Posted: February 28th, 2023

Policy brief

For this assignment, you will write a 2 page (singled spaced) policy brief evaluating the current policy approach to infrastructure of a particular kind in a chosen city, and making recommendations for what the city should do next to improve this infrastructure.

INSTRUCTIONS

For this assignment, you will write a 2 page (singled spaced) policy brief evaluating the current policy approach to infrastructure of a particular kind in a chosen city, and making recommendations for what the city should do next to improve this infrastructure.

IMPORTANT: The relevant lessons for this Assignment (2.1 and 2.2) explore issues of justice and equity in relation to infrastructure, and how access is shaped by intersecting dimensions of class, caste, gender, race, citizenship and so on.
Your brief should therefore be focused on these dimensions, and explicitly explore and discuss uneven access to infrastructure, and how this can be improved.

WHAT IS A POLICY BRIEF?

“A policy brief presents a concise summary of information that can help readers understand, and likely make decisions about, government policies. Policy briefs may give objective summaries of relevant research, suggest possible policy options, or go even further and argue for particular courses of action.” (UNC Writing Center “Policy Briefs”).

A policy brief:

Is written for an informed, non-specialist audience (e.g. decision makers, NGO advocates, journalists);

Contains specific policy message designed to engage and convince key stakeholders;

Is used as a tool to start a conversation and/or get the interest of non-specialist audiences;

Only includes the key findings/points;

Must be very clear and simple – written in a professional, but not academic style.

The purpose of a policy brief is “To engage and convince your informed, non-specialist target audiences that your policy proposals are realistic, credible and relevant for the debate and decision on the target issue” (ICPA Guide to Writing Policy Briefs).

INSTRUCTIONS

For this assignment, you should begin by choosing a city (outside of the United States) and a type of infrastructure to research.

Chosen city: Lagos, Nigeria.

Infrastructure type: electricity

Since this brief is relatively short, make sure to clearly identify and bound the type of infrastructure you will examine. For example, “water infrastructure” is too broad; choosing drinking water supply, sanitation, or flood management would be more appropriate.

Do your research. Use relevant course materials but you should find a minimum of 3-4 additional sources (either academic papers, policy documents etc.) to inform your writing, recommendations and conclusions.

You should primarily use peer reviewed academic articles and books, and other substantial, high quality sources, particularly when seeking reliable data. 3 or 4 media articles or web pages is not going to be sufficient. If you are not confident in your ability to assess sources, refer to this guide. You are always welcome to email me also for guidance.

NOTE: be wary of using policy briefs on your specific topic as sources for this assignment. There is the risk that you will over-rely on this source (e.g. citing it multiple times in a short space), which is a form of plagiarism. In order to ensure originality, I suggest you look at briefs on a different topic to determine the appropriate style, and other sources on your topic for content.

Outline your brief and begin writing. Your policy brief must be organized using the following sections.

1. A Title to communicate the contents of the brief in a memorable way.

2. Bullet-Pointed Executive Summary (1 Paragraph) an overview of the problem (context and cause), current policy, and the proposed policy action.

3. Context or Scope of Problem (1 paragraph) to communicates the importance of the problem and aims to convince the reader of the necessity of policy action.

4. Current Policy Landscape: This section discusses the current policy approach, its shortcomings, and why it is failing.

For this particular brief, pay attention to issues of access. Who currently has access to this infrastructure? Who does not, and why? What are the impacts of this on people’s livelihoods, health, and/or environments?

Policy Options and Recommendations: Present (with evidence and supporting data) 3 policy options, and then make recommendations for what should be done.

Suggestions must be feasible within the particular political, economic and social context.

Anticipate your audience’s objections. Since you are trying to convince an audience who may not agree with your assessment, you need to be clear on why the current policy needs to be changed.

After evaluating and discussing the 3 policy options, this section recommends and provide an overview of concrete steps to be taken to address the policy issue.

This section should be fair and accurate, while convincing the reader why the policy action proposed in the brief is the most desirable.

REQUIRED SECTIONS NOT INCLUDED IN PAGE LENGTH:

Consulted and Recommended Sources These should be reliable sources that you have used throughout your brief to guide your policy discussion and recommendations. In text citations and essay formatting should be APA style.

Graphs/Visuals: You may also use supporting graphics/tables etc. (These will not be considered part of the total page length.) They must be labeled (e.g. Figure 1), titled (e.g. “Graph Depicting XXX”, and referenced in the text (e.g. “See Figure 1, “As Figure 1 shows…”. A source must be provided after the caption and included in the list of consulted sources.

Lessons 2.1 & 2.2 materials

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/07/india-public-toilets-womens-health/670932/

Truelove, Y., & O’Reilly, K. (2021). Making India’s cleanest city: Sanitation, intersectionality, and infrastructural violence. Environment and Planning E: Nature and space, 4(3), 718-735.

Anand, N. (2011). Pressure: The politechnics of water supply in Mumbai. Cultural anthropology, 26(4), 542-56

Kasper, M., & Schramm, S. (2023). Storage city: Water tanks, jerry cans, and batteries as infrastructure in Nairobi. Urban Studies, 00420980221144575.

Silver, J. (2015). Disrupted infrastructures: An urban political ecology of interrupted electricity in Accra. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(5), 984-1003

Schwenkel, C. (2015). Spectacular infrastructure and its breakdown in socialist Vietnam. American Ethnologist, 42(3), 520-534

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH
DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12317

984

© 2016 urban research publications limited

— DISRUPTED INFRASTRUCTURES: An Urban
Political Ecology of Interrupted Electricity in Accra

jonathan silver

Abstract
Cities in the global South are often considered to be in the midst of infrastructural

breakdown, and characterized as either lacking networked services or as suffering from
ongoing disruption and sometimes failure. This article focuses on the electricity network
of Accra to examine the series of socio-natural processes that produce this ongoing disrup-
tion and to explore the power relations of networked systems in the city. It focuses on the
production of disruption through the analytical lens of urban political ecology, in order to
show how such a framework can be utilized to interrogate energy geographies. The article
begins by describing what happens when the lights go out and the flow of electricity is inter-
rupted across Accra in order to connect a series of socio-natural processes that contribute to
the ongoing network disruption and interruption. The article establishes the effect of his-
torical infrastructural governance, greenhouse gas emissions, flows of international capi-
tal, water and drought in northern Ghana, as well as urban sprawl, slum urbanism and
rising energy demand in the city, to illustrate the fundamentally unequal and politicized
socio-natures of these disrupted infrastructural processes.

Introduction
The electricity network in Accra, one of West Africa’s fastest-growing metro-

politan regions, powers much of the daily lives of the city’s residents. The maze of wires,
power plants, substations and pylons together form a key constituent of Accra’s infra-
structure, helping to sustain, through socio-natural transformation, urban life in Ghana’s
capital. Infrastructure systems are important not only, as Graham (2010: 1) suggests, as
the ‘fundamental background to modern everyday life’ but as Gandy (2005:28) argues,
they ‘can be conceptualized as a series of interconnecting life-support systems’ through
the flows of essential urban services they enable. Yet, disruption of Accra’s electricity
network occurs regularly, sometimes without warning, but often also in the form of
announced load-shedding by the Electric Company of Ghana (ECG). The effects of
infrastructure disruption vary across the city, resulting in multiple difficulties for and a
plethora of responses from urban dwellers, often based on socio-economic status. Fre-
quent ‘lights-out’ events present an ongoing series of disruptions that reveal important
historical and contemporary urban geographies of infrastructure in the city.

This article seeks to politicize the electricity network of the city and reveal the
power relations between various actors across this infrastructure system through an
analysis of the processes by which disruption is produced and responded to across Accra.
It argues that the ongoing interruption experienced across the city is produced by the
historical development of the electricity network within and beyond Accra, which has
resulted in a fragmented, splintered infrastructure that reinforces urban inequalities. It
suggests that this urban energy history leaves Accra vulnerable to emergent multiscalar
socio-natural processes that intersect with the electricity network. First, I consider the
effects of the hydro-electric production facility constructed at Akosombo Dam and the
intersection thereof with the increasing climate change in the Sahel region, resulting in

This research, part of a wider project led by Professor Harriet Bulkeley and entitled ‘Urban Transitions: Climate
Change, Global Cities, and the Transformation of Socio-technical Networks’, was funded by an ESRC grant (award
number RES-066-27-0002).

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DISRUPTED INFRASTRUCTURES 985

significantly reduced water flow. Secondly, the article looks at the links between neo-
liberal governance of urban land, growing prosperity and new urbanization patterns
that have led to increased energy demand across the sprawling city. However, the focus
on these two processes in this article does not suggest that these are the only aspects that
shape urban electricity politics in Accra. Rather, these have been chosen to demonstrate
the socio-natures of the network and identify the multiscalar actors involved within
and beyond the city in disruption.

Taken together, the actions of various social interest groups involved in the his-
torical production of the energy network and new forms of (socio-natural) urbanization
processes help to outline the politicized nature of disruption in Accra. This politiciza-
tion is further articulated by examining the responses to interruptions in the flows of
electricity across the city by various social interest groups. The article argues that power
relationships between the upper-middle class/elites and the urban poor are reflected
and reinforced by the ability of these groups to navigate disruption through access to
various forms of technology and new forms of energy-secure urbanism. Analysis of dis-
ruptions helps to identify the power relations in contemporary Accra and the emergent
urban energy geographies of the city. The article thus focuses on examining the series of
multiscalar socio-natural processes leading to disruption, how they become entwined
at the urban scale with different actors and the multiple ways in which they can be
understood as politicizing Accra’s electricity network.

The article draws on studies in urban political ecology (UPE) that seek to
exam ine the metabolic natures of infrastructures (Swyngedouw, 2004; Loftus, 2006;
Lawhon, 2013). This field of literature argues that metabolic flows produce and shape
urbaniza tion, which reflects and reproduces configurations of power and mediates
socio-environmental relations. Such an approach thus provides a way for researchers to
politicize these urban networks by elucidating the contested and unequal geographies
of infrastructure conditions. The article assesses how infrastructural disruption can be
understood through the notion of metabolism and reflects on the usefulness of this
concept in seeking to better understand the infrastructural dynamics of Accra. It draws
on the literature to examine how socio-natural processes of urbanization are enabled
through the infrastructures of the city, in order to analyse the political and contested
nature of these spaces, resource flows and material configurations, while also consid-
ering the contexts through which the city is shaped. Furthermore, the article seeks to
show how flows of electricity play a crucial role in mediating the present and future of
cities, and assesses how UPE can contribute to critical understandings of urban energy
geographies, which have been approached predominantly through the socio-technical
transitions literature. Finally, the article seeks to contribute to a developing, yet still
limited field of UPE studies in urban Africa, as well as to the wider community of infra-
structure studies, by illustrating how an analysis of disrupted electricity infrastructure
can expand our understanding of unequal production of cities across the region.

In the section that follows this one, I provide an overview of UPE to show how
the field and specifically the use of the concept of metabolism can provide an important
basis for politicizing urban electricity networks. The third section provides a historical
analysis of the development of the electricity network within and beyond Accra to show
how various periods of (urban) energy governance shape particular infrastructure
geographies to leave the system vulnerable to disruption. Section four argues that the
frequent interruptions in electricity flows, coupled with the historical production of the
network, are the result of an over-reliance on hydro-power, as climate change affects
water supply and leads to new forms of energy-intensive urbanization that are linked
to changes in urban form and to the growing wealth of some sectors of society. Section
five seeks to examine the emerging responses to disruption in Accra across urban-poor
and upper-middle class/elite spaces of the city, arguing that these display new forms

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SILVER 986

of fragmentation and inequality. The article concludes by reflecting on the politicized
nature of the urbanization of electricity through the socio-natural processes generating
disruption and the actors implicated in such dynamics.

Researching infrastructure disruption
— Urban political ecology

Whilst an ever-broadening literature on urban infrastructures generates multi-
ple pathways for examining urban systems, the field of UPE explicitly focuses on the
socio-natural power relations that are (re)configured through infrastructural processes
to identify the multiple social interest groups connected to these dynamics. As Swynge-
douw (2004: 4) suggests when tracing the metabolism of water in Guayaquil, which
could also apply to energy, this is ‘part and parcel of the political economy of power
that gives structure and coherence to the urban fabric’. A UPE analysis via a historical
materialist perspective focuses on the metabolic production of socio-natural land scapes
(Smith, 1984; Castree, 2001). The notion of socio-material flows shapes much of the UPE
literature that has engaged with urban infrastructure (Keil, 2003; 2005; Swyngedouw,
2004; 2006). Across the field of UPE, urbanization is understood as the transforma tion
of nature through processes of capital accumulation, conceptually brought together by
the notion of urban metabolism, which Swyngedouw (2006: 106) describes as ‘a series
of interconnected heterogeneous (human and non-human) and dynamic but contested
and contestable processes of continuous quantitative and qualitative transformations
that re-arranges humans and non-humans in new and often unexpected ways’.

Socio-natural processes constitute the material (re)production of the city; they
are a combination of the social relations of production and the transformation of nature,
and linked to capital flows from the local to the transnational (Swyngedouw, 2004). Noth-
ing lies outside of these transformations and the city is a part of these huge networks
that span across the local through to the global, incorporating human and non-human
actants, which include everything from capital to the wires themselves to the flows of
electricity to communications on energy policy. The use of this UPE understanding of
socio-natural urbanization foregrounds the importance of infrastructure systems in
seek ing to examine cities and the socio-environmental relations that are embedded
across these ever-shifting spaces. To approach the urban from this perspective means to
recognize that infrastructure systems form a central consideration in these circulatory
processes of capital accumulation and the transformation of nature as constituent ele-
ments of the metabolic process, as opposed to static systems or technical ‘things’.

Much of the UPE literature has thus taken urban infrastructures as point of depar-
ture in seeking to understand how capital accumulation shapes the city and the social
relations that are created, reflected and reinforced (Zimmer, 2010; Lawhon et al., 2014;
cf. Gandy, 2004; Heynen, 2006; Loftus, 2006). This suggests that urban infrastructures
act as conduits, circuits and sites for processes of socio-natural transformation (Heynen
et al., 2006). Thus, like the waterscape for Loftus (2007: 49), the urban electricity net-
work in Accra ‘should be understood as a produced socio-natural entity. It is produced
directly through the urbanization of nature’. From this perspective, electricity networks
are not only a series of socio-natural circulations but also make possible other metabolic
flows, implicating such networked systems in shaping and mediating the urban. This
dual role is particularly important in considering the geographies of infrastructure and
how such segregated, fragmented and fractured networks may reflect and reinforce
configurations of power.

This socio-natural framing generates a range of implications for developing an
analysis of infrastructure disruption. The use of electricity disruption as entry point sug-
gests a need to not only trace and make visible, but, more importantly, to centre on
the contested and politicized nature of infrastructure systems (Swyngedouw, 2004). It
is imperative to consider how these urban flows shape the city and its networked

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DISRUPTED INFRASTRUCTURES 987

sys tems and to look at the important structuring role these processes play in connect-
ing, composing, fragmenting, enlarging and renewing wider processes of urbanization
across the city (Kaika, 2005).

In UPE, there is a dearth of studies on energy that focus on the electricity 
net works of cities. While water has been central to the development of the field
(Swynge douw, 2004; Loftus, 2006), work on urban energy infrastructures, particularly
electricity, tend to be interrogated through studies that have mobilized a socio-technical
transitions approach (Rohracher, 2009; Jaglin, 2014; Mouton, 2014). Yet electricity is
arguably as important as water when it comes to shaping urbanization processes, and
more attention needs to be given to a UPE analysis of these resource flows across and
beyond urban regions. The application of insights developed through work on water to
electricity can offer a complimentary perspective to understanding the socio-natural
production of cities as a series of contested processes. Furthermore, despite much work
in the global South, there are only a limited number of studies of African cities (Loftus,
2006; Njeru, 2006; Lawhon, 2013) across the literature that prompt thought about the
potential of UPE to interrogate the emergent urbanization dynamics of this region and
how this might contribute to urban studies of cities such as Accra.

— An urban political ecology of disruption
Lack of networked provision, disrupted services and potential fragmentation

constitute an ongoing series of visible energy issues across cities, affecting service users
and urban dwellers who interact with the electricity system. Infrastructural geographies
of disruption, disrepair and failure are well documented generally (Graham, 2010) and
particularly across the global South (Davis, 2006; Pieterse, 2008; McFarlane, 2010). A
UPE analysis can mobilize such disruption to provide a window on wider multiscalar
flows that, importantly, also reveal the inequalities of interruptions in circulations of
urban resources (McFarlane, 2010). As Graham (2010: 3) suggests, ‘infrastructural disrup-
tions provide important heuristic devices or learning opportunities through which
critical social science can excavate the politics of urban life, technology or infrastructure’.

