neglected to take into account the vari ous and multiple (non- Cartesian) epistemic forms already operating within the social spaces that development experts and urban planners aim to “improve” through rational knowledge. Th e infrastructural ideal of a fully net-worked city is thus cast as a value- laden formulation, whose claims to moral and empirical superiority rest on a Eurocentric conception of the “good” that is centered around the rights- bearing individual and his or her relation to a sovereign state— a conception that more oft en than not functions as a plat-form for the consolidation of state power and imperial domination.

Understandings of “infrastructure” that consider only large- scale, state- directed technical and engineering feats— pipes, concrete, wires, and bulldozers— are thus criticized as both limited and misleading. Infrastruc-ture might rather be understood to comprise the multitude of practices and elements that facilitate access to what Simone calls “spaces of economic and cultural operation” and that function as “a platform providing for and repro-ducing life in the city” (2004: 407–8). Formal, state- led eff orts to extend or upgrade urban ser vice provision, in other words, undermine already existing, informal arrangements and disrupt socially and culturally embedded frame-works of access and belonging. Th is line of antiplan theorizing emphasizes how the grand designs of capital are interrupted, particularly in the postcolo-nial context, by cultural solidarities and life forms that thrive in the informal interstices of markets and states, subverting these structures from within. Universalizing metanarratives are alleged to hit a roadblock in the postcolo-nial city, where communitarian identities and solidarities subvert the grand designs of capital. Th us rather than interpreting the informal urban econo-mies, spaces, and practices as signs of modernity’s failure to fulfi ll its promises, antiplan theorists celebrate urban informality, reading the disorderly city not as dystopic but as a possi ble alternative to the totalizing politics of planned, state- led modernity. Urban informality, it is suggested, might be understood to comprise forms of sociality and economy born of traditional modes of life and livelihood with roots in non- Western cultural and social forms. As the architect Rem Koolhaas wrote as he soared above Lagos’s slums in a he li cop-ter, “From the air, the apparently burning garbage heap turned out to be, in fact, a village” (quoted in Gandy 2005: 40). Alternative forms of habitation, conviviality, and infrastructural connection, in other words, should not be read as spaces of oppression or exclusion but as urban instantiations of modes

Embedded Infrastructures 7

of life rooted in indigenous cultural practice— what Koolhaas characterizes as “ingenious, alternative systems” of “very elaborate or gan i za tional networks” (quoted in Gandy 2005: 40)— native to the Global South; it may simply be the case, in other words, that the apparent disorder of Lagos or Mumbai is simply what urban modernity looks like in the non- Western world.

Th is attention to the historical, po liti cal, and sociocultural dimensions of urban form and fragmentation is a welcome intervention. Yet reading infra-structural informality as a space of re sis tance to the totalizing dynamics of global market forces does not explain the hydraulic puzzles posed by Mum-bai, where the “formal” status of one’s home does not go far in predicting what comes (or does not come) out of one’s pipes and where water does not fl ow readily along class lines. For instance, in the middle- class housing soci-ety where I lived during my research, between 2008 and  2010, we received only forty liters of municipal water per person per day— roughly a third of the municipal supply norm for residential consumption and a quantity that is on par with some of the poorest, legally precarious, and po liti cally and socially marginalized localities in which I did research. Our society’s supplementary, by- the- tanker water purchases, Marxists might counter, is perfectly explicable within a cap i tal ist logic: with purchasing power rather than citizenship right determining access, water has simply been reconfi gured as an economic good, one that our society was fortunately able to aff ord.15 Th ose unable to pay for water at the market rate (i.e., the urban poor), by contrast, are forced into in-formal infrastructural arrangements. By this reading, what antiplan celebrates as opposition to the totalizing forces of the bourgeois- cap i tal ist state becomes indistinguishable from dispossession, informalization, and criminalization of the poor; what antiplan describes as au then tic forms of sociality uncolonized by capital is in fact entirely compatible with the exigencies of capital accu-mulation and dovetails with pro- market celebrations of entrepreneurial liberal subjectivity. One might even say that what antiplan does is simply redescribe everyday eff orts to live with the eff ects of capital in rather more celebratory terms. In championing makeshift or informal infrastructural arrangements as agentive re sis tance to the bourgeois state, antiplan theory not only lacks explanatory power but (as we see in chapter 4) takes as a point of analytical departure the conceptual categories of the very liberal market logic it professes to critique.

