The co-production of a constant water supply in Mumbai’s middle-class apartments

Abstract

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence Newcastle University ePrints -eprint.ncl.ac.uk Button C. The co-production of a constant water supply in Mumbai's middle class apartments.

Domesticating water supplies through rainwater harvesting in Mumbai

“…Mains drinking water comes from several reservoirs or lakes outside the city, but is only supplied for a few hours per day, to each area of the city (Sule, no date). In middle-class housing, an illusion of constant supply is created through the storage of mains water in tanks to be used at other times in the day, and supplementation by other forms of access, such as tankers and borewells, for nonpotable purposes (Button 2017). For poorer households, mains water connections are often from stand-pipes in the street, shared between several households and water must be collected in buckets whenever the taps spring to life (Anand, 2011, Graham et al, 2013.…”

“…In Mumbai, the municipality is reluctant to supply informal settlements with infrastructure as this could legitimise the area (Graham et al). Decentralised systems could help bridge the infrastructure deficit, but the current focus for the city authorities is, rather, on promoting middle-class responses that are self-funded (Button, 2017). Rainwater harvesting as a solution for middle-classes normalises uneven water distribution.…”

An incremental approach to service co-production: unfolding the co-evolution of the built environment and water and sanitation infrastructures

“…Finally, the evolution of WSS co-production is also linked with the unfinished nature of infrastructure networks (Button 2017;Faldi et al 2019;Zérah 2000). The adaptability of WSS infrastructures plays an important role in the sociotechnical and spatial reconfiguration of co-produced water and sanitation services.…”

“…irregular and unsafe drinking water provision, insufficient wastewater collection and treatment) along with processes of territorial reconfiguration (i.e. densification of built-up areas, rural-urban reconversion) require citizens to engage in co-production of water and sanitation services, leading to pragmatic reconfigurations of technical devices and infrastructure systems (Button 2017). This paper analyses the coevolution of the built environment and embedded water and sanitation infrastructures.…”

Configurational Analysis of Access to Basic Infrastructure Services: Evidence from Turkish Provinces

“…Wealthy communities have the resources needed to establish and maintain basic infrastructure services (Briceño-Garmendia et al, 2004). By contrast, poor households may have scant appetite for paying for basic infrastructure (Sohail et al, 2005), and less of the human and social capital needed to coproduce its design and maintenance (Button, 2016; though see Isham and Kähkönen, 1998). In poorer communities, public and private actors may therefore have little incentive for developing better basic infrastructure, since citizens in economic difficulty may not value it sufficiently to pay for it with either their money or votes (Bird and Bahl, 2013).…”