This literature on disruption generates three key areas of examination when
understood through a UPE approach. First, it provides an understanding of the historical
governance of infrastructure (Kooy and Bakker, 2008) and the networked conditions
that shape disruption. Secondly, it traces the metabolism of disruption, revealing the
multiscalar socio-natural processes generating such infrastructural episodes. Thirdly,
it examines the ways in which a range of actors are responding to and addressing ongo-
ing disruption, based on McFarlane and Rutherford’s (2008: 368) assertion that ‘the
politics underpinning urban infrastructural transformation are rarely more evident or
visible than in times of crisis or rupture’. A focus on the disruption of flows of electricity
can thus be mobilized as a window in order to trace and reveal the multiscalar processes
that shape uneven energyscapes and interrogate the role of different actors implicated
in such inequalities.

— Methodology
Ethnographic research was conducted in Accra between 2010 and 2011. A number

of different methods were used to draw together a multiscalar analysis of disrupted
electricity infrastructure. This included around 25 semi-structured interviews with a
wide range of actors involved in energy and urban governance, including national and
local policymakers, utility-company representatives, built-environment professionals,
civil-society actors and others. Whilst the questions put to each of these actors differed,
the aim of the interviews was to establish a metabolic narrative revealing the extent to
which individuals, organizations and relations structured the production of energy dis-
rup tion and the response. Alongside the interviews, a series of workshops involving 
par ticipant observation were held, as well as a survey of 35 households of residents in

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SILVER 988

the low-income networked neighbourhood of Ga Mashie, in order to understand how
these dynamics dialectically unfolded in urban poor areas (see Silver, 2014). In addi-
tion, a range of sites were visited, including Akosombo Dam, resettlement villages, new
middle-class residential developments and the arid Sahel region. This article draws on
the data collected and produced through these different methods to show the multiple
scales and spaces with which an analysis of infrastructures needs to engage. It has been
supported by ongoing research through the SAMSET project, an investigation into
urban energy issues that began in 2014 in order to support municipalities in Ghana in
shaping sustainable energy transitions.

The historical production of the network
The electricity network of Accra and the wider geographies involved in flows of

energy into the city are produced through the overlapping histories of Accra’s  infra-
structure (Chalfin, 2010) that shape a highly localized energyscape of wider global 
modal ities of infrastructure governance. This history incorporates many actors, includ-
ing the colonial authorities, the post-independence administrations of the Ghanaian
government and the utility companies involved in electricity generation, distribution
and supply, together with international institutions such as the World Bank.

— Colonial infrastructures
Colonial-era infrastructure systems in Accra have much in common with those

in other urban areas across Africa. Accra emerged within the wider context of resource
extraction, slavery and the necessity for an administrative apparatus to manage the socio-
natural flows of humans, precious metals, cocoa, and so forth; it grew through the capi-
tal it generated as a colonial node in the global imperial infrastructures of exploita tion
and subjugation. Accra’s history is predicated on the transformation of these natures, via
the ongoing power of the colonial authorities, into flows of capital that were partly
reinvested in the growing built environment, leading to further accumulation through
rents, services and tariffs. At the same time, the British colonizers ignored the infra-
structure needs of non-Europeans. As Myers (2006: 294) explains about Lusaka, ‘for
the most part urban authorities and European residents simply ignored develop ments
in the African part of town’. Accra is no exception, and this lack of attention was jus-
tified through various discourses of imperial and racial supremacy. Thus, the city is
representative of the common yet differentially unfolding colonial governance prac-
tices of urban areas in Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For
instance, the 1878 Gold Coast Towns Police and Health Ordinance created a new legisla-
tive tool for the authorities with the objective of empowering the governor to deal with
new urban flows such as waste and sanitation (Hess, 2000). Through the Town Council
Ordinance the colonial authorities sought to develop new urban systems through the
introduction of the first energy infrastructures in the form of street lighting (paraffin
lights) and the construction of an integrated water network, from 1885, which began
with the building of a reservoir.

The development of these forms of resource flows continued through the estab-
lishment of committees set up to develop infrastructural systems across a range of urban
services, including water supply, sanitation and lighting (Dickson, 1969). By 1885 an
increasingly panicked colonial authority explicitly racialized concerns about the socio-
environmental conditions of the city, particularly the spread of disease, which led to the
planning and creation of a new European extension called Victoriaborg. Established well
away from what the colonizers considered the cramped and unsanitary urban natures of
historical Accra, this new, racially segregated settlement provided the colonizers with
what they considered a safe environment. The segregated neighbourhood attracted
many traders, administrators and other settlers away from the perceived dangerous
con ditions of historical Accra. From 1914, limited electricity was provided in Sekondi,

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DISRUPTED INFRASTRUCTURES 989

and from 1922, the Public Works Department provided electricity to Accra to fulfil the
needs of the imperial industries and the residencies of the colonial elite. Thus, by the
early twentieth century, spatial segregation, mandated through law, established a divi-
sion of not only people, but also of urban services such as electricity. Segregation began
characterizing the fragmented spatial form of the city and the social relationships bet-
ween different urban dwellers. This segregation was neither total, nor always enforced,
indicating an incompleteness in the colonial project of urban control. As Graham and
Marvin (2001: 82) note, ‘this partial completion of modern infrastructure was a very
delib erate attempt to symbolize the superiority of colonial power holders over colonized
civilizations’.

By 1947 the colonizers, who continued to control management of this resource
flow, established the Electricity Department in the Ministry of Works and Housing
as a dedicated unit to oversee the growing but segregated emergence of an electricity
network in Accra and across the country. Following the second world war, as visions
of independence appeared on the horizon and nationalist sentiment grew, the colo-
nial authorities, fearing unrest, moved towards a paternalistic relationship with urban
dwellers based on a particular type of infrastructural development in what has been
termed the ‘compassionate period’ (Iliffe, 1987). While this rather problematic term
fails to convey the continuation of imperial domination it serves to illustrate a changing
emphasis on the part of the colonial authorities as they sought to provide essential
resource flows to Accra’s population, and shows the shifting nature of colonial logics
over this period of urban governance.

— Post-independence
Once Ghana became independent in 1957 its first president, Kwame Nkrumah,

set about developing his own vision of Accra, which focused on creating an (Afro-)
socialist and modern(ist) vision of the future (Demissie, 2007). Electricity formed a
key part of this post-independence modernity. The establishment, through the Volta
River Development Act in 1961 of the Volta River Authority (VRA), responsible for the
planned generation of hydro-power, which was followed in 1963 by the establishment of
the Electric Company of Ghana (ECG), responsible for supply and distribution, formed
the key post-independence electricity utilities in Ghana. This optimistic era was a
break from the logics of colonial rule yet at the same time continued to be mediated
by ways of governing the city and the (fragmented) infrastructural legacies of pre-
vious  modes of governance. As Otiso and Owusu (2008: 150) comment on Ghana
(and Kenya), ‘the provision of housing, basic services, and urban infrastructure also
suffered in both countries because of their continued reliance on colonial urban
planning regulations, by-laws, architectural styles, and housing standards’. Such urban
geographies are partly predicated on the mobilization, by the new urban elites, of
Ghana’s natural resources such as cocoa and gold, reinvested in the built environment
for their own purposes rather than in comprehensive infrastructure development for
the growing city.

Despite the contradictions of Nkrumah’s rule and the entwining of colonial
logics in this period––logics that were exclusionary and later followed by a weak
form of developmentalism––the construction of the Akosombo Dam provided an
infrastructural legacy for this era. It was a vivid symbol that embodied a range of pan-
African visions for the future of Ghana and the wider continent, based on modernization,
the taming of nature and economic growth, while at the same time leading to a reliance
on hydro-power and on the foreign capital required to undertake such a project. During
Nkrumah’s rule many neighbourhoods, particularly the new elite areas in Accra, were
linked to the electricity network, thus expanding access to energy services in the city.
The end of the Nkrumah regime, through a military coup in 1966, brought about the
decline of socialist visions for Accra and the country (Fitch and Oppenheimer, 1966)

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and to a large extent to the partial ‘infrastructural ideal’ that guided the government in
the immediate post-independence period.

During the era of alternating civilian and military rule (1966 to 1992) infra-
structures in Accra were mediated by an overlapping of various modalities of gov-
ernance that show the energyscape to be the product of many histories both from afar
and more proximate that shape the geographies of infrastructure. One constant was
the continued splintering of the city. As Konadu-Agyemang (2002, quoted in Davis,
2006: 96) insists, ‘the indigenous elite took over the European posts and all the benefits
attached thereto, and have not only maintained the status quo, but have, through
zoning and other planning mechanisms, created several other upper-class residential
areas, where income, position and clout determine access’. Such dynamics were shaped
within a context of accelerating urbanization and an ever-increasing debt burden on
the country as the new elites took the place of colonial officials and prioritized the
flows of urban services. Thus, after the promises of the post-independence government
of a modern (and infrastructural) future for Accra, attention to networked systems
declined markedly despite what Chalfin (2010: 197) terms ‘the later copycat projects of
Acheampong’. This failure of the government and of its under-financed utilities in this
period to develop a strategic response to the electricity needs of the country, including
through diversification beyond Akosombo, produced an infrastructural legacy that
continues to this day. Yet the electricity infrastructure that President Nkrumah built, in
addition to ad hoc government interventions and ever-increasing urbanization, has led
to a continued growth in demand for electricity. For instance, between 1967 and 1976
domestic consumption doubled to around 1,300 GWh (RCEER, 2005), making visible
the growing importance of this resource flow in powering this West African nation’s
future.

— Neoliberal infrastructures
The historical fragmentation of and under-investment in the electricity net-

work was compounded by neoliberal reforms in the 1980s. While Chalfin (2010: 195)
describes Ghana as being at the ‘forefront of neoliberal reform in Africa’, the Structural
Adjust ment  Program (SAP), led by the World Bank and supported by the Ghanaian
govern ment, left Accra increasingly vulnerable to disruption across its electricity net-
work. The SAP was characterized by the creation of a pay-as-you-use model for net-
worked services (Peck and Tickell, 2002), with the World Bank (1994:2) aiming to

‘manage infrastructure like a business, and not like a bureaucracy’. During this period,
the withering of state investment in urban and wider energy networks echoed wider
restructuring logics in what has become known across the continent as the ‘lost decade’,
a time which was marked by the increasing role of the private sector in the provision
and governance of services (Otiso and Owusu, 2008). The SAP and associated reforms
have had significant consequences for Accra’s electricity networks since their introduc-
tion in 1982. By 1993, World Bank financing of a new thermal power plant became
contingent on wider comprehensive reforms of the sector, which sought to unbundle
the integrated electricity network. Reforms remained based on the goal of universal
provision, while tariffs were increased and privatization encouraged (Williams and
Ghanadan, 2006). While these reforms were only partially implemented, revealing the
ways in which neoliberal logics mutated and became entwined in local geographies
(Chalfin, 2010), the 1990s continued to witness neoliberal visions of electricity-sector
reform that left a number of urban spaces without power, further fragmentation of the
network and the increasing cost of energy through a modality of governance that has
had significant influence on Ghana’s present energyscape.

The Power Sector Reform Programme, instigated from the mid-1990s by the
World Bank, entrenched neoliberal logics within the electricity sector as it sought to shift
financing from government and donor sources towards creating favourable con ditions

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DISRUPTED INFRASTRUCTURES 991

for private-sector involvement, as new independent power producers (IPPs) begin to
enter the market. Such dynamics, which have slowly pushed Ghana towards energy-
sector liberalization since the 1980s, seem to have reached a logical culmination in the
government’s consideration of privatizing the ECG in early 2015 (Ghanaweb, 2015).
This would be a radical transformation away from the state control that has char-
acterized the sector’s history and illustrates how the political economy of electricity
is being shaped by international institutions such as the World Bank. These reforms,
combined with the lack of political will by successive government administrations to
invest national funds in local energy sources, are leading to the unbundling of the elec-
tricity sector and creating the conditions for disruption through a series of increasing
vulnerabilities across the electricity network. Furthermore, ongoing under-investment
in the electricity network has resulted in numerous issues, including high transmission
loss, an obsolete infrastructure, and government fuel subsidies to the tune of US $900
million to the VRA, as well as poor management of the various utility companies. The
precarious fiscal state of the sector is illustrated by the need for emergency debt relief
for the ECG and the VRA, which totalled over US $200 million early in the millennium
(World Bank, 2004), and by the failure of various energy policies, such as the Energy
Sector Development Plan (1996–2000) to address power issues in the country.

The tensions inherent to the process of powering Accra mean that the main
actors involved––VRA, ECG and GRIDCO––are fragmented by ongoing rivalry, disputes
over payments vital to sustaining flows of electricity1 and the growing obsolescence
of infrastructure systems: the ECG currently needs US $200 million a year to keep
operating.2 The power play between the different utilities is most clearly visible in
the public attributions of blame across the media over load-shedding events, with
GRIDCO being blamed for supply shortfalls, the VRA being blamed for failing to keep
up with demand and the Ghanaian government being accused of failing to invest in
infrastructure. While Ghana is currently characterized as ‘a rising star and one of the
recent success stories in Africa’ (Breisinger et al., 2009: 3), it is clear that the electricity
network remains shaped not only by governance relations between the state and its
utilities but also by the continuing influence of international institutions, notably by the
World Bank (Honkaniemi, 2010).

A look at the historical governance of infrastructure in Accra reveals the
fragmentation that has characterized the city, the wider energy geographies that have
been shaped by different actors and the politicized nature of the electricity network.
These histories have produced a particular (urban) energy geography that created
conditions for disruption through the infrastructural legacies of the past. This analysis
shows not only the ways in which conditions for disruption have been produced
historically but also implicates a range of actors in these processes. These include
the colonial administrators and the historical patterns of splintered urbanism they
produced through racial segmentation, as well as the post-independence elites who
maintained this fragmentation while failing to invest in comprehensive infrastructure
development. The Nkrumah government, guided in part by international investment
capital in Akosombo, created a reliance on hydro-power. And the post-Nkrumah
administrations failed to diversify the energy-generation mix and to address the growing
obsolescence of the network (within and beyond Accra). Finally, the government of
Ghana, influenced by the World Bank, is following a path to liberalization that is being
sustained by international neoliberal logics concerning infrastructure, which have been
embedded within various levels and branches of the state.

1 The ECG owes the VRA about US $767 million, and the Ghanaian government also owes the authority around US
$250 million.

2 See http://article.wn.com/view/2015/01/09/ECG_Needs_200m_Yearly_To_Meet_Demand_For_Power_Supply/
(accessed 17 May 2015).

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The socio-natural production of electricity disruption in Accra
The production of the energy network, historically fragmented or ‘splintered’

and suffering ongoing under-investment through national policies that are increasingly
shaped by neoliberal reforms, leaves the flows of electricity into the city vulnerable
to disruption. This article contends that disruption of Accra’s network is produced
through the intersections between these histories and processes of climate change and
urban sprawl, implicating a range of actors in producing an unequal energyscape.

— Akosombo Dam, a reliance on hydro-power and the effects of climate change
Akosombo Dam stands testament to the modernist infrastructural ideals of the

Nkrumah government, which sought to modernize and universalize Ghana’s energy
infrastructure through large-scale generation of hydro-electric power (Moxon, 1969),
but also to the World Bank’s logics of financing such energy mega-projects across
the global South. The largest constructed lake in the world covers over 8,000 square
kilometres (Fobil et al., 2003), and like many such projects, has had a series of socio-
environmental impacts. These include the displacement of over 80,000 people in the
Volta River basin (Gyau-Boakye, 2001), many of whom have been resettled in villages
close by, where they continue to suffer from health, social and economic problems.
As Ghana’s key electricity-generation facility it leaves Accra vulnerable to emerging
climate-change dynamics because of its reliance on sustained water flows from the
increasingly arid Sahel region.