Indeed it may very well be true that capital is perfectly happy in Mumbai, that the power of capital is not at all at odds with forms of power and author-ity operative in and through urban informality— infrastructural or other wise. Capital might be said to work much like water itself, channeling and pooling,

8 Introduction

making and remaking the landscapes through which it fl ows, reconfi guring the contours of sociomaterial worlds that it inhabits. Yet what Marxist eco-nomic geography does not tell us is why water pipes have become so erratic in cap i tal ist Mumbai but not in, say, Shanghai, Seoul, or Jakarta. Mumbai’s hy-drologies cannot be deduced nor their future predicted by a theory of the uni-versalization of capital; appeals to capital’s infi nitely adaptive workings (which are by defi nition always true) are therefore, for our purposes, not particularly illuminating. To make sense of the relationship between economic markets and Mumbai’s water infrastructures we must push past these conventional cat-egories of analy sis— class and community, rights and rules—to pay attention to water infrastructures themselves: to the sociopo liti cal and material land-scapes through which water fl ows are produced and within which infrastruc-tures are embedded.16

Embedded Infrastructures

More than a half- century ago the economic historian Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]: 3) described “the idea of a self- adjusting market” as “a stark utopia.” Challenging a cornerstone of neoclassical economic theory— Adam Smith’s (2001 [1776]: 16) notion that mankind’s natu ral “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” results in internally animated, self- regulating markets17— Polanyi used the example of England to show how markets are in fact the highly artifi cial creations of an interventionist state. Far from natu ral, Polanyi (2001 [1944]: 3) argued, markets are produced through radical institutional and legal changes that, if left unchecked, pose a dire threat to the “ human and natu ral substance of society.” His theoretical intervention was twofold: it belied dominant economic thinking, fi rst, by demonstrating that actually existing markets are “embedded” (2001 [1944]: 130) in society and, second, in showing how economic theory itself can aff ect societally embedded markets in ways that have dramatic sociopo liti cal implications. Polanyi’s book demonstrated the tremendous social disruption that resulted from this state- directed pro ject of creating land and labor markets in nineteenth- century England. In what he calls a “double movement,” he shows how these social dislocations animated a po liti cal “countermovement” that curtailed the expansion and operation of England’s newly created markets. While he shows the operation of a market economy to be a result of deliberate state action, this po liti cal response to the pro ject of disembedding markets from society and the subsequent restrictions on the implementation of laissez- faire economic theory is characterized as

Embedded Infrastructures 9

spontaneous. Th e utopian pro ject to mold actual economies in the image of free- market theory, Polanyi (2001 [1944]: 136) argued, “attacked the fabric of society” and thus gave rise to fi erce re sis tance to this impossible pro ject.

