Description
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 Bjoerkman 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, Bjoerkman 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.
About the Author
Lisa Bjoerkman is Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at University of Louisville, and Research Scholar at CETREN (Transregional Research Network), University of Goettingen.
Reviews
"Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is a vividly detailed ethnography of Mumbai captured in its policy, institutions, infrastructure, and everyday sociopolitical practices associated with the capture, delivery, and distribution of water. . . . The subject of water is multidisciplinary in approach and is best viewed through the holistic lens of anthropology. This work is a rare addition to the literature." -- Namika Raby * American Anthropologist *
"Bjoerkman shows how a slum gets produced through the regulation of its water infrastructure and how this production is central to the city's redevelopment schemes....Mumbai has long been portrayed and understood as a city of extreme wealth and poverty, epitomized in the visual of a luxury high-rise surrounded by a moat of slums. The politics of water as illustrated in this book cracks open this image by showing just how connected they are." -- Rashmi Sadana * American Ethnologist *
"This is a very impressive book, one that makes a significant contribution to the literatures on urban infrastructures, water politics and urbanization in the global South. Immersing the reader in the politics of water infrastructures is very effective in showing how the 'big' politics of global-city making ultimately and inevitably become bound up in context-specific politics." -- Ross Beveridge * International Journal of Urban and Regional Research *
"[Pipe Politics, Contested Waters] overflows with novel insights on the significance of knowledge infrastructures within material networks; the workings of local politics; and the unforeseen consequences of economic reforms. It deserves to be widely read by infrastructure scholars, political anthropologists, and students of Indian political economy alike." -- Elizabeth Chatterjee * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *
"Bjoerkman's account is remarkably innovative. . . . This book makes a pioneering contribution to the emerging fields of assemblage urbanism, infrastructure studies, and post-colonial urban theory." -- Tanya Matthan * Contemporary South Asia *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822359692
Author Lisa Bjoerkman
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 408g
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 Bjoerkman 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, Bjoerkman 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.
About the Author
Lisa Bjoerkman is Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at University of Louisville, and Research Scholar at CETREN (Transregional Research Network), University of Goettingen.
Reviews
"Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is a vividly detailed ethnography of Mumbai captured in its policy, institutions, infrastructure, and everyday sociopolitical practices associated with the capture, delivery, and distribution of water. . . . The subject of water is multidisciplinary in approach and is best viewed through the holistic lens of anthropology. This work is a rare addition to the literature." -- Namika Raby * American Anthropologist *
"Bjoerkman shows how a slum gets produced through the regulation of its water infrastructure and how this production is central to the city's redevelopment schemes....Mumbai has long been portrayed and understood as a city of extreme wealth and poverty, epitomized in the visual of a luxury high-rise surrounded by a moat of slums. The politics of water as illustrated in this book cracks open this image by showing just how connected they are." -- Rashmi Sadana * American Ethnologist *
"Bjoerkman engages comprehensively with this gulf and covers a vast terrain, unfolding an intriguing plot of urban infrastructure politics. . . . The book is a brilliant piece of work."
-- Srinivas Chokkakula * Journal of South Asian Studies *"This is a very impressive book, one that makes a significant contribution to the literatures on urban infrastructures, water politics and urbanization in the global South. Immersing the reader in the politics of water infrastructures is very effective in showing how the 'big' politics of global-city making ultimately and inevitably become bound up in context-specific politics." -- Ross Beveridge * International Journal of Urban and Regional Research *
"[Pipe Politics, Contested Waters] overflows with novel insights on the significance of knowledge infrastructures within material networks; the workings of local politics; and the unforeseen consequences of economic reforms. It deserves to be widely read by infrastructure scholars, political anthropologists, and students of Indian political economy alike." -- Elizabeth Chatterjee * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *
"Bjoerkman's account is remarkably innovative. . . . This book makes a pioneering contribution to the emerging fields of assemblage urbanism, infrastructure studies, and post-colonial urban theory." -- Tanya Matthan * Contemporary South Asia *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822359692
Author Lisa Bjoerkman
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 408g