Plans for harnessing nature through the Akosombo Dam were first conceived
by the colonial authorities, but it was only in the post-independence era that the
government set about seeking to construct this infrastructure mega-project. The
project reflects the dominating influence of World Bank energy policy on governments
in the global South (Goldman, 2005). As it had limited access to finance, the Ghanaian
government needed to access international capital and technological expertise to
execute the project, which entailed American-based Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical
Company creating, with World Bank support, the Volta Aluminium Company (VALCO).
Such arrangements are predicated on unequal power relationships between the newly
independent state and foreign capital while also forestalling the building of other
potential power-generation facilities. The conditions of the financing arrangement, to
which the Ghanaian government contributed around 50%, involved that the priority of
the VRA at Akosombo is to power the VALCO aluminium smelter first, and only then the
population of Ghana. The financing of Akosombo Dam was thus based on the continuing
practice of resource extraction by companies from the global North, reflecting the
difficulty newly independent states experience in generating capital for infrastructure
investment. However, following a cost crisis that culminated in 2006, VALCO became
state-owned, and these inequalities therefore continue in new forms. The company has
been the largest consumer of power in the country, estimated by a VRA representative
at up to 40%, for which it pays 25% less than other consumers, thus making huge
demands on the electricity infrastructure of the country while also representing an
unequal relationship in terms of cost and access. Furthermore, its failure, like other
parts of the government, to pay the VRA and GRIDCO continues to leave these two
operators starved of capital for investment in the obsolete infrastructure they are using,
increasing the potential for disruption and further weakening their ability to address
transmission losses of up to 20%.

The demands of (foreign-based) capital, via the production of aluminium,
together with the World Bank’s preference for large dam projects, have led to Akosombo
binding together Ghana’s electricity production with its hydrological dynamics and
with emergent climate-change processes. As a VRA worker at Akosombo Dam clearly
states, the socio-natural relationship to water is vitally important for the country:

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‘In Ghana water is life, not just for the thirsty but for those who need energy in their
lives’.

The hydrological zones that provide the water flows necessary for electricity
production at Akosombo Dam stretch north towards the Sahel region. These zones are
becoming increasingly unstable, reflecting the effects of climate change in this fragile
region (Tacko Kandji et al., 2006). The parts of the Sahel region in northern Ghana
and in the other West African countries that make up the Volta water basin have been
experiencing a reduction in rainfall of 20% (CARE, 2007) over the past 20 years. This
reduction in rainfall and increase in aridity can be partly explained by processes of
deforestation and desertification that have characterized northern Ghana over the past
century, which are closely linked with the energy needs of the region’s urban populations
(via charcoal). Furthermore, the region from which Akosombo Dam draws much of its
water resources is predicted to become increasingly drier and more arid (Gyau-Boakye,
2001), which may lead to a further drop in rainfall by up to 27% (CARE, 2007). Thus
the hydrological zones that together constitute the water supply for Akosombo Dam
are forecast to experience, through the effects of climate change, reductions in flow of
between 30% and 40% (EPA, 2000: 6), which will lead to a reduction in hydro-power
output by up to 59% (Government of Ghana, 2000), thus further compounding the
already problematic energy-generation situation.

During various periods in the past, water flows had already been reduced dra-
matically, giving some indication of present and future difficulties. These include the
water flows to Akosombo Dam dropping to below 30,000 square cubic metres a second
in 2008, lowering generation capacity by up to 60% and precipitating widespread
and sustained load-shedding. As over 55% of Ghana’s electricity-generation capacity is
dependent on the Akosombo Dam (RCEER, 2005), emergent climate-change processes
in the Sahel threaten to further destabilize energy flows into Accra and lead to frequent
infrastructural disruption. The historical over-reliance of the Ghanaian government
on hydro-power production coupled with institutional problems in the VRA indicate
that ongoing future disruptions of the electricity network in Accra will be closely
associated with the growing climate-change crisis across the region.

While water flows for electricity production have decreased, the govern ment’s
response since the early 2000s has been to rely increasingly on new circulations of
gas to help the ECG navigate these energy uncertainties. Yet the ability of the VRA to
sustain flows to its power plants has not been successful, with demand at least twice as
high as supply even when the West African Gas Pipeline is operational (which in itself
is not guaranteed). This is the result of geo-political failure by the government to co-
operate with countries such as Nigeria and Ivory Coast, coupled with the instability of
supply by the West African Gas Pipeline Company, which is partly due to difficulties
experienced across Nigeria. Furthermore, the government has not invested sufficiently
in new energy sources (for example, renewables such as solar and wind energy) over
the past two decades; therefore, the failure of the government and its utilities to diver-
sify the energy sector are becoming increasingly visible as climate-change affects
production at Akosombo.

Global anthropogenic changes and associated hydrological dynamics become
key metabolisms through which energy disruptions are produced in Accra, linking
the city to socio-natural processes across northern Ghana and the wider Sahel region,
where the earliest impacts of climate change are already being experienced. Climate
change is clearly implicated in the destabilization of the energy production in Ghana
(Owusu et al., 2008)] and is therefore an important dynamic in energy disruption in
Accra. This shows how the energyscape is produced and mediated via the urbanization
of nature and is intricately linked to processes of capital accumulation that implicate a
range of actors within but also beyond Ghana in network disruption. Greenhouse gas

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SILVER 994

(GHG) emissions caused by historical industrialization in countries of the global North
have started having serious global repercussions that are manifesting as climate changes
in regions such as the Sahel. These climate-change effects have been exacerbated by
Ghana’s energy-production investment paths. Ghana’s need for international capital in
the form of VALCO, coupled with World Bank infrastructural policy, the Nkrumah gov-
ernment’s decision to invest in hydro-power and the subsequent failure of the Ghanaian
government and its utility companies to diversify over the past 20 years, have made the
country reliant on hydro-power. This reliance has set the conditions for climate change-
driven disruption.

— A sprawling city
The sprawling nature of Accra, the housing systems that characterize capitali-

zation of urban land and an increasingly neoliberal urban environment are other impor-
tant components of the production of disruption. Accra’s population growth rate of
4.4% contributes to its status as one of the largest cities in West Africa: its population,
estimated at 3.7 million in 2006, is potentially more than 4 million at present (UN-
Habitat, 2009), thus generating the significant energy-intensive urban sprawl that
reveals the politicized nature of disruption.

These urbanization dynamics have emerged as a direct consequence of the SAP
of the 1980s, in which the free market expanded, creating new private-sector actors
in the built environment, as well as aspirations of homeownership and new forms of
liquidity to invest in urban land. Such processes had a direct impact on the landscape
of Accra (Yeboah, 2000; Grant, 2009) and its surrounds through the urbanization
of nature in the form of peri-urban land. This sprawl has been compounded by the
inability of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly and the government, through the Town
and Country Planning Department, to undertake effective planning of Accra. The SAP’s
impact on government resources to effectively respond to this sprawl is profound. The
planning regime implicates not only the neoliberal reforms of the SAP, but also the role
of the elite in ignoring planning laws, as they were able to use their wealth to navigate
around standards and regulations. As Hanson (2010: 31) argued: ‘These days, people
build wherever and whenever the please as long as the money is available’.

Contrasting housing and infrastructure systems frame this growth and sprawl,
which accelerated through the late 1980s and into the 1990s through the increasing
number of middle-class/elite housing systems across the city. The series of networked
systems that characterized the growth and sprawl of Accra emerged from Accra’s sus-
tained real estate boom and the financialization of land, based on housing construction
for the emerging middle-class and elite sectors of Ghanaian society. The elite (classified
by the African Development Bank, 2011, as spending over US $20 a day) who make
up around 2% of Ghana’s population (or 450,000 of the country’s residents) helped to
shape new consumption patterns, particularly in the capital. The wealth of the elite is
increasingly visible in the building of new shopping centres and expensive cars on the
city’s streets. Their new spending ability is further reflected in the range of housing
being constructed, from detached housing (costing upwards of US $450,000 for a three-
bedroom house in ‘desirable’ neighbourhoods such as Cantonments) to new apartment
blocks such as Atlantic Tower, Airport City (with prices starting at US $250,000) and
the growing residential estates that have characterized much of the newly built urban
form in the city (Grant, 2009).

This Ghanaian elite is joined by an emergent middle class, which reflects the
economic growth the country has experienced in recent years. The term ‘middle class’,
in Ghana and across sub-Saharan Africa, remains a subject of debate: some estimates
suggest that it now includes around 5 million people or 20% of the country’s residents.
Yet the income range of this ‘middle class’, with a daily per capita consumption of US $4
to $20, does not help explain the growth of new (suburban) housing typologies. A more

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DISRUPTED INFRASTRUCTURES 995

accurate measure of the influence of growing wealth in Ghanaian society on house
purchasing and on spatial form is the ‘upper-middle class’. The African Development
Bank (2011) suggests that this group has a daily per capita consumption of US $10 to $20
and makes up 13% of the population. These Ghanaians have increased their spending
on non-essentials such as cars, household goods, flights and, of course, houses (costing
upwards of US $60,000). Together, the middle class and the upper-middle class of
Ghanaian society are fuelling housing demand (Bank of Ghana, 2007) and creating a
mortgage sector estimated to account for 8% of the population (Oxford Business Group,
2012), resulting in the socio-material transformation of Accra’s landscape, including its
energy geographies.

Accra’s rapidly growing housing landscapes for the elite and upper-middle
class increasingly consist of detached, expensive homes modelled on European and
North American suburban typologies––row upon row stretching towards the horizon
on former peri-urban land. An example is Trasaco Valley, a huge development with
prices that begin at US $1 million. The increased visibility and availability of global
capital is present in some of these new developments, with a range of financial actors,
including private equity groups such as Actis and housing groups such as Hollywood
International Development, investing in real-estate markets in West Africa. This
suburbanization, financed through the increasingly marketized urban land market,
produces a series of important changes across Accra in relation to understanding and
politicizing disruption of the electricity network.

As far as energy flow and circulation in Accra is concerned, these new housing
developments contribute significantly to the ongoing disruptions that are associated
with new consumption patterns in these sectors of society. The main construction
materials in many of these new middle-class housing systems are imported concrete
or sandcrete blocks; these are used in over 84% of (formal) houses across Accra (AMA,
2006). Concrete is chosen partly because it is relatively cheap and readily available,
and partly as it allows for architectural details that symbolize the emergence of an
(imported) middle-class/elite aesthetic (classical columns, arches, and so forth). It has
become the defining material characterizing the urban sprawl of Accra. The energy-
intensive nature of concrete is significant, not only in terms of high volumes of produc-
tion, but also because concrete buildings require large air-conditioning systems, owing
to the thermal inefficiency of concrete, thus leading to an ever-increasing demand for
electricity. As an Accra-based architect explains: ‘Most of the new middle-class hous-
ing has air conditioning and this creates a growing demand on energy and the need to
finance this at the household level and at the national level’ (interview with architect,
Accra, November 2010).The design and materialities of these housing systems have fur-
ther contributed to the urbanization of energy demand and added to the significant
growth in total electricity consumption by domestic users: demand rose from 1,319
GWh in the year 2000 by 853 GWh to 2,172 GWh by 2009––a jump of around 65%
(Ghana Energy Commission, 2011: 13).

The production of disruption in Accra can be extended from the climate
change-driven crisis at Akosombo to implicate a series of actors shaping, profiting and
participating in processes of urban sprawl. This urbanization is reshaping socio-natural
dynamics of energy in the city and has placed increasing pressure on the electricity net-
work. The actors implicated in this energy-intensive transformation of Accra include
the government of Ghana and the World Bank via their support for the SAP, which
created conditions under which marketized land has increased significantly and
the capacity of planning authorities to regulate the growth of the city has been
curtailed. Increasing global financial investment in real estate suggests that local and
international housing developers are also implicated in the energy-intensive typologies
that characterize (sub)urbanization in Accra as capital accumulation opportunities in
the city accelerate urban development and marginalize sustainability concerns. Finally,

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SILVER 996

the growing prosperity of certain socio-economic groups and the consumption choices
they are making concerning housing and household goods (such as air-conditioning
units), coupled with a disregard for planning processes, also contribute to increased
demands on the electricity network. The fact that these actors have instigated, profited
from and participated in these processes suggests that the production of disruption can
be politicized, revealing new forms of fragmentation and splintered urbanism (Graham
and Marvin, 2001). This politicization becomes particularly relevant when considering
which parts of society in Accra suffer most from interruptions in the flows of electricity
in terms of their capacity to respond to this disruption.

Splintered responses to disruption across Accra
— The urban poor

When the electricity network is disrupted through the metabolisms examined
above it is the urban poor who very often face the most dire consequences. An ECG
employee explains such disruption in Ga Mashie as follows: ‘The lights-out affects a lot
of people and business, and much revenue is lost during these episodes, interrupting
people’s lives and ruining appliances and businesses’ (interview, November 2010). These
effects are exacerbated by another form of disruption: the daily interruptions of flows
of electricity as a result of an inability to sustain connections through the introduction
of prepaid meters and the rising costs of electricity. Over the past decade the price of
electricity has risen sharply, from 1.94 to 6.92 cedi per kWh (Energy Commission of
Ghana, 2013) with 76% of households in the household survey suggesting that they
sometimes or often experience difficulties paying for electricity. Survey results in Ga
Mashie show that 94% of households experienced more than 20 disruptions to their
electricity supply over the course of 2010 as a result of these two forms of disruption,
namely everyday energy poverty and wider network disruptions. As one resident
explained, this causes serious problems for residents who are already struggling with
difficult socio-environmental conditions: ‘We depend on light for our everyday activi-
ties. Without light or energy there were many problems for people trying to make money
or for people to get by in the family compound’ (interview, December 2010).

Many of the urban poor who are living in neighbourhoods where electricity
access remains precarious are forced to find multiple low-cost responses to ongoing dis-
ruptions at household and community scales, which are often improvised or incremental
(Silver, 2014). The disruption of the electricity network in neighbourhoods such as Ga
Mashie therefore prompts a variety of responses. These responses range from dealing
with disruption caused by prepaid meters by means of clandestinely connecting to
the grid, to load-shedding responses such as storing candles, forming neighbourhood
groups to protect property during network failure and purchasing shared generators
for businesses. The urban poor are often forced to come together to navigate the worst
effects, and low-income households thus have to opt for a series of alternatives when
disruptions such as load-shedding occur. They are forced to make use of these alterna-
tive strategies in order to navigate the problems caused by disruption, or suffer the
sometimes unavoidable effects of darkness on important household activities, includ-
ing on income generation and children’s homework––something that cannot always be
avoided.

While technologies that can help navigate disruption exist, many of these
remain unaffordable. For instance, a 4.5 kilovolt-ampere (kVA) diesel generator that
could supply a low-income household with limited power during network disruptions,
remains prohibitively expensive at 4,000 Ghanaian cedi (US $1,000). Such secondary
infrastructure thus remains out of reach of many urban dwellers in Accra who are
already struggling to survive. Members of the Ga Mashie community are aware of
the potentials of off-grid technologies, such as solar photovoltaic systems. Over 80%
of survey participants suggested that such technology would help their households

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DISRUPTED INFRASTRUCTURES 997

to manage network disruption better. However, these forms of technology emerge
through market mechanisms and are mainly bought by the upper-middle class/elite,
the urban poor being unable to access these. As an ECG employee (interview, Decem-
ber 2010) working in Ga Mashie candidly states, ‘Solar becomes [available] only for the
rich but should be for the poor’. Even low-tech solutions to disruption are fraught with
difficulties: the survey in Ga Mashie showed that 64% of participants have found that
alternatives to electricity, such as paraffin and candles, cost more, thus placing further
financial as well as psychological strain on households during disruptions. Research
by Quartey (2010) supports this, showing that the urban poor lost up to 10% of their
monthly income during the power crisis of 2007. The need to purchase alternative fuel,
coupled with the difficulty of affording technology such as generators, has resulted in
many residents in low-income neighbourhoods facing disrupted lives when electricity
flows are interrupted.

Incremental responses by the urban poor to infrastructural disruptions are ongo-
ing and often temporary, aimed at making small differences to the metabolic interac-
tions between urban dwellers and infrastructure networks. Responses include material
improvisation to improve network connections (McFarlane, 2011; Silver, 2014) and com-
ing together as a community to secure urban space during disruption. Such incremental
infrastructure dynamics, flows and processes encompass diverse practices that help
urban dwellers bridge spaces of absence between unequal flows of capital investment
in urban infrastructure and the socio-natural manifestation of such disjunctures. The
urban poor, already struggling to sustain electricity connections as a result of ongoing
poverty, face further difficulties in sustaining flows of electricity that are vital to their
everyday economic activities in areas such as Ga Mashie. In this neighbourhood, as in
other poor urban networked communities, access to emerging premium network spaces,
technologies and eco-innovations remains low or non-existent. As poor urban dwellers
lack the ability to generate large-scale financing for new technologies such as solar
systems that would enable them to mediate the worst effects of network disruption,
and as they have only limited access to capital, resources or political connections, they
need to find ways to intersect interests to navigate network disruption and hope. This
contrasts starkly with the options that are open to the upper-middle class and elites
of Accra, who do have the ability to sustain flows of electricity through traditional
generators, and are able to access emerging premium network spaces, technologies and
eco-innovations.