With a global resurgence of neoclassical economic thought since the 1970s animating a wave of pop u lar and scholarly interest in the free market— both as an ideology and a po liti cal pro ject— Polanyi’s lessons are as timely as ever. Scholars have adopted the term neoliberalism to refer (on the one hand) to the idea that, when left to their own devices, markets are effi cient, self- correcting, and fair in the way they allocate resources, as well as (on the other hand) to the multiplicity of policies and programs that invoke the effi cient- market idea as a legitimating rationale. Of course a theory about how the market mechanism works is not the same thing as concrete policies that cite these ideas as their justifi cation and motivation.18 Th e necessary divide between effi cient- market ideas and the vari ous policies and practices animated by these ideas means as well that there is no necessary correspondence between the two as far as ends are concerned. Ethnographers have thus shown how effi cient- market logics have been put to work by politicians and policymakers in trying to address all manner of social and po liti cal problems, from environmental pollution to po-liti cal deadlock (e.g., Collier 2011). In his discussion of infrastructure in post- Soviet Rus sia, for instance, Collier (2011: 25–26) shows how the market logic of individual “calculative choice” was deployed by Rus sian planners “in a way that could be accommodated to the substantive orientations of universal need fulfi llment.” “We should not move too quickly,” Collier cautions, “from the identifi cation of neoliberalism with a microeconomic critique and program-ming to any assumption about the formations of government that neoliberal reform shapes.”19 Indeed the globally ascendant form of po liti cal rationality that emerged at the end of the twentieth century was less a call to liberate mar-ket relations “from their social shackles” (Rose 1999: 141) than a call to re-structure techniques of governance such that social goals are pursued via mar-ket mechanisms— through the aggregation of calculated, interest- maximizing choices of individuals and fi rms.

In liberalization- era Mumbai the effi cient- market idea found a receptive audience among an odd- bedfellows co ali tion of urban development planners, international experts, populist politicians, landowners, and real estate develop-ers who saw in “the market” a seemingly magical solution to a long- standing and intractable urban prob lem: how to reconcile sky- high urban land values with the need to acquire land for social purposes like infrastructure, ameni-ties, or public housing. While this puzzle had stumped a generation of urban

10 Introduction

planners, in the 1990s the prob lem took on par tic u lar salience, animating a broad po liti cal co ali tion of actors united by the imperative to transform Mumbai into a “world- class city.” As a matter of national importance, Mumbai’s transformation became a cause célèbre that would see policy experts, private- sector interests, and pop u lar politics join hands to put market logic to work in pursuit of Mumbai’s make over. A new set of regulatory instruments institution-alized in conjunction with the country- level liberalizing reforms of 1991 and ex-panded in a series of amendments over the following two de cades (the subject of chapter 2) attempted to resolve Mumbai’s perennial land puzzle by creating a market in urban development rights. Th e new rules created incentives for private- sector actors (landowners and developers) to hand over land and build amenities for social purposes by off ering compensation not monetarily but in kind— with market- responsive rights to develop above and beyond heights and densities allowed by the city’s development plan. While markets for develop-ment rights of course exist in other cities (e.g., New York), the way and extent to which liberalization- era Mumbai has operationalized this market mechanism may well be globally unpre ce dented;20 in what one centrally involved planner ruefully recalled as “our special innovation,”21 Mumbai’s liberalization- era plan-ning regime eff ectively severed the right to build from land itself.

In order to make sense of how liberalization- era Mumbai’s marketization of  urban development rights has aff ected the city’s water infrastructures, we must briefl y return to the Polanyian question of what markets do and how they are made. Markets work as a “coordination device” (Guesnerie 1996, quoted in Callon 1998: 3), resolving confl icts over terms of exchange. To create a market in something, that something must fi rst be reconceptualized as an abstract thing— a commodity—so that a price for such things can be agreed upon.22 To describe something as a commodity is thus not to identify any par-tic u lar quality of that thing that distinguishes it from other, noncommodity things but rather to identify a par tic u lar situation of exchangeability.23 Creat-ing this kind of exchange requires mea sur ing some object’s value vis- à- vis the value of other objects.

Calculating something’s exchange value is complicated by the fact that ob-jects of exchange are not really abstract objects but are invariably “caught up in a network of relations, in a fl ow of intermediaries which circulate, connect, link and reconstitute identities” (Callon 1998: 17). Th e pro cess of reckoning involved in the creation of a commodity situation therefore involves a pro-cess of systematically sorting through these dense networks of relations within which any par tic u lar actually existing thing exists. While some properties, attachments, and associations will be included within the ambit of calcula-

Embedded Infrastructures 11

tion of some object’s exchange value, others will not make the cut. Th e pro cess of adjudicating which properties and relations will be taken into account in valuation and which will not is accomplished by means of rules, laws, and accounting procedures— acts of mea sure ment that defi ne the boundaries of the commodity situation of any par tic u lar thing. Th e pro cess of conceptual cutting off and inclusion—of extricating objects from the dense networks of sociocultural, po liti cal, and material relations in which they are in actuality embedded— allows for the possibility of calculation. It is this pro cess of “fram-ing” (18) that sits at the heart of marketized exchange.

