In Hydraulic City Nikhil Anand explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai's settlements, Anand found that Mumbai's water flows, not through a static collection of pipes and valves, but through a dynamic infrastructur...
Paperback: 312 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press Books (March 17, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822362694
ISBN-13: 978-0822362692
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
Amazon Rank: 299287
Format: PDF ePub fb2 djvu ebook
- Nikhil Anand epub
- Nikhil Anand books
- 0822362694 epub
- History pdf ebooks
- 978-0822362692 epub
The author has taken great pains to expose the politics and the nitty gritty of obtaining a water connection in the slums of Mumbai which extend over vast areas of the city on illegally occupied private and government land. These lands have been occu...
the relations between residents, plumbers, politicians, engineers, and the 3,000 miles of pipe that bind them. In addition to distributing water, the public water network often reinforces social identities and the exclusion of marginalized groups, as only those actively recognized by city agencies receive legitimate water services. This form of recognition—what Anand calls "hydraulic citizenship"—is incremental, intermittent, and reversible. It provides residents an important access point through which they can make demands on the state for other public services such as sanitation and education. Tying the ways Mumbai's poorer residents are seen by the state to their historic, political, and material relations with water pipes, the book highlights the critical role infrastructures play in consolidating civic and social belonging in the city.