— Upper-middle class and elite spaces
When network disruption occurs, secondary infrastructures beyond the electri-

city network provide additional levels of energy security for upper-middle class and
elite households. The spluttering and humming of diesel generators is a ubiquitous
sound across many neighbourhoods in the city. This response to disruption, based at
least partly on the very design and construction of such new housing typologies, reveals
the difference in the responses available to different socio-economic groups in the city.
Furthermore, while the urban poor struggle to navigate the everyday difficulties caused
by disruption, Accra’s energy network is being reconfigured around new private net-
work spaces that offer increased security for those able to afford such developments.
These emerging housing/energy infrastructures are being produced through new exper-
imental eco-homes and large master-planned potential housing developments.

A number of eco-homes being built across the city provide early premium spaces
for eco-innovation, as well as emergent technologies and materialities that offer infra-
structural security. Thus far these are available only in a handful of locations, often
developed and owned by architects. One example is that of the Addo practice, which
avoids the use of cement, rather employing technologies such as rainwater collection
and solar photovoltaics to help navigate disruption and create natural cooling through

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passive design, large roof overhangs and timber screens in order to lower energy
consumption. Furthermore, the use of indigenous materials, such as mud, which have
been used for centuries across West Africa, exemplifies the large financial saving that
can be achieved by reducing energy usage. Yet less than 10% of (formal) houses in
Accra currently contain mud in outside walls, compared to over 50% in other parts of
the country (AMA, 2006), particularly in the arid Sahelian north of Ghana. This also
illustrates what may be considered a ‘cultural splintering’ over the past decades, which
has seen urban dwellers moving away from traditional methods of climate-resilient
building in the region.

Experiments in eco-innovation that articulate new Afro-centric architectural
styles and are based on sustainable materials remain a niche part of development, taking
place only in isolated locations across Accra rather than significantly permeating the
imaginations of the city’s growing and aspirational upper-middle class and elite. Interest
in these eco-houses is linked to new, imported sensibilities around sustainability and
energy efficiency from international developers. Thus the increasing number of niche
responses that centre on security from infrastructural disruptions in individual eco-
homes are also evident in the development of ‘sustainable masterplans’ for new middle-
class and elite housing. Such developments suggest a significant upscaling of housing
that offers various levels of energy security across Accra. The construction of these
housing systems, and the attendant premium network spaces that are being created, is
mainly being driven by international developers, backed by significant capital holdings.
These systems often have some level of sustainability embedded in their governance
charters and offer a vision for new housing systems in Accra beyond the ubiquitous
concrete suburbias that have grown across the city and have given rise to concerns over
disrupted flows of essential urban services such as electricity.

Delivery of such sustainability-orientated projects is about to begin on a sig-
nificant scale in Accra, as the city becomes an increasingly attractive urban space for
flows and circulations of international capital, to which developments such as the
mammoth US $6 billion technology park Hope City are testimony. One residential
example is the aptly named Appolonia––City of Light scheme, financed by global equity
provider Renaissance Group and delivered through its African land business Rendeavor
Ltd. The developers have mobilized US $100 million in initial investment for master
planning, land division, infrastructure systems and management framework for the
Appolonia project. The project is part of a series of real-estate projects by Rendeavor
Ltd. across Africa, with similar visions for a project on the outskirts of Nairobi, where
construction began in 2012 but which has since been plagued by problems and delays.
Such developments show the increasing convergence of global flows of capital in
fast-growing African cities and emerging concerns about urban sustainability and,
importantly, infrastructural security. Appolonia, planned as a new city on the outskirts
of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, is expected to be constructed over the next 10
years on an 800-hectare site, with ambitions to eventually accommodate over 85,000
residents. It is described by its developers as promoting ‘world-class environmental
integrity and sustainability’ with the potential to transform housing development
across Accra. The construction of such upper-middle class/elite homes in Accra is partly
based on providing infrastructural security for potential customers and may therefore
counter the fast-growing energy demands of the energy-intensive housing systems
that are currently being constructed. The new developments may thus help Accra
lower demand on the electricity system; yet they also reveal the unequal technological
response to disruption in the city.

New urbanization processes generate a number of potential subsequent geo-
graphies across Accra’s electricity system. Clearly, the potential exists for a reduction
in energy demand that may affect the frequency of disruption and failure. At the same
time, the increasing number of upper-middle class/elite households opting out of large

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DISRUPTED INFRASTRUCTURES 999

networked infrastructures will lead to a reduction in revenue for the ECG, which will
make it more difficult for the ECG to sustain its lifeline tariff and will have an adverse
effect on the already weak investment in upgrading and maintenance, potentially
resulting in increased disruption.3 Furthermore, these dynamics will reinforce the
historically splintered infrastructure, giving it a new contemporary form and illustrating
the politicized nature of responses to disruption between those who are able to afford
access to premium networked spaces and those who are unable to afford it.

Those who are able to afford technologies such as generators and photovoltaic
panels, or new energy-secure and sustainable housing developments, are able to
access different types of premium network spaces that offer increased (and unequal)
capacity to navigate disruption. Such spaces are being shaped beyond the city’s under-
invested, fragmenting electricity network, creating additional layers of household
energy security for upper-middle class/elite households. These inequalities in terms
of security from disruption show the further unbundling and reconfiguring of Accra’s
splintered infrastructure, which is being shaped through access to diversifying circuits
and flows of electricity based on socio-economic status and the ability to pay for
premium network spaces.

Conclusion
This article has elucidated an urban political ecology (UPE) of disruption through

an understanding of the historical production of Accra’s electricity network, in particular
two emergent socio-natural processes that are generating increased interruptions and
responses across the city to such infrastructural episodes. The production of disruption
provides a useful heuristic device to understand the infrastructural geographies of the
city and is important because it reveals the political nature of the electricity network.
While UPE studies have tended to focus on water infrastructures, this article shows
how such an analysis can be mobilized to understand urban energy geographies, thus
extending such studies into new infrastructural systems and resource flows. It shows
that an understanding of the electricity network in Accra is intrinsically linked to the
urbanization of nature, through the interactions of water dynamics, GHG emissions,
housing production, and so on. Most importantly, it is infused with power relations. As
Kaika (2005: 75) commented, this focus on metabolism illustrates the socio-natural
production of electricity networks: ‘Exploring the uncanny materiality of “the other”
in the form of the invisible metabolized nature or technology networks points at the
social construction of the separation between the natural and the social, the private
and the public. It reveals the individual, the social, and the natural, as a socio-natural
continuum that disrupts the boundaries between the above socially constructed cate-
gories’. These insights thus open up new ways to interrogate urban electricity infra-
structures, which is perhaps the most important consideration to emerge from this
work. They suggest that future analysis needs to engage with the multiscalar and socio-
natural metabolisms that mediate electricity infrastructures both within the city and
through the dialectical shaping of wider landscapes through processes of urbanization
(Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015).

In addition, this article has contributed to the growing field of UPE across African
cities, providing an illustration of how socio-natural processes are part and parcel of the
urbanization process of this region. This is important, as it suggests that debates about
the geographies of infrastructure, social relations, associated politics and investment
flows in African cities need to move beyond the city scale, technical understandings
of networked systems and normative accounts that dominate understandings, policy
and debates in countries such as Ghana. Such an understanding of the urban means
engaging with the multiscalar and socio-natural processes that mediate infrastructures

3 The lifeline tariff offers a flat rate to customers consuming 50 kWh per month or less.

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both within the city and through the dialectical shaping of wider landscapes; this can
contribute to ongoing critical studies of African urbanisms. The need to respond to the
current technocentric, managerial accounts that dominate literatures on infrastructures
in African cities is increasingly recognized (Lawhon et al., 2013), and this study provides
one way to ‘rethink and recast the pragmatic considerations of development policy on
the back of a more textured appreciation of the urban and its probable and possible
futures’ (Pieterse, 2010: 208).

Furthermore, an examination of disruptions to the electricity network provides
important insights into how scholars politicize Accra’s urban environment. It argues
that a series of multiscalar actors are involved in producing interruptions across
the city that reflect, reinforce and reshape power relations between different social
interest groups. First, it implicates the various actors involved in the historic shaping
of the city’s electricity network, which can be characterized as splintered (Graham
and Marvin, 2001) and vulnerable to emergent metabolic processes of climate change
and urban sprawl. The role of the colonizers is, of course, pertinent, as they shaped
an infrastructural geography across the electricity network that still contains ongoing
legacies of colonial-era governance that need to be accounted for. Yet, colonial histories
obviously have been reshaped since independence: the World Bank’s preference for
investing in the hydro-power complex at Akosombo, the need to provide energy for
international capital in the form of VALCO, often at preferential rates, and the failure of
the government from Nkrumah onwards to diversify electricity generation all account
for the conditions that have led to the network becoming vulnerable to climate change
and energy-intensive sprawl. Increased liberalization of the electricity sector has
compounded these problems, particularly as the Ghanaian government has failed to
invest sufficiently in an increasingly obsolete infrastructure. The actions of utilities
such as the ECG and the VRA further reinforce the vulnerability of the network: lack
of payment, ongoing disputes and debt suggest that the utilities have failed to plan
properly for Ghana’s future energy needs. A plethora of actors have historically been
involved in the production of energy circulation, in this case electricity, suggesting
that an understanding of the organizations and institutions that are implicated in
the current configuration of infrastructure involves analysis that pays attention both
to the overlapping, globally shaped histories of governing Accra and to the localized
arrangements through which these unfold (Chalfin, 2010).

Secondly, closely related to this historically produced vulnerability is the
increasing effect of climate change on energy generation and thus on disruption. This
shows that climate change is political: it politicizes urban infrastructures at a series
of scales. The instigation of anthropogenic processes by the industrializing countries
of the global North, the Ghanaian government’s reliance on hydro-power, VALCO’s
power needs, World Bank policy and the failure of the VRA to adequately respond to
these imperatives all reveal the multiple implicit and explicit decisions both locally
and further afield that have contributed to disruption. Furthermore, the actions of
these actors intersect with historical investment decisions concerning hydro-power
that have brought about a metabolism of disruptions centred on Akosombo but
stretching across the Sahel region and into the earth’s atmosphere. As climate change
becomes increasingly apparent, such findings call for further work to understand how
anthropogenic processes intersect with the historical production of infrastructure, how
they reconfigure socio-natural relations and what the political, policy and social-justice
implications of these dynamics are.

Thirdly, the analysis implicates a range of contemporary actors in the urbani-
zation of Accra who have contributed to the increase in energy demand through explicit
and implicit consumption choices, policy orientations and profit motives. Historical
and contemporary processes of capital accumulation through the growth of the built

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environment have generated profit for a series of actors, from the colonial authorities
through to the postcolonial elites, including the country’s housing developers and
increasingly also comprising international housing financiers. Furthermore, the impact
of the World Bank in shaping this structural adjustment programme is clearly visible
across the city. Partly supported by the government of Ghana, the programme has
severely curtailed the capacity of planning authorities at both the urban and national
scale. The failure of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly and the Town and Country Plan-
ning Department to respond to urban sprawl, either because they lacked the capacity
or failed to hold elites and developers to account, further reinforces these energy-
inten sive urbanization trends. Such conditions allow the elites and housing developers
to increasingly construct upper-middle class housing systems that increase energy
demand across the city significantly and intersect with the consumption choices of the
growing upper- middle class in terms of housing design and energy usage. This analysis
draws attention to how studies of urban infrastructure need to recognize the ongoing
reconfiguration of spatial and social inequalities across conditions of splintered urban-
ism (Graham and Marvin, 2001) resulting from contemporary forms of urbanization
and the social interests involved in such geographies.

Finally, responses to the ongoing disruptions and failures across the energy
network reveal the inequalities between the capacities of the urban poor and the upper-
middle class/elite to navigate interruptions. The consequences for the poor are severe,
as a community leader in Ga Mashie comments: ‘Economically it will stop community
development’. The effects are often amplified by the fact that the poor are unable to
access costly technologies and are forced to resort to incremental and improvised
strategies in order to try and limit the costs caused by the frequent interruptions
to their everyday lives. The upper-middle class/elite, by contrast, have access to
technology such as generators. Furthermore, new forms of (splintered) urbanism that
incorporate sustainable technologies and various forms of energy security are emerging.
These dynamics and processes may instigate a further process of fragmentation and
networked inequality, potentially creating archipelagos of energy security for the
upper-middle class/elites. While the wider urban energy network will continue to
operate, Coutard and Rutherford (2011:107) point out that ‘the development of “small-
scale”, “decentralized”, “dispersed”, or otherwise “alternative” technologies clearly
problematizes the inherently networked nature of the urban, on the environmental,
spatial, social and political levels that technical infrastructure always implies and
impinges on’. This post-networked urbanism, while currently minimal and dispersed, is
likely to increase its presence across Accra as the growing upper-middle class/elite seek
ways to insulate themselves from wider infrastructural disruption. Such networked
geographies call for further interrogation of these new forms of urbanization predicated
on energy security concerns (Hodson and Marvin, 2009) and for further investigation
of how these are reshaping urban inequalities, and the incremental responses of low-
income households and communities to (unequal) conditions (Silver, 2014).

This article has shown the significance of seeking to understand the socio-
natures that shape Accra’s electricity network through a focus on disruption. Impor-
tantly, it has sought to politicize such dynamics by examining the actors implicated
in these emerging urbanization and infrastructural geographies. Its findings raise
questions about the power relations that are distributed across and associated with
networked systems, which call for a reconfiguration of the electricity network, emerging
forms of urbanization and the agency of different social interest groups to produce a
more just energyscape across Accra.

Jonathan Silver, Department of Geography, Durham University Science Site,
Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom, j.d.silver@durham.ac.uk

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Theme issue article Nature and Space

Making India’s cleanest city:
Sanitation, intersectionality,
and infrastructural violence

Yaffa Truelove
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

Kathleen O’Reilly
Texas A & M University, College Station, TX, USA

Abstract

Inaugurated in 2014, India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) intends to eradicate open defecation in

urban and rural areas by 2019. In cities, the scheme ranks municipalities for achieving open

defecation-free status and other measures of cleanliness. In 2017, Indore was first nationally

recognized with the national Cleanest City award. In the weeks before the city was evaluated,

it sponsored a number of activities that demolished housing and sanitation infrastructures, singled

out the female body for humiliation, and forced residents to revert back to the very sanitation

practices the city was allegedly trying to eradicate.

This paper traces the differing articulations of power at work between the extension and

demolition of the city’s infrastructure. It focuses particularly on latrines, the metrics, and the

urban vision to make Indore the Cleanest City, but also gives attention to the additional infra-

structures connected to latrine-making and unmaking, including housing. We specifically explore

two dimensions of what we call the “infrastructural intersectionality” of the Clean City Mission,

which discloses differing forms of compounding infrastructural violence that include the dissolu-

tion of both material and social infrastructures. Firstly, the intersectionality of gender/caste/class/

race social identities and power relations that are embedded and reified through infrastructures

and, secondly, the intersectionality of multiple infrastructures that are inter-connected and co-

constituted through each other. We argue that bringing the lens of intersectionality is critical for

recognizing the socially differentiated and gendered dimensions of sanitation infrastructure, the

SBM, and its situated infrastructural violence. By exploring two themes related to infrastructure

and intersectionality, we show the criticality of embodied and gendered approaches to analyzing

the

power of infrastructure in the everyday.

Corresponding author:

Yaffa Truelove, Department of Geography, University of Colorado, 260 UCB 110 Guggenheim Boulder, CO 80309, USA.

Email: truelove@colorado.edu

EPE: Nature and Space

2021, Vol. 4(3) 718–735

! The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/2514848620941521

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mailto:truelove@colorado.edu

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Keywords

Gender, infrastructural violence, intersectionality, sanitation, Swachh Bharat Mission

Introduction

During November 2017, officials from the Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) traversed

the city in an effort to enumerate every household with a toilet. When they entered

Sukhniwas road, the location of an informal settlement that had only recently been incor-

porated into the city’s expanding municipal territory, the officials found a cluster of 40

dwellings that lacked access to either personal or public toilets. The officials informed

this group of residents that they would need to invest Rs.1360 (approximately US $20)

within one week for an individual household latrine, the balance being subsidized by the

national Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission). Some residents complained that

this was a hefty sum for poor city-dwellers to procure in such a short amount of time, but

families nonetheless found a way to pay the IMC, and were given receipts. Soon after, the

IMC dug individuated pits for each house. However, after this, toilet-building ceased.

Officials never returned to the site, and residents were left to wonder when their latrines

would be installed, if ever. The next time the state entered the settlement, a few months later,

disaster struck. Twenty IMC officials and eight police arrived one early morning and

announced that homes without toilets would be demolished at once (Shantha, 2017).