Th e marketization of development rights in world- class- era Mumbai com-moditized urban development rights by conceptually unbundling rights to build from the materialities of the city; development rights, as one planner put it, were “brought out of thin air, not related to land in any fi xed proportion” (Phatak 2007: 47). Th e market- driven, rapidly changing form of Mumbai’s built space has thus been unbundled from the planning trajectories and regu-lations governing the city’s land- bound water infrastructures.

Notwithstanding the conceptual cutting off of marketized things (i.e., devel-opment rights) from the material, social, and po liti cal worlds in which they are in actuality embedded (i.e., land and land- based infrastructures), the relational ties that are formally excluded from market framing do not, of course, simply disappear. Th e prob lem is well understood by mainstream economics, where the aft erlives of these relational ties are referred to as “externalities.” A common ex-ample of market externality is industrial pollution: when toxic waste discharged by a manufacturing plant into a local river aff ects the health of local residents, these health costs— which were not taken into account when setting the price of the industrial good— would be considered market externalities. Similarly in cities the marketization of built space can have all sorts of infrastructural externalities that are well understood by urban planners the world over: the con-struction of a tall residential tower on a narrow road in a prime neighborhood, for instance, might lead to many hours wasted by third- party actors in traffi c snarls— costs that were not factored into the market price of a new fl at in the big building.24 Th e marketization of development rights means that logics ani-mating the production of Mumbai’s built space have been severed from those governing its water infrastructures. Th e market in development rights, in other words, is remaking the face of Mumbai without consulting the pipes.

Life in the city is of course not possi ble without water; notwithstanding the institutional unbundling of the city’s built space (where people live and work) from its water pipes, the po liti cal and bodily exigencies of life in the city mean that Mumbai’s businesses, residents, and industries do get water—in some way

12 Introduction

or another— every single day. In this context the interest ing question becomes that of access: How does the growing and globalizing city of Mumbai meet its daily water needs? What is at stake, and who are the stakeholders in vari-ous confi gurations of fl ow and access? What kinds of politics, power relations, modes of governance, and practices of citizenship are produced, animated, or constrained by these confi gurations? In this book I show that what fl ows or does not fl ow out of this or that pipe depends on highly dynamic intersections among the multiple regimes of knowledge and authority that water inhabits, as well as the ways fl ows are confi gured and reconfi gured across space and over time. Making water fl ow requires continuous and oft en contentious eff orts to direct and redirect fl ows across the rapidly changing built space of the city. As one astute observer quipped when I asked why her tap had gone dry, “Look, when water comes, it’s because of politics, and when water doesn’t come, it’s because of politics.”

Pipe Politics

What can we learn from studying infrastructure? What analytical leverage does an infrastructural perspective allow? Infrastructures are dualistic, Lar-kin (2013) notes; they are not only things in themselves but are also relations among things. When doing their relational work, the properties of infrastruc-tures as things in themselves can become invisible, hiding behind the associa-tions that they mediate in a disappearing act that social scientists sometimes call “black boxing” (Latour 1999: 183). For instance the relationship between people and water in Mumbai might be said to be mediated by material things (pipes, trucks, valves, pumps) and forms of knowledge (maps, work tenders, hydraulic models, news reports), as well as less tangible, larger- scale forces (fi nancial instruments or interest rates). Such things appear signifi cant only insofar as they enable or impede a relationship between people and water, and so they tend to be overlooked until moments of breakdown or blockage. It is when water stops fl owing that the pipes themselves come into focus. At these moments attention is pulled upstream and underground, toward maps and models and toward power and politics. It is at such times that relationships that might have been taken for granted, naturalized, are revealed instead to be rather “precarious achievements” (Graham 2009: 10). Moments or locations of interruption work as a methodological entryway to the sociopo liti cal and ma-terial forces underpinning other wise taken- for- granted urban pro cesses and geographies— a means by which to explore the technologies, materialities, and politics that infuse everyday life in the city.

