Water as an object of enquiry

The nature of the municipal tap is feudal and bureaucratic … you left the tap open before you went to sleep. When the water sputtered at three, four or five a.m. and sometimes not at all, was when your day began. (Nagarkar 1995)

In a recent interview, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai remarks that neither the science nor the technology of water provision is very mysterious. In India, for example, with record levels of economic growth and prosperity there is also no lack of capital either. It is, therefore, ‘stunning’ in Appadurai's words, that in India and elsewhere millions must make do without the most basic of services: access to potable water.¹ And if anything, despite international programmes and targets, the proportion of people living in slums or without access to water has continued to grow.

If the fact that people lack adequate access to water or sanitation has nothing do with science, organizational complexity or some cultural nuances in the impetus of modernity, then what lies behind the glaring infrastructure divide? The poor lack water because they are politically marginalized: the poorest of the poor must inhabit an ‘infrastructure free’ zone where their vulnerability is derided, exploited and highly visible. For millions more households they must make do with inadequate, intermittent or, in some cases, unsafe supplies, not out of preference but simply because that is all there is. The difficulty with water infrastructure, unlike other technological networks such as communications, is that significant long-term investments are needed in the built environment ranging from dams, pipes and purification plants to the plumbing of individual dwellings and the provision of drainage networks.

Historically, the state has played a pivotal role in realizing these kinds of strategic objectives, often through bonds and other financial instruments, but the role of the state, and especially of municipal government, has come under sustained ideological and fiscal pressure since the 1970s. Since the state in much of the global South has failed to meet the needs of the urban poor, a plethora of alternative networks and survival strategies exist including the use of wells, street vendors, tankers and pilfering to meet daily needs. At the same time, the flow of capital has moved in an opposite direction from the provision of basic infrastructure needs towards more lucrative forms of investment such as real estate, producing intensifying cultural and architectural juxtapositions.

Unlike nineteenth-century London or Paris, many cites in the global South do not have an integrated body politic that necessitates the provision of adequate housing and basic services for the poor: these are not cities dependent on a militant working class to function effectively but rather nodes within a global urban system. The political and economic elites of fast-growing cities such as Mumbai or Nairobi are inured from any obligations to the urban poor because they can ignore their needs: millions more poor migrants are available to take on the role of ‘toilers’ within the urban economy irrespective of their living conditions. With political mobilization in the global South often organized in relation to ethnic, religious or other forms of cultural difference, the possibilities for building progressive political alliances are often stymied or subverted. In such scenarios the ostensible ‘universality’ of water politics becomes subsumed within a fragmentary firmament of interests and obligations.

If we were to sketch an agenda for research into water and urban infrastructure, what questions or themes might emerge? It is clear that no one discipline holds any monopoly over this research field and that the most interesting insights are likely to emerge from new combinations of theoretical and methodological expertise.

A first theme might be the exploration of the material and metaphorical connotations of ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’. Whereas poorer parts of the city – what Appadurai refers to as the ‘horizontal’ city – are ‘open to the gaze’, the infrastructure networks of richer areas are largely hidden from view. In prosperous quarters we find that pipes, sewers, cables and other paraphernalia of the networked city are generally tucked away within the cavities of walls, buried under roads or otherwise out of sight. If we argue that the provision of clean water is a fundamental underpinning to citizenship rights then the effective exclusion from modernity poses profound cultural and political questions about the nature and existence of universal values in an urban context.

A second theme to consider is the changing role of the state since water is simply too important to be abandoned altogether in the wake of the global push towards the privatization of public services. In some cases, the state retains very tight control over water and water policy: in areas such as geopolitical contestations over water resources or the setting of water quality standards, the state is very present. A series of spectacular high-profile privatization failures, however, has altered the political and economic dynamics of water provision towards regional rather than international solutions. We find that the retreat of the international water sector from large-scale contracts with metropolitan regions dominated by the poor has opened up new possibilities for small-scale modes of provision (Bakker 2010). These developments necessitate fresh perspectives on the role of metropolitan governments that cut across a myriad of different areas of responsibility from public health to transport.

A third theme encompasses emerging post-col‐ onial governmentalities. These intersecting strategies of control and differentiation are arranged and enacted in relation to different categories of people with varying rights to the city ranging from the ‘new elites’ to those excluded from meaningful forms of citizenship. The city consists of intersecting arenas of control where different regulatory regimes co-exist with micro-circuits of exploitation at street level where raw expressions of violence may erupt at any time.

The title of this essay is somewhat paradoxical since water itself, as a bio-physical entity, does not provide any clear answers to the uneven presence of water in the contemporary cities of the global South. Water is better conceived not as an object of enquiry but as a lens through which we can better understand both the historical dynamics and contemporary limitations of modernity.

Notes

1. Arjun Appadurai interviewed in the documentary Liquid City (2007).