As reported by one woman, named Nanjubai, whose house was demolished in the area:

They began knocking at our doors at 6am and asked us all to step out immediately. We were

asked to either save our lives or our belongings; we chose our lives. In no time, all our belongings

were crushed. Our houses were razed to the ground and we were made homeless. (quoted in

Shantha, 2017: 3)

Shortly after the demolition, the Swachh Survekshan (SS), an assessor group for the Swachh

Bharat Mission (SBM) sent from the central government, descended upon the city to mea-

sure (among other indicators) the presence of toilets and whether the city could be ranked as

open defecation-free (ODF) (Shantha, 2017). Not only did the SS declare Indore to be ODF,

but the group awarded high points for additional measures of cleanliness. Shortly after, it

announced that Indore was “India’s Cleanest City”—first among 500 Indian cities in achiev-

ing cleanliness (Khanna, 2017).
The Sukhniwas slum was not the only neighborhood to experience infrastructural vio-

lence in the days leading up to the SBM’s cleanliness assessment. In an area called Bhuri

Tekri, the IMC had invested 13 million rupees (approximately US $172,000) to build latrines

for the zone that would be visible during the SS assessment. Only two months after 825

individual household latrines were installed in this neighborhood, both the housing and new

latrines of residents were simultaneously destroyed. Bhuri Tekri had been pre-designated for

demolition by municipal officials, after the toilets had served their purpose of being present

during the days of SS survey (DBSS, 2018; Shantha, 2017).Such state practices increased the

precariousness of the urban poor, not only through the destruction of toilets, but also

through the linkage of toilets to the elimination of other infrastructures such as housing,

water, electricity, and connectivity to places of work, compounding infrastructural violence

and multiplying negative effects on particular bodies.

Truelove and O’Reilly 719

This paper traces the differing articulations of power at work between the extension and
demolition of the city’s infrastructure. It focuses particularly on latrines and the urban
vision to make Indore an ODF and “Clean City,” but also gives attention to the additional
infrastructures connected to latrine-making and unmaking. As there have been few studies
to date that analyze the social and material impacts of the SBM—particularly in the cities
awarded the highest rankings—this research addresses this lacuna by also identifying the
visceral and affective embodied experiences perpetrated through the SBM urban vision and
its compounding infrastructural violence for particular city-dwellers. By exploring two
themes related to what we term “infrastructural intersectionality,” we show how the SBM
produces differing forms of compounded infrastructural violence and corporeal suffering.
Firstly, by “infrastructural intersectionality” we refer to the intersectionality of gender/
caste/class/race social identities and power relations that are embedded and reified through
infrastructures and, secondly, the intersectionality of multiple infrastructures that are inter-
connected and co-constituted through each other. Thus, through our analyses of infrastruc-
tural intersectionality, we argue that embodied and gendered approaches are critical for
analyzing the power of infrastructure in the everyday. We draw on national news sources,
detailed documents produced by the IMC, and verbal reports from Deen Bandhu Samaj
Sahayog Indore (DBSS, a local activist NGO)1 to show that the Clean India Mission
damages socially differentiated and gendered bodies in ways that are revealed not only
through an analysis of sanitation infrastructure in various states of decay, maintenance,
and repair, but their rippling effects onto additional infrastructures of urban life, specifically
housing and social networks of cooperation.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, we introduce the concept of infrastructural inter-
sectionality, tying it into recent literature on gender and sanitation and the social, temporal,
and material life of infrastructure, including current theorizations of infrastructural vio-
lence. Next, we introduce the SBM, and Indore’s interpretation of SBM guidelines as part of
its quest to become a “Clean, Green, and Smart” city. We then specifically explore the two
dimensions of infrastructural intersectionality as it pertains to the Clean City Mission,
analyzing intersecting forms of embodied suffering that emerge from the dissolution of
both material and social infrastructures. We argue that bringing the lens of intersectionality
is critical for recognizing the socially differentiated and gendered dimensions of sanitation
infrastructure, the SBM, and its situated infrastructural violence. Thus, our findings specif-
ically show that infrastructural violence is mediated and co-produced by differing forms of
intersectionality, which necessitate a situated analysis of infrastructural violence that is
attentive to the ways that the decay, maintenance, and repair of infrastructures are tied
to embodied and affective harm.

Conceptualizing infrastructural intersectionality

In this paper, we draw from feminist theory and scholarship on gender and sanitation, as
well as critical infrastructure studies, to conceptualize two types of “infrastructural inter-
sectionality” that emerge from the SBM program in Indore. We argue that bringing the lens
of intersectionality is critical for recognizing the socially differentiated and gendered dimen-
sions of sanitation infrastructure, the SBM, and its situated infrastructural violence.

Firstly, by infrastructural intersectionality we refer to feminist theorizations of intersec-
tionality, dating back to Crenshaw’s work in 1991, that highlight “the complexity of gen-
dered experiences in tension with race, ethnicity, class, age, or sexuality,” etc. (Crenshaw,
1991; see also Beebeejaun, 2017). Gender, rather than being either fixed or mutually exclu-
sive from other social identities such as race, class, sexuality, or age, is rather shaped

720 EPE: Nature and Space 4(3)

through other intersecting identities, which produce differing forms of power and oppres-
sion. By intersectionality in a sanitation context, we mean how a subject’s multiple identities
shape his/her vulnerabilities in relationships of power, e.g. the overlapping of gender, class,
and caste discrimination that oppresses poor lower-caste women in different, usually great-
er, ways than lower-caste men, or upper-caste women. In the recent past, significant research
on gender and urban sanitation in India has engaged intersectionality as a key feature of
poor women’s experiences with open defecation and community sanitation. First among this
scholarship is the work of Bapat and Agarwal (2003) whose study of community toilet
blocks in Mumbai showcases poor women’s successful activism surrounding sanitation,
driven by their particular, gendered needs. Research that followed examines poor
women’s everyday lives, including the insecurity and vulnerability associated with OD in
the city (Truelove, 2011). In response to an urban sanitation provision approach of one-size-
fits all, Joshi et al. (2011) illustrate that such a policy could not possibly address the san-
itation and hygiene needs of the un- and under-served in Indian cities. Their work drives a
much closer look at the ways that intersectionality limits poor urban residents’ access to
sanitation. Pavement dwellers, those with physical ailments, and women all require specific
sanitation and hygiene facilities, and experiences of inadequate sanitation are intensified
through intersectionality, e.g. a disabled woman living on a city street. As increasing atten-
tion has been given to urban women’s experiences of OD and toilet building projects across
South Asia, a list of intersecting inequalities has emerged: age; marital status; ethnicity;
stage in the life course; type of employment; caste; and religion (Doron and Jeffrey, 2014;
Kulkarni et al., 2017; Sahoo et al., 2015). Nearly endless positionalities might stymie a
search for sanitation solutions attempting to address all women’s experiences, but most
importantly, intersectionality illustrates the myth of “women” as a category (see
Mohanty, 1988), and recent gender and sanitation scholarship attends to intersectionality
(Mohanty and Dwivedi, 2019). We thus draw from this long-standing feminist work on
intersectionality and sanitation infrastructure to analyze how making Indore “India’s
Cleanest City” through the SBM both operated through, and reproduced, intersecting
gender, caste, and class relations in the city, leveling compounded forms of infrastructural
violence on poor, lower-caste women’s bodies.

A second and congruent dimension of infrastructural intersectionality that we examine in
the paper refers to multiple infrastructures that are inter-connected and co-constituted
through each other. For example, rather than seeing sanitation infrastructures such as toilets
as being mutually exclusive from other infrastructures like water or housing, we highlight
the ways that transformations in one infrastructure intersect with, and have rippling effects
pertaining to, other related infrastructures. We propose an analysis that takes into account
the interconnections and co-constitutions of multiple infrastructures. Here we seek to draw
from, and contribute to, literature on critical infrastructure studies (outlined in more detail
below) that examines the socio-material dimensions of infrastructure making and unmaking.
We thus analyze intersecting infrastructures related to the SBM to build toilets, placing
toilets in the center of our analysis and following their material and socio-political
making and unmaking. Our work documents the ways that one set of sanitation infra-
structures has rippling effects onto others (housing, social networks, etc.). We thus argue
that this second dimension of “infrastructural intersectionality” provides an important lens
into viewing the multiplying effect that transformations over time (e.g. installation, decay,
maintenance, repair, and demolition) of one infrastructure can have in relation to others
(e.g. housing, water, transport, etc.), and the criticality of taking such intersections into
account with regard to the unequal affective and visceral experiences of infrastructural
change in the everyday.

Truelove and O’Reilly 721

Socio-material infrastructures and situated infrastructural violence

In order to interrogate the connections between the intersectional material dimensions of the
SBM’s mandate to clean Indore, and the socio-political and embodied repercussions that
resulted, our analysis draws from and contributes to an emerging interdisciplinary literature
that examines urban infrastructure as a socio-technical assemblage. By conceptualizing
infrastructure as a socio-technical assemblage, a wide array of interdisciplinary scholarship
demonstrates the role of both the human and non-human in shaping infrastructural systems
and their social and political outcomes (Amin, 2014; Anand, 2017; Larkin, 2013). Attention
within this literature to embodiment brings into relation visceral and affective experiences
with the materiality and temporality of infrastructure, placing everyday lives at this nexus
(Fredericks, 2018; Truelove, 2019; Sultana, 2011; Thompson, 2016).

By viewing infrastructure as both material and cultural, this body of work demonstrates
the differing agencies and powers that both animate, and are embedded within, socio-
technical systems. We attend to infrastructure as revealing “the political geist of a
given moment” (Anand, 2015), not only through its materials and technology, but also
through the human and non-human assemblage necessary to extend it, destroy it, and
determine its distribution.

Not only are infrastructures technical projects of state-making, disclosing forms of state
power and “expert” knowledge, but scholars also demonstrate the role of infrastructure in
shaping social experience and subjectivities in ways that go beyond state power. For exam-
ple, socio-technical approaches to “vital infrastructures” (Fredericks, 2014) highlight the
ways that the very “things” that make up infrastructure tend to have lives of their own in
mediating relations between humans and the environment (Bennett, 2009). In particular, a
number of critical works (e.g., Amin, 2014; Anand, 2017; Bennett, 2009; Meehan, 2014)
have productively revealed the agency of the objects of infrastructure. However, these non-
human elements simultaneously shape, and are produced through, a variety of social power
relations, ideologies of modernity and progress, and the uneven rights, regulation, and
distribution of vital infrastructures. Thus, this new and growing literature on infrastructure
not only queries how we might more robustly conceptualize the agency of objects and
materials of particular infrastructures, but also their embeddedness in changing power
relations and political configurations. For example, processes of decay, maintenance, and
repair of infrastructure in an urban context may alter not only the material form of infra-
structure, but also change the pre-existing social-political-infrastructure nexus (Graham and
Thrift, 2007), a point which we specifically take up in relation to toilets in Indore.
Particularly, a lens that incorporates the “temporal fragility” of infrastructure, i.e. the con-
tinual repatterning of infrastructural forms, relations, and social worlds over its life phases
of decay, maintenance, and repair (Ramakrishnan et al., under review), enables us to map
the continuous reworking of these socio-technical assemblages with particular regard for
gendered violence and a continuing lack of sanitation for the poor.By following toilets, we
draw from other studies on waste and sanitation infrastructures in the global South
(Chalfin, 2014; Desai et al., 2015; Fredericks, 2018) that demonstrate how the socio-
material dimensions of sanitation and waste practices unequally shape residents’ routines,
bodies, life opportunities, and urban experiences of the city itself.

As our research seeks to specifically contribute to this literature by adopting a lens of
“infrastructural intersectionality,” we tease out how the material dimensions regarding both
the extension and demolition of sanitation infrastructure produce uneven intersectional
consequences, including (1) rippling and intersecting effects on additional critical infrastruc-
tures (e.g. housing, and networks of social collaboration and support) and (2) compounding

722 EPE: Nature and Space 4(3)

forms of intersectional infrastructural violence that unequally affects overlapping gender,

caste, and class groups (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012). By infrastructural violence, we refer to

Rogers and O’Neill, who trace how structural, instrumental, and even “passive” forms of

violence can be tied to how infrastructures are implemented, regulated, and unequally expe-

rienced, including “socially harmful effects from infrastructure’s limitations and omissions

rather than its direct consequences” (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012: 406–407). Thus, by fol-

lowing the materiality of toilets in Indore, we examine the complex power relations and

forms of violence that are embedded in, and emerge through, their installation, monitoring,

and accompanying demolition. Congruently, placing toilets in the center of our analysis

enables us to view how changes in sanitation infrastructure, including both the installation

and demolition of latrines, bleeds into additional infrastructures within the city, and ampli-

fies the effects and unequal lived experiences of the SBM in Indore, particularly infrastruc-

tural violence leveled on poor, lower-caste groups and women. We thus contribute an

intersectional gendered, classed, casted approach to the infrastructural violence produced

in the wake of efforts to transform Indore into India’s cleanest city.

India’s Swachh Bharat Mission and the production of

gendered shaming

In 2013, after decades of failed national sanitation interventions, India remained a country

with high rates of households without latrines, about 53% (Times of India, 2013). In 2014,

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the SBM to eliminate open defecation across the

country (Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, 2018). Through the scheme, the

Government of India (GOI) intended to build 12 million latrines across the country by

October 2019—five years after the mission’s launch.2 The urban portion of the project

was estimated to cost approximately USD $9.7 billion. Re-making cities into “clean cities”

through the SBM required transforming existing waste practices, including municipal waste

collection and processing, and especially eradicating OD and ensuring that all urbanites

have access to a toilet. SBM integrated components of previous interventions considered

successful. For example, the Nirmal Gram Puraskar (Clean Village Prize), introduced in

2003, awarded cash for political subdivisions below state governments for becoming ODF.

Its success led to the roll out of the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA), which used subsidies

(like earlier interventions) and added the behavior change approach known as CLTS

(Community Led Total Sanitation). CLTS champions the “shock and shame” approach

of shocking communities into the knowledge that they eat each other’s feces due to OD, and

shaming those who continue to go for OD.
SBM was a continuation of the NBA, including its core components of subsidies—known

as “incentives” under the SBM—and shaming, one element of behavior change communi-

cations that was introduced and financed in the new national sanitation policy. Public

shaming is a gendered practice, because of the social norms surrounding open defecation

behaviors. For the urban poor, some of the daily choices influencing where to defecate are

broadly the same across genders: cost of building an individual household latrine; lack of

space for a pit or access to sewer networks; affordability of pay toilets; monsoon flooding;

and water insecurity (Hirve et al., 2015; Kwiringira et al., 2014; Osumanu and Kosoe, 2013).

However, urban research makes clear that gendered social norms of modesty, and threats

(and realities) of violence against women generate physical and psychosocial stress for

women and girls when choosing the best option to relieve themselves (O’Reilly, 2016).

These measures of sanitation-related psychosocial stress experienced by women and girls

Truelove and O’Reilly 723

in particular include trauma, shame, anxiety, guilt, embarrassment, humiliation, and viola-
tion (Caruso et al., 2017). Indian women living in informal settlements have taken steps to
safeguard themselves and their daughters, by traveling some distance from their residences
in groups and carrying weapons like stones or chili powder (Truelove, 2011). Bodily disci-
pline can be constant, most notably that women constrain their eating and drinking to avoid
going at inopportune times, i.e. in daylight (Chaplin and Kalita, 2017; House et al., 2014).
Additionally, intersecting oppressions of gender and caste produce different experiences of
safety and stress, as in the case of Kulkarni et al. (2017) in which women of dominant castes
within their slum enjoyed a certain amount of prestige, and thus protection from harass-
ment, compared to women of subordinate castes. In this paper, we draw from feminist work
on intersectionality, psychosocial stress, and inadequate sanitation infrastructure to analyze
how making Indore “India’s Cleanest City” through the SBM both operated through, and
reproduced, intersecting gender, caste, and class relations in the city. Compounding social
oppressions intersected with the ruination of sanitation and housing infrastructure that ran
counter to the SBM’s stated latrine-building and gender-sensitive goals, and ultimately
increased the suffering of poor, lower-caste women.