Embedded Infrastructures 13

While promising insight into these multiple layers of interaction and mediation, thinking about infrastructure relationally can also be mystifying, as it blurs the boundaries of what might “count” as infrastructure. For instance, while pipes, pumps, and valves are of course part of the assemblage that con-nects people and water,25 water itself is what allows pipes, pumps, and valves to work in this par tic u lar way: a pipe will not convey just any water, for instance, but requires water of a certain pressure in order to perform its transporting job. Here a par tic u lar property of water— pressure— becomes part of water’s infra-structure. A machine to produce water pressure, a suction pump for instance, might for this purpose be introduced into water’s infrastructural ambit, but then of course without water to prime it, a suction pump will not coax water from the end of a pipe at all but might instead blow up— a situation that, need-less to say, might require water to remedy. Certain properties of water thus become part of water’s infrastructure.

Indeed infrastructures are not only relational but are also things with lives of their own. Th e materiality of infrastructural objects can have aff ective di-mensions, producing “sensorial and po liti cal experience” (Larkin 2013: 12). Infrastructural things can be highly symbolic: the construction of airports, bridges, and even water pipes can be animated by logics that intersect only tan-gentially with offi cial, stated purposes. In contemporary Mumbai large- scale infrastructural projects (both highly visible ones like bridges and airports and less charismatic ones like water pipes) are oft en conceived (and indeed admit-tedly so) fi rst and foremost as a way to signal and perform the city’s world- class character to potential investors. Similarly (as we see in chapter 7) a water dis-tribution main laid with much pomp and show by a politician in the run-up to an election might work as much to demonstrate a po liti cal aspirant’s capacity to mobilize the apparatus of the state as it does to improve water supply to a neighborhood. Moreover while the symbolic and material lives of infrastruc-tures as things in themselves might be indiff erent to infrastructure’s mediating role (i.e., to connect water with people), activity related to infrastructure’s aff ec-tive register will invariably have hydraulic implications, impacting (oft en inad-vertently) the relationship between people and water. An account of how water is made to fl ow through Mumbai will thus need to consider not only (on the one hand) the networks of material, technological, and ideological interactions that mediate relations between people and water, or (on the other) the aff ective dimensions of infrastructures, but also how these material and symbolic lives interact in sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory ways.

Th ese multiple dimensions make water infrastructures unwieldy and ex-tremely porous, their meanings and operations constantly exceeding the

14 Introduction

designs and hopes of any par tic u lar author. Mumbai’s water infrastructures animate and inhabit manifold and layered regimes of knowledge and authority that are put to work in producing fl ows. Th ese networks operate within three registers: fi rst, the abstract logics of planning, modeling, regulation, fi nance, and management; second, the real- time material pro cesses and activities that constitute the everyday work of making (or trying to make) water fl ow; and third, a semeiotic register in which water and its infrastructures are performa-tive of power, knowledge, and authority.26 Th e ineluctable materiality of water infrastructures means that the vari ous registers fold in on one another: hy-draulic spectacles are, for example, necessarily underwritten by the very real and material work of making water actually appear. By the same token the material exigencies of bodily hydration or of hydraulic spectacle destabilize and chal-lenge abstract, ideological domains of planning and regulation.

