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OverviewWinner, 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. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Lisa Björkman , Lisa BjeorkmanPublisher: Duke University Press Imprint: Duke University Press Dimensions: Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.544kg ISBN: 9780822359500ISBN 10: 0822359502 Pages: 296 Publication Date: 09 October 2015 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Embedded Infrastructures 1 1. We Got Stuck in Between: Unmapping the Distribution Network 21 2. The Slum and Building Industry: Marketizing Urban Development 62 3. You Can't Stop Development: Hydraulic Shambles 82 4. It Was Like That from the Beginning: Becoming a Slum 98 5. No Hydraulics Are Possible: Brokering Water Knowledge 128 6. Good Doesn't Mean You're Honest: Corruption 165 7. If Water Comes It's Because of Politics: Power, Authority, and Hydraulic Spectacle 198 Conclusion: Pipe Politics 227 Appendix: Department of Hydraulic Engineering 235 Notes 237 References 267 Index 277ReviewsPipe Politics, Contested Waters is a brilliant ethnography of water and Lisa Bjorkman is one helluva fieldworker: indefatigable, resilient, determined, and resourceful. Determined as she was to get to the bottom of things, what she finds is that she can't. The more she tries to map the infrastructure or follow the water engineers and their workmen to the sites at which the 'system' needs to be fixed, the more the solutions, if there are any, seem out of reach. A pathbreaking book, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is destined to become a classic in the burgeoning literature on water and water sustainability. -- Steven Caton, author of Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is an important and original study of urbanization in the global South. Using the example of Mumbai's water supply, Lisa Bjorkman explicates the complex nexus of cultural and political developments affecting everyday life in the city while marking an important break in the historiography of urban infrastructure networks. Bjorkman tells an extremely complex story very effectively. -- Matthew Gandy, author of The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination 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 Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is a brilliant ethnography of water and Lisa Bjorkman is one helluva fieldworker: indefatigable, resilient, determined, and resourceful. Determined as she was to get to the bottom of things, what she finds is that she can't. The more she tries to map the infrastructure or follow the water engineers and their workmen to the sites at which the 'system' needs to be fixed, the more the solutions, if there are any, seem out of reach. A pathbreaking book, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is destined to become a classic in the burgeoning literature on water and water sustainability. -- Steven Caton, author of Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is an important and original study of urbanization in the global South. Using the example of Mumbai's water supply, Lisa Bjorkman explicates the complex nexus of cultural and political developments affecting everyday life in the city while marking an important break in the historiography of urban infrastructure networks. Bjorkman tells an extremely complex story very effectively. -- Matthew Gandy, author of The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination 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 Bjorkman 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 Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is an important and original study of urbanization in the global South. Using the example of Mumbai's water supply, Lisa BjOrkman explicates the complex nexus of cultural and political developments affecting everyday life in the city while marking an important break in the historiography of urban infrastructure networks. BjOrkman tells an extremely complex story very effectively. --Matthew Gandy, author of The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination 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 * [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 * 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 * 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 * 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 * 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 * Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is an important and original study of urbanization in the global South. Using the example of Mumbai's water supply, Lisa Bjorkman explicates the complex nexus of cultural and political developments affecting everyday life in the city while marking an important break in the historiography of urban infrastructure networks. Bjorkman tells an extremely complex story very effectively. --Matthew Gandy, author of The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination Author InformationLisa Björkman is Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at University of Louisville, and Research Scholar at CETREN (Transregional Research Network), University of Göttingen. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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