Reconfiguring governance and intersectional power through the SBM

In this section, we analyze how the SBM furthers new forms of governance deriving from
the fragmented, decentralized state that in turn shape intersectional power relations and
hierarchies on the ground. Specifically, we examine how initiatives originating at the center,
intending to create a “Clean City of India” via sanitation interventions, redistributes gov-
ernmental power in ways that re-structure local gender, caste, and class geometries. To do
so, we situate the SBM in relation to additional urban projects (such as Smart City Indore),
demonstrating how the SBM utilizes newly developed metrics to measure and “prove”
cleanliness to the central government. We show how these new metrics are accomplished
through decentralization practices in Indore that uniquely empower the municipality, local
officials, and even upper-caste groups in “cleaning” the city, while targeting and shaming the
practices and spaces of predominately female, lower-caste bodies. Thus, both these new
forms of governance, and concomitant rescaling of governance, profoundly shape not
only material infrastructures on the ground, but social power geometries in ways that pro-
duced new hardships for particular intersectional gender/class/caste groups in the city.

Towards a “Clean, Green, and Smart” Indore

Although Indore is India’s 9th largest city and home to more than 2 million people, it is
nonetheless categorized as a tier-two city. As such, the municipality envisions itself as a
“smart” alternative location for businesses and companies that wish to avoid the hassles and
competition for space ascribed to India’s mega-cities (DBSS, 2018). Efforts to “Clean and
Green” Indore have not only come about through the SBM, but prior initiatives to make
Indore attractive to investors and businesses, as well as a heritage site for tourists. Indore,
notably, was one of the 20 cities selected in a nation-wide inter-urban competition for
“Smart City” funding from the central government in 2016. Coinciding with the SBM,
Indore’s Smart City initiative followed the directives of the national government’s larger
smart city urban mission to make the smart cities open defecation-free, which states: “a
smart city has no open defecation, and a full supply of toilets based on the population”
(GOI, n. d.). Furthermore, Indore has received central funds through the “Housing for All”
scheme, a federal program for cities to provide affordable and legal housing to the urban

724 EPE: Nature and Space 4(3)

poor. Although infrastructure and services like housing, sewerage, and water supply are

highly unequal in the city—with significant informal settlements and diverse infrastructural

configurations—the city also has a unique history of more progressive housing policies (on

paper) compared to municipalities in neighboring states, including the Patta Act in Madhya

Pradesh that purportedly ensures greater degrees of tenure security for residents of informal

settlements. As we shall see in the latter sections of the article, the intersection of national

urban schemes and historic and localized legal precedence for settlers’ rights have profound-

ly shaped both the implementation and the unequal lived experiences of SBM.

Rescaling governance and the new metrics of “Cleanliness”

According to the Ministry of Urban Development, the SBM aims to “foster a spirit of

competition among the cities [being evaluated] and offers a comprehensive assessment of

their sanitation status” (Ministry of Urban Development, 2017a: 1, our italics).

Approximately 118 cities were declared open defecation-free in 2017, and thus Indore’s

achievement of the first place ranking that year occurred through criteria that included an

ODF declaration, but went beyond it. In particular, the SBM puts in place a set of highly

specific metrics for calculating a city’s cleanliness. The SBM utilizes a number of criteria and

a points system, developed through the federal level of governance, to evaluate sanitation and

hygiene levels in the 500 cities of its purview, assessing each city through the following three

mechanisms: (1) municipal documentation (given 45% weightage), (2) independent observa-

tion (through the Swachh Survekshan, and given 25% weightage), and (3) citizen feedback

(given 30% weightage). These three assessment mechanisms are then applied to differing

thematic parameters of measuring a “clean” city that include: (i) municipal solid waste man-

agement, (ii) the presence of toilets and open defecation-free status, (iii) capacity building and

e-learning, and (iv) what the mission calls “information, education, communication (IEC)

and behavior change.” The monitoring and ranking body, called the Swachh Survekshan, is

an independent group contracted with the Ministry of Urban Development at the central

level, which both observes measures of cleanliness (mechanism 2) and evaluates municipal

documentation and citizen feedback (mechanisms 1 and 3). This occurs annually in January

and February, when the SS sends officers to observe and evaluate data across 500 cities. The

end result, according to the Ministry of Urban Development, is one in which:

. . . this survekshan would help the centre and state governments mentor and guide cities based

on their performance vis-à-vis other cities and identify other areas of improvement. The findings

will also enable the cities to learn about the best practices being implemented in other cities and

to adopt them, tailored to their own requirements. (Ministry of Urban Development, 2017a: 2)

After Indore was awarded first place in 2017, the IMC produced a 168-page document,

including pictures and slides, to convey its “best practices” regarding becoming the cleanest

Indian city, the majority of which focus on the multiple tactics used to stop open defecation

and address solid waste management (Ministry of Urban Development, 2017b).

Citizen policing and deepening intersectional social power hierarchies

In this section, we show how the development of these key “best practices”—particularly

those implemented at the municipal level of governance to end open defecation, prove the

presence of toilets, and change citizen behaviors—inaugurated new forms of both discursive

and material power at the local level, authorizing new policing roles for particular officials

Truelove and O’Reilly 725

and groups of citizens. First, the IMC formed local “swachhagrahis,” using groups of
citizens to “spread awareness” and monitor open defecation. In practice, the swachhagrahi
campaign resulted in the much-heralded use of citizen “dibba gangs,” or groups of children
and men who policed open defecation in the morning hours across all 84 wards of the city.
In most cases, dibba gangs consisted of middle-class or elite upper-caste Hindus.
Contrastingly, the individuals practicing ODF were from predominately lower-castes in
many instances, with poor women’s bodies being specifically targeted (Srivastav, 2017).
Dibba-gang members were deployed to various places between 4:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. to
track OD, predominately the hours when women go, i.e. in the dark. This policing entailed
beating metal containers (a dibba) like a drum when witnessing open defecation to interrupt
and draw attention to the practice. The IMC, along with a number of newspapers, produced
photo documentation of such policing, all praising this “innovative” citizen practice in
helping the city to change uncouth behaviors and end open defecation in its pursuit of
cleanliness (see, for example, PTI, 2016).

Officials from the IMC openly declared that “dibba gangs” should serve to embarrass
and humiliate the “offending” (female) body. As recounted by the Additional Commissioner
of the IMC:

There is not just the ‘dibba gang’, we have the ‘whistle gang,’ ‘mic gang’ [referring to the use of

temple speakers in broadcasting incidences of open defecation in the area] as well – they work in

the same routine, if they see people defecating in open they shout and embarrass them.

Our motto is to change their behavior. (Bhatia, 2017)

Additional disciplining measures were put in place by the municipality, including “spot
fines,” which empowered official IMC “clean marshals” to level Rs. 100 fine on any
person caught open defecating, again targeting the female body, this time through its
unequal criminalization. A signed agreement not to defecate in the open by school children
and urban residents was also used as key “evidence” submitted to the center to demonstrate
that ODF had ceased. Pictures of these policing practices were featured in Indore’s “best
practices” report on ending OD and becoming India’s cleanest city.

The embodied ramifications of new regimes for monitoring, enumerating, and document-
ing sanitation in Indore deepened intersecting class/caste/gender inequities and power rela-
tions in the city. Firstly, household members who did not have access to latrines within
homes, or within the neighborhood, were the primary targets of the campaign. These bodies
became subject to new policing tactics that worsened the negative physical and affective
experiences surrounding already inadequate sanitation in predominately poor and informal
settlements. However, the experience of such new policing tactics must be further situated
within poor communities to account for the already-existing gender and caste dimensions of
sanitation practices. For example, urinating in public places is socially acceptable for male
bodies, but immodest for females, opening more spaces for men to urinate while spatially
constraining women’s options. In addition, public urinals have been put in place across a
number of Indore’s districts for men through the SBM, but toilets for women are far more
uncommon (Ministry of Urban Development, 2017b). Notably, women already police their
bodies, to ensure that the need to urinate and defecate does not occur at the wrong time and
place—a source of measurable psychosocial stress (O’Reilly et al., 2018). Because of the
regular harassment and threats of violence women face in cities when they open defecate (see
Truelove, 2011), women coordinate their open defecation with other women, going in
groups in the early morning as a mechanism to increase safety and reduce psychosocial
stress. Children and adolescent girls go in the company of their mothers or other relatives,

726 EPE: Nature and Space 4(3)

and may be even more constrained in their mobility than adult women. Such coping strat-

egies make women’s practice of open defecation more visible (since there are a number of

women congregating together) in urban spaces, and thus additionally vulnerable to harass-

ment and policing gangs. Conversely, men may journey to fields or railway tracks alone, or

on the way to a work site (for example, near construction sites), which is a much more

mobile, flexible, and spontaneous practice than for women, and frees them from the type of

visibility and scrutiny that new policing tactics level of women’s bodies. Furthermore, within

informal settlements, lower-caste groups may be the last to be able to access, or afford,

latrines within their homes and communities, and in general constitute a higher proportion

of the urban poor. As such, open defecation is not only a gendered and classed practice, but

one that is inflected, and re-produced, through existing caste inequalities and violences.
Thus, as SBM policing efforts at the municipal level notably operated through the insti-

tutionalization of gendered shaming and new caste and class based patterns of citizen polic-

ing and even criminalization, it furthered the harassment and social obstacles to accessing

secure infrastructure that poor and lower-caste women endure in the city, while empowering

upper-caste male citizens with heightened powers of authority over women’s bodies. Thus,

these new policing regimes made early morning sanitation practices more intolerable and

difficult for poor women, while deepening unequal power geometries that women face and

experience in everyday life. Here, the practices utilized by “dibba gangs,” IMC officials

leveling spot fines, and upper-caste groups narrating open defecation on loud speakers—

all mobilized in service to the city’s (and nation’s) cleanliness—place women as culprits and

offenders, rather than the sufferers, of the city’s inadequate sanitation. Women are meant to

mend and repair their ways, rather than the city adequately servicing and repairing its

absent and decaying infrastructure.
NGO activists monitoring the issue reported that such practices constituted an intensifica-

tion of gendered “harassment.” For example, one activist reported that the harassment of the

female body spread beyond targeting the practice of open defecation, but also intersected with

broader patterns of gendered harassment to extend to what women were wearing, for exam-

ple, with men calling out jokes about a woman’s sari falling down while attempting to relieve

herself, while also taking pictures to submit to the municipality as evidence of the gang’s good

work (DBSS, 2018). While heightening visibility onto women’s open defecation, such practices

also serve to further render invisible the amplified inequities women living in informal settle-

ments face in a city in which housing and latrines exist in states of disrepair, decay, or are

widely absent altogether. In this way, infrastructures’ absence, decay, and temporal fragility

are deeply entwined with embodied, affective experiences of inadequate sanitation since these

infrastructures are neither provisioned nor maintained in a safe, reliable, or secure manner.

Yet, despite these substantial material hardships and exclusions from key urban resources, the

poor (often lower-caste) female body is marked as responsible for dirtying and polluting the

city through “backward” and “uneducated” practices by which she may have little choice to

alter.3 Her body is policed, laughed at, and ridiculed, rather than being represented as caught

in a nexus in which every sanitation option (if there are options indeed) produces negative

psychosocial, bodily, material, and socio-economic consequences.

The making and unmaking of latrines and its rippling

infrastructural effects

In this section, we elaborate a second conceptualization of what we term infrastructural

intersectionality, or the ways that the practices of making infrastructure (in this case,

Truelove and O’Reilly 727

latrines) simultaneously work to both shape and unmake other infrastructures (e.g. housing,
and networks of social collaboration and support). Thus, we point to the multiplying effect
that changes (e.g. installation, repair, decay, breakdown) of one infrastructure can have in
relation to other infrastructures, and argue that such intersections are critical in shaping the
unequal lived experiences, and violence, of infrastructural transformation in the everyday.
Specifically, we show how the practices to monitor and “prove” the presence of toilets
throughout the city produce a set of rippling consequences that intersect with, and re-
shape residents’ lived experiences of other infrastructures. Thus, by following the infra-
structures of toilets, we examine the repercussions of toilet-making on informal housing,
specifically, the infrastructures of the city’s “Housing for All” scheme. We demonstrate that
the repair of sanitation in Indore, through “cleaning” the city, is inflected by tensions
between it and the demolition and displacement associated with informal housing.
Consequently, we trace how changes to the infrastructures of sanitation ultimately produce
snow-balling effects on both the material infrastructures of housing and social infrastruc-
tures of collaboration and support in informal settlements.

The optics of toilets and the politics of housing

The state of Madhya Pradesh is remarkable compared to other Indian states because of a
1984 Act that is, in theory, designed to assure housing rights to the homeless. Through what
is known colloquially as the Patta Act (MP Nagariya Kshetro Ke Bhoomihin Vyakti
Adhiniyam), the state is required to provision housing for the poor on government land.
In addition, there are pro-poor laws regarding land—15% land provision in every colony
has to go to “weaker portions of society,” and 15% towards a relocation/resettlement zone.
De jure housing rights, however, manifest themselves differently in practice. Furthermore,
the “Housing for All Scheme,” operating at the center, provisions funds to the municipality
of Indore, which have mostly been used in practice to shift residents from informal settle-
ments to resettlement areas (usually on the periphery of the city). Residents’ housing status
in relation to these schemes serves to further shape their unequal lived experiences of the
SBM and its rippling repercussions.

When the Swachh Survekshan came to Indore in January 2017 to measure the city’s
cleanliness, city officials scrambled to erase from visibility those houses and neighborhoods
of the poor that had not yet been provided toilets. A visible lack of toilets for its population
would stymie any hopes the city had for a top ranking, and would also hinder its “smart city”
goal of achieving an ODF city, for which the city had also received funds. The temporary need
by the municipality to hide the absence and decay of toilets for the poor resulted in the
haphazard displacement of slum dwellers through the removal of their homes and “missing”
toilets from the landscape. Here, we see how the city’s sanitation drive orchestrated at the
municipal level, but funded and mandated at the central level of the state, serves to propel the
destruction of housing and toilets that were intended to correct infrastructural forms of
uneven development, but instead reproduced the marginalization and precarity of the poor
by simultaneously destroying other infrastructures of social and material support.

For example, on Sukhniwas road (discussed in the introduction), despite households
paying the IMC for toilets in advance of the SS’s arrival, the municipality razed 40
houses belonging to the Bhil community (classified by the GOI as a Scheduled Tribe)
because of the IMC’s own failure to build and install the toilets before the SS visit. In an
adjacent lane to Sukhniwas road, 72 houses were also demolished through the same tactics.
When residents asked IMC officials why they were demolishing their homes, IMC officials
responded by blaming the sudden demolition on “higher ups,” saying that they had been

728 EPE: Nature and Space 4(3)

ordered to demolish “houses without toilets,” and thus were only following directives
(Shantha, 2017). Here we see a multiplying effect of infrastructural violence on the Bhil
community, orchestrated and revealed in the tensions between the construction and demo-
lition of intersecting infrastructures: the inability of officials to build and install toilets in a
timely way resulted in the destruction of housing and displacement of Bhils from both their
homes and long-established social networks. Sunita, a woman living near the Sukhniwas
road who had her house demolished, recalled: “Pits were dug for the toilets. But when they
came to demolish our houses, they also filled up those pits and planted saplings there,”
apparently in an effort to obscure evidence of the municipality’s unfinished work to build
the toilets (Shantha, 2017). Freshly dug pits materially represent slum dwellers’ hopes for
state benefits and a new security of urban belonging—expectations that were raised and then
dashed. Moreover, filled pits and planted saplings supply material evidence of the power of
the state to recognize and render invisible material and social infrastructures.

While some Sukhniwas residents attempted to stay on the site after demolition, using
makeshift material (tarpaulin and sheds) to repair their housing by fashioning temporary
shelter, the majority were forced to leave. For example, a group of families that worked for
the same employer were offered shelter in a nearby plot he owned. Although their belong-
ings were scattered and lost, they had a temporary place to stay. However, such displace-
ment put these residents further in the debt of their employer, while simultaneously
removing them from their neighborhood and setting in motion the erosion of the social
infrastructures of cooperation that supported them. For example, the social networks that
help residents find temporary jobs, the collaborative work of women to arrange for water,
and the sharing of electricity were no longer possible. Such experiences further reshaped
affective trajectories of home and belonging (Ramakrishnan, 2014), with some residents
expressing hope of a return to Sukhniwas, while others remained reeling from the emotional
impact of being separated from long-standing communities simply due to an absence of
(already paid for) toilets. Additionally, there were no toilets at the new site, which appeared
to be outside the purview of the SS monitoring team as it was the employer’s property. One
resident, named Shilpa Bhabar, indicated that she was allowed to move back to the place of
her demolished home after around one month. She states: “We were asked to leave the city
for some days [when the SS came]. When we returned, we were allowed to build our houses
here [again]” (Shantha, 2017), a practice that would surely entail significant rippling hard-
ships, eroding any savings her family might have and forcing them to begin from scratch in
gathering the materials for their home. If material infrastructure is unstable and unpredict-
able over time, then so too is the affective experience multiple and fleeting. For Shilpa
Bhabar, loss through demolition and worry over the labor and cost of repair flowed in
parallel with the instability of infrastructures. On Sukhniwas road, as with Bhuri Tekri as we
shall see below, the timing and geography of both the SBM and the “Housing for All
Scheme” overlapped in ways that resulted in the paradoxical extension and demolition of
both toilets and housing with uneven affective consequences.