Th is book focuses on water with attention to the specifi cities of the material itself.27 Water is a medium with which to explore material and symbolic di-mensions of po liti cal contestation at the intersection of large- scale infrastruc-tural dynamics (fl ows of fi nance, technological expertise, global management discourses) and intimate forms of knowledge, power, and authority. Water is extremely heavy and unwieldy, extraordinarily time consuming and expensive to move; once it has reached a resting point— once gravity has done its work— water tends not to go very far without signifi cant fi nancial, technological, and po liti cal investment. By the same token water’s materiality means that actually getting it has necessarily spatial and temporal dimensions. Attending to water’s materiality thus invites a broader conceptualization of power and politics than suggested by neo- Marxian formulations (where power is a structurally given resource wielded in the interests of cap i tal ist elites), attending instead to how power and identity are materially produced, contested, drawn and redrawn through space and across time.

While all infrastructures mediate and interact with spatiotemporal rela-tionships and divides, water has physical properties that make it particularly good to think with: water has a tendency to fl ow downhill, thereby informing relationships not only among localities at higher and lower elevations but be-tween upstream and downstream points of access on par tic u lar pipes; water has a propensity to be siphoned off and to disappear without a trace, giving rise to rumor and speculation over the paths along which water may or may not fl ow; water has a capacity to distribute pathogens and refuses to res pect social boundaries, meaning that water not only produces social divides but bleeds across them in complex ways; water requires bulky, high- cost, labor- intensive transport infrastructure, and as a result network extensions are oft en fraught

Embedded Infrastructures 15

with enormously time- consuming pro cesses resulting in material confi gura-tions that can prove somewhat “obdurate” (Bijker 2007: 122) once in place; water’s weighty infrastructures provide a lens into the importance of time and space, as pipes sink deep into swampy ground (thereby challenging gravity- fed fl ows, as we see in chapters 4 and 5), while remaining buoyant as they pass through bedrock- supported neighborhoods (chapter 6); relatedly since water is a necessary and time- sensitive substance (no one survives long without it), access practices are informed not only by exigencies of hydraulics, fi nance, or practicality but by strategies and socialities of risk mitigation (chapter 6); fi nally networks of water pipes and below- ground fl ows (as opposed to, say, transport infrastructures) are oft en hidden from view, buried under the epi-dermis of the city, illegible and opaque and thereby pregnant with possibility (chapters 6 and 7).

A pipe- political approach to urban water is fi rst and foremost a matter of method, one that requires us to both follow the water (Deleuze and Guattari 2004) across space and through time and to follow the inquiries of the actors we encounter along the way (Farias 2011).28 Th e material, place- specifi c, and meaning- laden qualities of water and its infrastructures invite (even require) a holistic, ethnographically grounded research approach (Orlove and Caton 2010). Th e research for this book was carried out over eigh teen months, focus-ing on a geo graph i cally contiguous region of Mumbai— the M- East Ward— which is si mul ta neously an administrative, electoral,29 and a hydraulic unit: the neighborhoods, businesses, and industries of M- East are supplied water from a single local reservoir. Working with this unit of analy sis allows for an explora-tion of hydraulic relations between diff erent locations: who or what is upstream or downstream from whom, for instance, on a par tic u lar distribution main. Accounts and insights emerged from myriad social, po liti cal, and geographic positions within the water distribution network, each location functioning as a par tic u lar lens through which broader po liti cal and social pro cesses are explored. Th e narrative builds on insights gathered at the neighborhood level (ethnographic research and oral histories with individual families and busi-nesses, local plumbers and water vendors, neighborhood leaders and po liti cal aspirants), at a sociotechnical level (involving rounds with water department engineering staff , municipal valve operators, tanker drivers, licensed plumb-ers, and meter readers), at an institutional and more explicitly po liti cal level (interviews with senior- level water engineers, state ministers and legislators, technical experts, and international con sul tants and lenders), as well as from textual analy sis (of current and archival policy documents, development plans, pro ject reports, and maps). Working with such a broad range of sources allows

16 Introduction

for an account of the city that is both ethnographically rich (in both thickness and duration) while also historically grounded— not only attending to con-temporary politics of water but also providing insight into how the pipes came to be so unpredictable in the fi rst place.

