Pipe dreams? Practices of everyday governance of heterogeneous configurations of water supply in Baruipur, a small town in India

Abstract

This article compares a networked and a non-networked artefact and the diverse practices of everyday governance around these localised configurations of water infrastructure in Baruipur, a peripheral and rapidly urbanising small town in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area. Plagued by arsenic contamination, the state has been pushing to expand and consolidate a networked piped infrastructure bringing in treated surface water. This shift threatens to reconfigure the existing diverse infrastructure configurations that are fragmented, incremental in nature. We examine the scholarship on the situated and embodied forms of Urban Political Ecology to understand how everyday social relations and plural practices at the level of the town, the ‘para’ (roughly neighbourhood), and the household to understand how socio-material artefacts shape lived experiences and local networks of power. The shift in the socio-technical configurations, in turn, lead to new forms of power coalitions, network conflicts, and collaborations. Through an in-depth qualitative examination, we conclude that heterogeneous infrastructure configurations and everyday practices are not only gendered but also intricately embedded within intersections of social affinity, intimate geographies, and embodied class power relations in the ‘para’.

Rethinking urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday: Perspectives from and of the global South

“…This includes research that is attentive to local histories and everyday practices and processes that do not necessarily fit received concepts in urban studies, and often intersect with, supersede, or modify and situate processes of capitalist urbanization. Studies in this SI on urban electricity (Pilo', 2021), water (Kundu and Chatterjee, 2020;Alves, 2019;Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021;Truelove, 2021;Pihljak et al, 2021) and waste (Schindler et al, 2021) bring a situated approach to everyday urban governance, giving attention to local institutions, histories, diverse infrastructural configurations and multi-scalar power relations.…”

“…Here, urban environments are understood to be produced through multiple interconnections of social difference and power that are unevenly embodied in everyday life (Doshi, 2017). Kundu and Chatterjee's (2020) article in the SI utilizes both a situated and feminist political ecology approach to the UPE of water in Baluipur, India. This study reveals how water governance in the everyday is inflected through intersectional gender and class relations that co-produce uneven outcomes and diverse infrastructural configurations for urbanites.…”

“…The original research in this SI demonstrates that "actually existing" infrastructural governance involves complex assemblages of human (economics, politics, institutions, social relations) and non-human (biophysical processes, material decay, environmental factors) associations (see also McFarlane, 2008: 348). Thus, our understanding of how cities are governed in the everyday must increasingly account for actors, practices and processes at registers that have too often received little scholarly attention: the electricians who shape patterns of inequality within the network (Pilo', 2021), the informal strongman who regulates local wells in particular neighborhoods (Truelove, 2019), and water governance actors who act as both the state and its outside at different points in time (Kundu and Chatterjee, 2020;Pihljak et al, 2021).…”

“…In informal settlements of the global South, a focal point of many of the studies of this SI, infrastructures are both the symbol and manifestation of unequal citizenship (Anand, 2017;Lemanski, 2020;McFarlane and Silver, 2017). Denied, splintered, and fragmented infrastructures inaugurate an everyday politics of "making do" and piecing together infrastructural fragments into somewhat functioning systems (McFarlane, 2018) that are further shaped by intersecting class, gender, race, and ethno-religious relations (Kundu and Chatterjee, 2020;Sultana, 2020;Truelove, 2019a). Everyday strategies, articulations, and mobilizations for more equal access to the city become manifested through (and in relation to) the politics of breakdown, maintenance, and inadequacy of infrastructure access, and thus expose wider systems of urban inequality and citizenship.…”

“…Often, analytically tracking the politics and poetics (Larkin, 2013) of infrastructures helps reveal infrastructure's situated violences (see Rodgers and O'Neill, 2012;Truelove and O'Reilly, 2020), effects and emancipatory potential that coexist at the same time, and sometimes in the same space. For example, Schramm and Ibrahim (2021), Kundu and Chatterjee (2020) and Pilo' (2021) all reveal the complex power relations and politics that emerge from neighborhood struggles over water and electricity networks respectively. In each study, these authors show how negotiating access in particular urban spaces has diverse and situated effects on differing residents and state and non-state actors, deepening marginality for some, while empowering others with increased access, control, or decision-making power (see also Cornea et al, 2016).…”