In the settlement called Bhuri Tekri, which is situated in a hilly area that used to be a
quarry, the city’s use of the ‘Housing for All’ scheme had scheduled the area for demolition
and resettlement of more than 800 households, a prospect that many residents had protested
and resisted (DBSS, 2018). The IMC’s plans became further complicated by an impending
visit by the SS and its measurement of toilets. An area of land outside the city center (and far
from employment and transport) had been allotted for relocation of households, although
two multi-story buildings for re-housing had not yet been constructed there (a point of
alarm for Bhuri Tekri’s residents). However, the demolition was scheduled to occur several
months after the SS was due to arrive in Indore. This placed IMC officials in a conundrum

Truelove and O’Reilly 729

of how to handle the fact that the centrally located settlement did not have toilets on site,
and thus could potentially jeopardize the city’s ODF ranking. To ensure that toilets would
be visibly present on a site shortly to be demolished, the IMC spent more than 13 million
rupees to build 825 toilets in advance of the SS’s visit (Shantha, 2017).

Bhuri Tekri residents had been formally protesting their eviction since it was announced,
and hoped that installing toilets might solidify their claims to remain in their homes. For
example, Krishan Kuma Vishwakarma paid Rs. 1400 to have a latrine built in his 300
square foot house, wanting to stave off resettlement. But he and approximately 700 addi-
tional families had their toilets and homes destroyed two months after toilets had been built
to showcase their presence to the SS. These residents had their lives moved to the periphery
of the city where neither new homes, nor latrines, had been built on the site. In fact, around
50 mobile toilets had been brought in for their use, many of which residents reported fell
quickly into disrepair, reeked, and had no drainage system in the area. The makeshift toilets
were particularly problematic to women as they were forced to choose between the risks of a
hazardous and dysfunctional toilet and those associated with open defecation. Residents
found themselves simultaneously displaced from their homes, new latrines, livelihoods (since
new residential locations are far from the city), and social networks. The poor were thus
displaced from long-established and incrementally accruing infrastructures to unfinished,
decaying and absent housing, sanitation, and water infrastructure (Shantha, 2017). In quick
succession, residents experienced the optimism of recognized, permanent neighborhoods in
the city due to state-provided household toilets, followed by feelings of disappointment,
disgust, and neglect as the IMC pushed them literally and figuratively to the periphery.
In sum, here we see the disproportionate and intersectional effects of national SBM policies
and the locally implemented Clean City drive on the making and unmaking other infra-
structures of the city on lower-caste, poor, and female bodies.

Conclusion: Infrastructural intersectionality

In this paper, we demonstrate the connections between the implementation of sanitation
infrastructure and the rippling effects onto other vital and critical infrastructures that result.
We reveal how the violence ensuing from national and local sanitation initiatives to “Clean
Indore” gives rise to compounding forms of corporeal suffering that distinguished
“offending” bodies and exposed particular caste, class, and gender groups to intersecting
hardships related to material and social infrastructures, ultimately reifying intersectional
power geometries in the city amidst ongoing changes. As there have been few studies to date
that analyze the social impacts of the Clean India Mission—specifically within the cities
awarded the highest rankings—our research addresses this gap. Our analysis calls for an
approach of “infrastructural intersectionality” to situate the uneven impacts and situated
violences of infrastructural transformation.

In particular, our findings regarding the material and embodied effects of the SBM in
Indore necessitate working through the differing dimensions of what we term infrastructural
intersectionality. We specifically show two dimensions of intersectionality with regard to
Indore’s infrastructure and the SBM. The first draws directly from feminist theory and prior
sanitation scholarship, referring to the intersectionality of social identities and power rela-
tions that are embedded and stabilized through the temporal fragility of infrastructures, as
seen through the material and affective consequences of the SBM. The second considers the
intersectionality of infrastructures in different phases of construction, decay, repair, and
demolition that are co-constituted and entangled, and revealed through the spillover effects
of latrine-making onto the unmaking of housing and social networks of support (that also in

730 EPE: Nature and Space 4(3)

turn shape intersectional power relations). By putting forward these conceptualizations
regarding the intersectional effects of infrastructure, we call for approaches to situate
the political, material, and affective dimensions of infrastructure and its associated forms
of violence.

In analyzing this second dimension of infrastructural intersectionality, or the ways the
transformation of one infrastructure spills over to affect others, this study considers Indore’s
sanitation infrastructure through the analytic of temporal fragility—specifically, construc-
tion, decay, repair, and demolition. Our findings expose the relationality between the
making of new sanitation infrastructures, on the one hand, and the simultaneous unmaking
of toilets, housing, and social infrastructures of support. In particular, the city’s attempts to
repair its absent and decaying sanitation infrastructure were activated by a decentralization
of power from the central government through the SBM’s urban mandate. This resulted in
empowering local officials, upper-caste groups, and men in the policing of open defecation
and, more specifically, poor women’s bodily practices and spaces. Furthermore, the emer-
gent power geometries associated with enumerating and documenting infrastructure, includ-
ing those used to “prove” that open defecation had ceased and the monitoring and counting
of neighborhoods with toilets, brought visibility to Indore’s urban spaces and infrastruc-
tures at critical moments in time. As such, poor households in locations where the state had
failed to fully construct and repair toilets (in time) were demolished for the SS’s survey.
Open defecation and absent or incomplete toilets were temporarily eradicated from the
landscape. In other words, evidence that would prevent Indore’s ODF status and lower
its cleanliness ranking was erased from view by removing bodies, practices, and infrastruc-
tures from urban spaces. Such practices also served to dislocate people from homes, rever-
berating through other critical infrastructures. In perhaps the most paradoxical of moments,
millions of rupees were poured into the construction of new toilets that the state knew could
never be used, since the new latrines were located in a settlement (Bhuri Tekri) slotted to be
demolished shortly after their construction. After the Swachh Survekshan came to Indore
and completed their measurements, both the new toilets and homes in the vicinity were
leveled to the ground, revealing the uneven and contradictory material and socio-political
effects leveled across the cityscape in the name of becoming India’s cleanest city.

Finally, regarding the ways intersectional social identities and power relations are shaped
through the multiple infrastructures discussed above, we show that the effects of making
Indore India’s “Cleanest City” reified specific power geometries and compounded hardships
for the urban poor, women, and lower-caste groups. Although the guidelines of the Clean
City Mission are discursively represented as fulfilling Gandhi’s dream—understood as the
national goal for all citizens of making India a clean, healthy place—the effects in Indore
produced situated corporeal suffering, inequities, and infrastructural violence for specific
groups of city-dwellers, namely poor residents, women, and lower-caste groups. We show
that the Mission’s focus on ensuring cities are open defecation-free shaped not only uneven
sanitation practices and access to toilets, but also drove intense affective encounters with
infrastructure for particular urban citizens through processes of construction, decay, repair,
and demolition. Thus, we demonstrate the criticality of embodied and gendered approaches
for analyzing how caste, class, and gender intersect with both visible and invisible urban
infrastructures, revealing the power of the state to both unequally impact and even erase
specific bodies from the urban landscape.

Thus, our findings show the everyday ramifications of new regimes for monitoring, enu-
merating, and documenting sanitation infrastructure in Indore that deepened intersecting
social inequities and power relations in the city. Gendered bodies, specifically those of
lower-caste women, became the disproportionate subjects of new policing tactics that made

Truelove and O’Reilly 731

the physical and affective experiences of already inadequate sanitation in predominately poor

and informal settlements even worse. Such tactics heightened visibility and the punitive

repercussions (including intensified psychosocial stress) of women’s open defecation, as well

as the power of upper-caste, predominately male groups in policing women’s bodies in service

of the city’s cleanliness. However, lower-caste women’s experience of infrastructural violence

reached its most extreme when their investments in toilets (that never came) resulted in the

subsequent demolition of their homes, creating a crisis in which women were unable to access

multiple, critical infrastructures of urban life. We show that this compounded, corporeal

violence is crucial for understanding the unequal socio-political and lived experiences of the

SBM and quests to make cities “clean”, “smart,” and open defecation-free.

Highlights

• In 2017, Indore was nationally recognized with the Cleanest City award of India.
• The SBM redistributes governmental power to municipalities, upper-caste groups, and

minor officials, restructuring local power geometries and generating infrastructural

violence.
• Processes of installation, decay, repair, and demolition of infrastructure simultaneously

work to unmake other material and social infrastructures.
• “Infrastructural intersectionality” is an approach tailored to situate the political, mate-

rial, and affective dimensions of infrastructure.
• We demonstrate the criticality of embodied and gendered approaches to analyzing the

power of infrastructure in the everyday.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jessica Budds and Kavita Ramakrishnan for their helpful and con-

structive feedback on multiple drafts of this article. We are also grateful to the organizers and par-

ticipants of the 2018 University of East Anglia “Processes of Decay and Repair: Ecologies of Life,

Politics and Urban Infrastructure” workshop for their suggestions and engagement with the ideas

presented here. Additional thanks to Anu Sabhlok and Jennifer Fluri for their feedback on the article

when presented at the 2018 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers session on

Gendered Infrastructures. We are also indebted to Anand Lakhan for his insights on Indore. Finally,

we greatly appreciate the time and effort that Leila Harris and three anonymous reviewers gave toward

improving this

article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or

publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this

article.

ORCID iD

Yaffa Truelove https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9295-122X

732 EPE: Nature and Space 4(3)

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9295-122X

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9295-122X

Notes

1. These secondary sources have also been utilized to document residents’ experiences and interviews

in real time preceding and during the days of the SS visit, in which the authors were not present in

Indore.
2. On 2 October 2019, Prime Minister Modi contentiously declared that SBM had met its goals,

despite numerous studies that suggest otherwise (Economic & Political Weekly, 2019).
3. Here, we do not mean to infer that women do not resist and exert their own agencies with regard to

their urban experience, but rather to indicate the unequal structural, material, and discursive

conditions shaping women’s bodies.

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CAPRESSURE: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply
in Mumbai

NIKHIL ANAND
Haverford College

Now there is a [state] policy regulation for water that we are bound by. Those
structures prior to January 1995 are eligible for basic amenities. We are
allowed . . . supposed to give water to them. Those [who have unauthorized
structures built] after that date also get water. They make arrangements to take
connections, forge ration cards and do such things to get them. . . . In slums our
policy is to give water connections to federations of 15 employees. We bring
the connection to them, and their secretary is responsible for bill collection
maintenance, bill payment, etc. If the population is at higher elevations, then
we provide them with a suction pump and infrastructure at the bottom, and
make them responsible for its operation and maintenance. The total revenue
of the department is Rs. 1480 crores, of which Rs. 800 crore is the profit.1 It
is the only public utility with such performance. The slum dwellers are good
paymasters. The government is not. Central, state governments are difficult.
So this is the summary. You have questions?

—Patkar, Engineer, Water Department, Mumbai, September 14, 20072

Early in my fieldwork, I talked with Patkar, a senior hydraulic engineer at the
headquarters of Mumbai’s water supply department. I asked him to tell me about
the city’s water system, particularly as it pertained to slum dwellers. Experienced
in talking with reporters and researchers about the city’s water supply, Patkar
told me about the quantities of the city’s system—its lakes, pipes, scarcities, and

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 26, Issue 4, pp. 542–564. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C© 2011 by
the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01111.x

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POLITECHNICS OF WATER SUPPLY IN MUMBAI

topographies. As he started to tell me about the ways in which settlers access
water,3 however, his narrative shifted to incorporate the language of incomplete
entitlements and differentiated state policies. This slippage, enacted in the gap
between what state technocrats are supposed to do and what they are allowed to
do, reveals the flexibility and contingency that settlers are subject to when accessing
water in the city. Even though city water rules allow only certain settlers (settled
prior to 1995) to access the system legally, Patkar is aware that nearly all settlers
access some municipal water. Patkar takes care to point out that the circumscribed
legitimacy of settlers in accessing water is not based on their inability to pay water
bills in Mumbai, nor is it because the city water utility lacks the funds or the
expertise to invest in network improvements to the city’s settlements. The degree
to which settlers (currently comprising 60 percent of Mumbai’s population) can
access water depends instead on politically mediated cutoff dates and physically
mediated topographies, on pumps and secretaries, and on department policies and
the tacit ways in which these can be circumvented.

Following Patkar’s recognition of the ways in which politics, technology, and
physics simultaneously configure Mumbai’s water supply, in this article, I suggest
that “pressure” might be a useful analytic to understand how settlers claim water
in Mumbai. You need pressure to make water flow. To get water, settlers and
engineers need to make different kinds of pressure. Pressure can be mobilized by
using pumps or politicians, and access to the technologies of pressure is mediated
as much by capital as by social connections. To understand the importance of
pressure is to recognize that water is accessed by enabling both physical and social
relations, and water supply can be curtailed as much by politics as by topogra-
phy. The different ways of making pressure—and the social and natural relations
they entail—elucidate the ways in which diverse groups are able to settle the
city.

Based on 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork between a settlement in
northern Mumbai and the field offices of the city water department, in this article I
seek to draw together literatures in political ecology and citizenship so as to theorize
how cities are made livable, inhabited, and claimed. By focusing on how settlers
access water in Mumbai, I wish to make two points. First, I seek to move beyond
binary theorizations of haves and have-nots that are commonplace in writings
about cities, especially those in the global south (Davis 2006; Harvey 2008). Both
in scholarly and in popular literature, Mumbai has frequently been thought of
(and measured) in binary terms—those who have more than they can ever need
and others who have desperately little to live on (Banerjee-Guha 2009; Human

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:4

Development Report 2009). This political economic narrative is a simplification.
As both proponents and critics of this narrative will point out, things are more
complex on the ground. In urging that we think beyond this narrative, I do not
wish to suggest that inequality is not a trenchant problem. Instead I suggest it is
important to move beyond this narrative for both theoretical and political reasons.
As feminist geographers have pointed out, dualistic narratives are constitutive of
capitalism and make few resources available to those that are marginalized by them,
save that of revolutionary collective action (Gibson-Graham 1996; Hart 2002; see
also Chakrabarty 2000). Furthermore, political economic narratives have been
unable to show how, despite tremendous odds, those marginalized by the state
and the market actually make their homes and stay in them through what Asef
Bayat calls “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary” (Bayat 1997:61; see also
Ghannam 2002).

After three decades of settlement, life is less precarious than it was previously
for many living in Mumbai’s older settlements. Many residents no longer identify
themselves as “poor.” How have certain settlers established themselves in the
city? Which settlers are able to establish themselves in the city? Here, I think
through these questions by paying attention to the ways in which they access
water.

Second, I focus on how settlers pressure the water system to draw attention
to the materiality of water and the ways in which water is drawn into and ex-
ceeds political formations. Recent work in urban geography has focused on the
hydrosocial cycle of urban water systems (Gandy 2002; Kaika 2005; McFarlane
2008; Swyngedouw 2004). Drawing Haraway and Harvey into a productive con-
versation, Kaika suggests that we need to denaturalize “fetishized relations of pro-
duction and the hidden material networks and flows that urbanize nature” (Kaika
2005:5). This approach has been tremendously valuable in demonstrating how cities
are implicated in networks of environmental, political, and social relations that al-
ways exceed their geographies (Gandy 2002; see also Cronon 1991). As water is
transmitted to and distributed through the city, it produces regimes of management
and marginalization (Swyngedouw 2004). Nevertheless, while this approach has
illuminated the power necessary to produce and draw water into the city, it has had
less to say about quotidian practices and the “microspheres of negotiation” through
which settlers in the city access water (Gandy 2008:125). It also says little about
how and why the materiality of water itself is critical to its political formations
(see Larkin 2008; Latour 2004; Mitchell 2002).

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POLITECHNICS OF WATER SUPPLY IN MUMBAI

As thousands of city employees work hard to move water through many miles
of pipes and into urban homes, water is not easily controlled in this technopolitical
system; it leaks and disappears. In drawing attention to the corporality of water,
I seek to make a contribution to the scholarship in political ecology and science
studies, in which scholars have urged us to avoid treating nature as a passive
substrate on which politics acts (Bennet 2010; Forsyth 2003; Mitchell 2002; Vayda
and Walters 1999). As Barry points out, a materialist analysis of politics is one
that “must attend to the resistance of matter to political control” (Barry 2001:26).
Focusing on pressure in particular, I try to show how water is figured not only
by particular technopolitical formations but also by the ways in which it exceeds
politics and destabilizes its distribution regimes.