Or ga ni za tion

Th e book begins with the arrival in India of an internationally mobile dis-course extolling “the market” as the best and most effi cient allocator of re-sources and provider of urban ser vices. Th e opening chapter traces the career of this idea in Mumbai, revealing a surprising history of how the water de-partment’s century- old system of careful mapmaking and rec ord keeping was abandoned— a decline in which the debates over privatization are shown to have themselves been deeply implicated. Having undermined the water de-partment’s ability to do its job, this ideologically driven reform agenda (pushed by Mumbai’s world- class- city boosters) then sought to render the distribution

F I G U R E I . 1 . Mumbai’s M- East Ward. Google Earth: Data s10, noaa, U.S. Navy, nga, gebco. Image ©2014 TerraMetrics, Image © 2014 DigitalGlobe, Image Landsat.

Embedded Infrastructures 17

network knowable— its market risks calculable—as per the exigencies of a privatization contract. In an eff ort to produce these kinds of data, a series of high- tech (and labor- saving) calculative tools were introduced into Mumbai’s infrastructural ambit. Th is knowledge- production pro ject, however, was fun-damentally incoherent; the new mea sure ment tools were simply incommen-surable with the material and technological specifi cities of Mumbai’s actually existing, historically inscribed water infrastructures. New, mechanized devices thus produced a steady stream of discordant (even meaningless) data, while the department’s long- established, human- centered systems of mapping, monitor-ing, and recording fell into decline. Th e privatization debates thus presided over the decimation of the department’s informational infrastructures— a dy-namic that, in an ironic twist, would derail a privatization initiative when it fi -nally arrived. While the two- decade arc of debate over the benefi ts and pitfalls of privatization would conclude with Mumbai’s water infrastructures squarely in the public domain, the chapter shows how market logic unmapped Mum-bai’s water distribution network.30

Chapter  2 turns to the po liti cal pro ject to transform Mumbai into an investment- friendly world- class city by using market mechanisms to recon-fi gure the built spaces and upgrade its infrastructures. Th e market presented a utopian solution to long- standing and intractable po liti cal struggles over land— struggles in which the city’s landowners, policymakers, and pop u lar politicians had locked horns at least since in de pen dence. Animated by the idea that these deeply po liti cal confl icts could simply (and indeed quite profi tably) be adjudicated by the market, Mumbai’s liberalization- era policymakers ap-proved a set of new regulatory tools, thereby creating a market in urban devel-opment rights. Th e chapter analyzes how this market actually works— how it has unmoored the geographies and economies of the city’s built space from its material infrastructures both theoretically (in order to create the market) and in practice (as the market- fueled built space of the city is rapidly reconfi gured). Animated by the high- risk volatilities and high- return possibilities of real es-tate, Mumbai’s marketization of urban development resulted in a temporal and material mismatch between its above- ground built space and its below- ground pipes, fl ows, and pressures.

While the disjuncture between the city’s built form and its water pipes seems to suggest that the world- class city would also be a dry city, this is not the case; the new malls, gated communities, shimmering offi ce towers, and glittering hotels do, generally speaking, get water. Th e imperative to make water avail-able to the world-class city— notwithstanding the linear constraints of time and the material constraints of pipes— has, in the words of department engineers,

18 Introduction

thrown “the entire infrastructure in a shambles.” Chapter 3 is concerned with “the shambles”: the technologies, hydrologies, and imaginaries that work to make (or attempt to make) water available to the rapidly changing space of the city notwithstanding the materialities of the pipes.

Chapter 4 shows how the market in development rights— what Mumbai’s water engineers disdainfully refer to as “the slum and building industry”—is tied up with the historically layered and materially inscribed po liti cal land-scapes within which the city’s working classes have made claims to urban land and resources. Th e narrative follows the material, ideological, and legal trans-formation of a municipal housing colony, a neighborhood called Shivajinagar- Bainganwadi, into a “slum” that could be surveyed for redevelopment.31 Th e reimagining of Shivajinagar- Bainganwadi as a slum was itself the result of the po liti cally mediated deterioration and criminalization of its water infrastruc-ture in the context of liberalization- era policy shift s, which position the un-planned, illegal or informal slum as the self- evident conceptual counterpoint to the planned, formal, world- class city. Shivajinagar- Bainganwadi’s story re-veals the deeply po liti cal and highly unstable nature of the world- class/slum binary and demonstrates the shift ing po liti cal and economic stakes imbued in these categories.

Th e second half of the book turns ethnographic attention to the everyday work of making water fl ow and to the sociopo liti cal and material landscapes that fl ows of water both produce and inhabit. Chapter 5 describes the everyday infrastructural practices devoted to making water fl ow and hedging the ever- pre sent risk of breakdown. Th ese practices in turn give rise to whole landscapes of rumor, speculation, and stealth—on pipe locations, on water pressures, and on the timings and operations of valves as well as on the networks of power and infl uence that underpin these volatile fl ows, appearances, and disappear-ances of water. Vari ous kinds of knowledge about water are attained or hid-den, leveraged or blocked through elaborate and power- laden activities of knowledge exchange. Th e opacities that infuse the distribution system animate constantly shift ing sociopo liti cal and relational networks and fuel practices of “knowledge brokering.” Given the inexorable necessity of water— everyday ac-cess being quite literally a matter of survival— water knowledge is power. And controlling the dispersed networks by which that knowledge is accessed and mobilized become the stakes over which thus empowered po liti cal players battle.

Despite water engineers’ best attempts to explain water trou ble as the result of technical diffi culties (such as airlock), natu ral disasters (such as insuffi cient rains), or shortages (increasing demand from population growth), dry taps are

Embedded Infrastructures 19

overwhelmingly described—in private conversations, in pop u lar discourse, and in media narratives—as the result of an all- knowing, all- power ful state that is riddled with corruption. Notwithstanding the fragmentation of knowl-edge and hazy legalities that department engineers themselves must navigate in providing water to the rapidly changing city, Mumbai residents remain convinced that the water department possesses complete knowledge of and exercises precise control over the water distribution system. Dry taps are thus assumed to be the deliberate designs of wayward offi cials. Chapter 6 demon-strates how everyday experiences of the ever more erratic distribution system are eff ectively rendered comprehensible largely through these ever more fan-tastic ideas about corruption.

Chapter 7 outlines the relationship between water infrastructure and po liti-cal authority in Mumbai. Th e chapter begins with a cholera outbreak in the slum neighborhood of Rafi que Nagar in the run-up to the 2009 parliamen-tary elections, focusing on the response of the area’s elected councilor, a man named Patil.32 Politicians like Patil face a dilemma: what ever fl ows or does not fl ow out of his area’s pipes will be interpreted as a sign of power and authority over the omniscient and corrupt state apparatus— either his own authority or someone else’s. Yet given the intractability of the distribution system, the vola-tile discourses of legality that permeate water supply especially to slums as well as the very real hydraulic challenges of actually convincing pipes to produce water, evidencing this kind of material authority is exceedingly complex and po liti cally risky. Given that no one is quite sure who or what makes the water come, but everyone knows that it comes “because of politics,” much eff ort was made by local- level knowledge brokers (who tend to become party workers at election times) to provide concrete (or rather aqueous) evidence of this or that po liti cal party’s material sovereignty over the pipes. As elections are fought and won or lost largely on the strength of local knowledge networks, those who can demonstrate command of hydraulic knowledge become— through the electoral process— politically power ful players in the city. While the proj-ect to transform Mumbai into a world- class city has thus presided over what the water department describes as hydraulic “chaos,” the disembedding and re-confi guring of infrastructural knowledge has re scaled po liti cal authority in the city. Pipe politics is producing urban forms and opening up possi ble futures that, as we see in the conclusion, diverge quite starkly from those envisioned by a world- class urban imaginary.