Through manipulations of pressure, water is made available to diverse social
groups. Not only do these practices enable settlers to live in the city but also effect
what I call hydraulic citizenship: a form of belonging to the city enabled by social
and material claims made to the city’s water infrastructure. Produced in a field
that is social and physical, hydraulic citizenship is born out of diverse articulations
between the technologies of politics (enabled by laws, politicians, and patrons) and
the politics of technology (enabled by plumbing, pipes, and pumps). It depends on
the fickle and changing flows of water, the social relations through which everyday
political claims are recognized, and the materials that enable urban residents to
connect to and receive reliable water from the urban system. As settlers and other
residents constantly evaluate and respond to the dynamic flow of water in the city,
these connections both elucidate and differentiate the ways in which settlers are
able to claim and live in the city.

By drawing attention to the ways in which hydraulic citizenship is made through
personal, political, and material claims on the city infrastructure, I show that the
public realm isn’t “denuded” (Gandy 2008) but is saturated with diverse social
and political claims that exceed the frameworks of liberal, modern citizenship.
Mobilizing electoral politics, settlers pressure state bureaucracies and make them
respond to their needs. They modify pipes and pumps, sometimes with the support
of city officers, and sometimes despite their sanctions, to make resilient and
powerful settlements in the city (Benjamin 2005; Sundaram 2010). Drawing on
Scott’s (1990) articulation of “infrapolitics,” I suggest that these practices are not
merely coping strategies, nor are they prepolitical. They critically compromise the
authority of city engineers and other technocrats to control the system, and they
are central to understanding the workings of the contemporary urban hydraulic
system in cities like Mumbai.

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:4

In Mumbai, upper- and middle-class residents access water through property
developers, who hire consultants, experts, and liaisons to “convince” city officials
to sanction large and reliable water connections to their developments prior to
their occupation. In contrast, the homes of settlers are not constructed follow-
ing the city’s formal approval process. They are recognized as being eligible for
municipal services only a decade or so after their construction, after they are
deemed to be critical to the electoral successes of political representatives, and
after they have been functionally administered by dadas (big men) for several years
(Hansen 2001).

Therefore, I begin by showing how settlers access water from the public
system. Through processes of incremental and differentiated citizenship, qualified
settlers are required to substantiate applications for water connections with a
formidable set of documents to prove their residence. Because this coterie of
documents—described below—is difficult to assemble, settlers do not approach the
water office directly but instead approach city representatives for “help” in getting
water connections. As they mobilize diverse relations with democratically elected
representatives, dadas, and social workers to access water, settlers constitute
themselves as citizens and subjects of the city.

In a critical and influential formulation, Partha Chatterjee identifies these prac-
tices as characteristic of what he calls “political society.” Settlers “make their claims
on government, and in turn are governed, not within the framework of stable con-
stitutionally defined rights and laws, but rather through temporary, contextual and
unstable arrangements arrived at through direct political negotiations” (Chatterjee
2008:57). Chatterjee suggests that it is through moral and political claims made as
a population on the sensibilities of leaders and city officials that settlers get access
to water.

As I show in this article, settlers try and engage both civil and political relations
to get water. Yet, not all settlers in Mumbai are able to access water reliably from the
city administration, whether through political society mobilizations or citizenship
claims. In the final section of this article, I focus on the ways in which certain
settlers in the settlement of Premnagar are unable to receive water with reasonable
pressure. Pressure’s absence reveals much about how it is made. Focusing on
how water engineers do not attend to the water needs of Premnagar’s residents,
I describe why they are unable to constitute themselves as a deserving political
society. In so doing, not only do I wish to point to the limits of political society but
I also want to describe the multiple ways in which some settlers are able to survive
in the city despite the absence of municipal water pressure. The diverse ways in

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POLITECHNICS OF WATER SUPPLY IN MUMBAI

which they access water—through illegal connections and subterranean flow—
point to how water is not entirely encompassed by powerful political regimes and
also to the multiple ways in which diverse settlers are able to manage and establish
themselves in the city.

POLITICAL TECHNOLOGIES

Mumbai’s water supply department was founded in 1860, when the colonial
government responded to a debilitating drought by designing and constructing
dams beyond the boundaries of the island city. From its earliest days, the water
supply system of the city was limited and not adequate to serve all residents of
the city. Colonial officials and their elite municipal council sought to extend water
networks only to a limited population—typically the wealthier classes and British
subjects (Dossal 1991).4 This approach of “salutary neglect” left large sections of
the city’s population out of biopolitical systems of government and put them in the
sovereign control of “customary leaders,” whose primary function was to ensure
their populations did not disturb the law and order of the city (Chandavarkar 2007;
Hazareesingh 2000). Working beyond the regimes of liberal government since the
colonial era, dadas have managed these areas as patrons, disciplining them with
discretionary resources and violence (Hansen 2005). In the absence of suffrage and
citizenship rights, settlers had few resources in colonial times to demand water and
other urban infrastructure (Chandavarkar 2007).

The expansion of national political citizenship in the postcolonial period,
exercised by settlers by voting in elections, has steadily reconfigured relationships
between dadas and their local populations, for whom they have always been a
vital link in accessing urban resources. Because settlers are critical to the electoral
success of political parties, the city’s dominant political outfits have worked to
bring the services of the state (water, electricity, hospitals, schools) to settlements
in a highly visible manner. They often do this by supporting, and seeking the
support of dadas and other leaders in the settlements. This is accomplished not
only by working to accommodate their ad hoc demands for the state’s resources
but also by nominating them to run on party tickets in city and state elections
(Hansen 2005).

I got a better sense of these processes while conducting fieldwork in Mumbai.
On a wet July afternoon, I arrived at the house of Rané, a leader of one of the more
prominent women’s groups in a settlement that was approximately 25 years old.
Rané had a well-appointed house. It was clean and neat, painted in pink, with floor
tiles. The room where we talked was well lit and ventilated. I was introduced to

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:4

her three-year-old, who was watching a television that was flanked by a fish tank
on one side and a cluster of dolls with blond hair and blue eyes on the other. Rané’s
husband worked as a clerk in a municipal office, a reliable job that guaranteed them
a degree of financial stability. For many years, Rané had led a women’s group in the
settlement that was strongly affiliated with the women’s wing of the Shiv Sena.5

Like other groups in the area, the group appeared to have been more active in
times past. Now, group members met twice a year, primarily around the Ganpati
festival to collect donations to host the festival and at the beginning of the academic
year to distribute schoolbooks donated by the Shiv Sena.

In response to my initial question about the settlement’s history, Rané began
her narrative the way many settlers did. Without a trace of nostalgia, she told me
of their water difficulties in the early 1980s, when no councilors would pay any
attention to them. They would get water from the well. Soon after, they began
going to the nearby cemetery to buy municipal water from the caretaker at 10p
a handa (vessel). As the price of water rose to Re. 1 per handa,6 they decided to
petition a political leader for help.

A Congress MLA [state legislator of the Congress Party] helped us. . . . He
provided a two-inch line at first, but soon after, the pressure wasn’t there.
People began making holes in the ground (gaddha) for water when the public
standpost no longer gave enough water. Then later, Tendulkar [a Sena city
councillor] came [to power in the municipal council]. He put in a nine-inch
line, which also was good for a while before it no longer gave pressure.
We have complained several times to the BMC [Municipal Corporation of
Greater Mumbai] about this. They have our names there. Our name is in the
complaint register . . . but whenever we complain they say that because we live
on a hill, we have a problem. . . . Now there is a morning and an evening line.
The morning line was brought by Tendulkar, and some people have formed
groups to get water from [his line]. Others are hesitant, because after paying,
and waking up at seven at least there should be water there. Oftentimes there
is no water in the morning line. People have paid plumbers to put Ts on that
line as well, and take water without paying, without a meter.

I was impressed by Rané’s technopolitical knowledge of the water system. Like
other settlers she knew the water network in the settlement well. From buying
water by the handa to getting municipal water from a line installed by the politician,
Rané’s story describes the process by which the state has extended itself into the
settlement over the last two decades via the work of its elected representatives.

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POLITECHNICS OF WATER SUPPLY IN MUMBAI

Like many others, she focused on the vagaries of water “pressure” (using the English
word) as her main problem. When there is little pressure in municipal pipes, settlers
were unable to collect enough water in the little time they had. Rané suggested
that in those situations, settlers survived by drawing water from markets, wells,
ditches, plumbers and by exerting pressure on politicians.

Rané named each new pipe after a particular elected official. Indeed, in recent
years, city and state representatives have spent a significant portion of their local
area development funds on extending the city’s water system into the settlements,
making sure that infrastructural developments they commission in the settlements
conspicuously bear their names. As city councilors have become personally involved
in the administration of water in the settlement, many areas now have better access
to water than before.

The work of councilors stands in marked contrast to the work of the municipal
administration, whose projects are frequently invisible and less known, particu-
larly in the settlements. Nevertheless, as Rané indicates, access to water remains
precarious, and taps frequently stop working after a few years of service. Votes,
evidently, aren’t sufficient to guarantee hydraulic citizenship in Mumbai. Hydraulic
citizenship, realized by the receipt of pressured water from municipal pipes, also
depends on the legal histories of the settlement, the city’s water network, and the
work of its engineers.

In part, Rané’s vulnerability to the vagaries of water pressure draws on longer
histories of exclusion and marginalization embedded in the city’s legal and policy
regimes. Although they have been made more inclusive over the years, the city’s
rules continue to restrict the ways in which settlers can legitimately claim the
city’s water. Today, certain settlers can form a group and apply for “standpost
connections,” per the city’s water rules.7 If their applications are approved, settlers
can hire licensed plumbers to make the connections from their homes to the
nearest service main at their own cost. According to city water rules, settlers
are sanctioned pipes ranging from half an inch to an inch in diameter. Because
service mains are often located at some distance from settlers’ homes, these
slender pipes often travel great distances to settlers’ homes. Because pipes also run
above ground, they are vulnerable to breaking, leaking, or getting blocked every
few years.

Further, not all settlers are able to apply for standpost connections. Only
settlers who can prove that they occupied their settlements before January 1995
can apply for water services.8 To do this, they need to distinguish themselves from

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:4

other settlers, by providing an extraordinary set of documents while applying for
a water connection. These are:

1. An application form for a new connection;
2. A resolution/memorandum issued by settlers declaring a new (water)

society, with a secretary in charge of collecting and paying dues;
3. A list of “members” with their ration card numbers in one column and

their electoral ID numbers in another, “verified” by the junior engineer;
4. Supporting documentation that includes copies of every member’s

(food) ration card and a copy of the 1995 electoral roll, with each
of their names highlighted; each page must be certified as a true copy
by the junior engineer;

5. A receipt that Rs. 200 has been paid to the BMC for “scrutinizing” the
application; and

6. A certification nominating a licensed plumber to do the pipe laying.

Although the revised water rules provide a means for millions of settlers
to apply formally for water connections, the complexity of the process renders
it almost impossible for settlers to do so directly at the water department. For
instance, it is not easy to find the required 1995 voter list. Further, every application
tacitly requires a letter of support from a politician, “requesting” that the application
be approved. Thus, despite changes in the water rules that allow settlers to get
formal connections to water supply, it is difficult to get a water connection approved
in a timely manner without the support of a councillor or legislator.

Hansen and Verkaaik have directed our attention to charismatic figures like
councilors and plumbers, urban specialists who “by virtue of their reputation, skills
and imputed connections provide services, connectivity and knowledge to ordinary
dwellers in slums and popular neighborhoods” (Hansen and Verkaaik 2009:16).
Indeed, settlements are filled with specialists offering their services as “brokers” to
navigate settlers to access different state services. Here, however, I wish to point to
the ways that the laws, rules, and policies of municipal government are themselves
critical to the authority of urban specialists (see also Gupta and Sharma 2006).
The various requirements of the application form for a new water connections are
designed to turn people away from directly accessing water as substantive citizens
and instead to direct them to seek the support and help of the system’s experts—
specific councilors and their plumbers. The official water application procedure
produces the discretionary power of councilors and other charismatic leaders in
the settlement. Straddling the boundaries of the (in)formal and (il)legal, councilors

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POLITECHNICS OF WATER SUPPLY IN MUMBAI

are able to reinscribe their power in their settlements by mediating and facilitating
access to the procedures of government.

Talking to me at his office in a public bank, Surve, a Shiv Sena leader, explained
the system to me. I asked why settlers and their plumbers didn’t go to the water
authority directly. Why did they first stop by the party office? He replied:

Here the plumbers know that in the final instance you need a councillor’s
letter. The procedure has been made in the BMC [procedure BMC mein bana

diya]. The BMC can sanction water connections without the councillor or the
Shakha Pramukh [the head of the Shiv Sena’s branch office]. But if they give
it, then they won’t get any maal [stuff, colloq. for money] in the middle. So
they have made a “system” [English usage]. The system is that you tell the
councillor or political party member [you want a water connection]. That
way, the local councillor is respected, he will get maal. [Otherwise he will
object, saying,] If you give it direct, what will my position be here [in the
settlement]? There is an understanding—that if you do this, like this, things
will come in this way. The system. So people say instead of [having to come]
eventually to the councillor, let’s do it first. So the system—of ration cards,
forms, etc.—these are all procedures, so [that] people say it’s better to go to
the councillor. It’s the system. Some people say it’s about the money. There
is the money, but that is not the only thing going on.

Following “recognition” of their homes, settlers are expected to connect to the
water system without councilors calling in favors. But as Surve argues, this is not
how the public system has been made. It, too, requires personal networks of legit-
imation and endorsement to move application documents through the bureaucracy
(Hull 2003). Therefore, even after urban residents achieve state recognition after
years of delicate clientelism, popular voting, and social mobilization, their relations
with councillor-dadas and their political parties continue to play a significant role,
particularly around water supply.

As I show later in this article, the relations between settlers and councilors
are unstable, complex, and multiply constituted. Nevertheless, in virtually every
settlement of the city, water plays a critical role mediating the relationship between
the government and the governed. Settlers see the provision of water as a fun-
damental responsibility of the government, and elected representatives are often
evaluated and reelected based on their success at extending urban infrastructure
(water, electricity, and roads) into their settlements. With the parameters of their
success so defined, councilors intervene in and make themselves necessary to the

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:4

technopolitics of the city’s water supply. They frequently demand that engineers
divert more water to their wards. They “help” both recognized and unrecognized
settlers in applying for water connections. If settlers can claim tenancy prior to the
cutoff date, councilors write letters of support on settlers’ behalf, to strengthen
their applications. If settlers do not have the necessary documents, councilors orga-
nize forged copies, to send along with letters for a price. Thus, while the legality of
settlers matters, as does their ability to pay for connections, it is their relationship
with councilors and other charismatic leaders in the settlement that enables their
access to the public system.

Councilors are a critical locus of authority in the municipal water system,
particularly for settlers. In mediating the demands of settlers, they do important
screening work for the overworked engineers of the water department. In turn,
they need engineers to validate their requests. Councilors would frequently speak
to me about the skill and technique that were required to “take work out of the
BMC.” Yet, engineers do not merely respond to councilors out of goodwill. They
also depend on councilors to approve their requests, applications, and tenders for
a range of works projects—water pipelines, roads, sewage networks, and so on.
Councilors and political party workers can also mobilize large groups of protestors
to heckle or intimidate engineers, or to vandalize their offices.9 As such, engineers
need to ensure that they do not unduly upset councilors or deny their requests
on the basis of rules. To ensure that the councilors’ concerns are addressed, city
engineers are delegated to “take care” of the problems of designated councilors,
even if these requests do not always adhere to municipal policies.

For instance, engineers are only too aware of the ways in which councilors
manipulate documentation. A former chief engineer told me that the water depart-
ment had been compelled by politicians and administrators “not to go into depth
[to verify the authenticity] of every application.” As long as engineers can maintain
ignorance about an application’s illegitimacy, they cannot be accused of violating
the state’s law. They therefore deploy ignorance as a technology of government.
Knowing not to know particular violations of the city’s water rules allows the
city’s rules to remain unchallenged, even as it permits engineers to remain open
to allowing profitable, political, and sympathetic systems of access for the urban
poor.

City engineers, however, are not in a position to accede to every councilor’s
demands. Receiving only a limited quantity of water to distribute in their wards,
they are unable to give every ward more water with more pressure. If a councillor or
his constituency pressures engineers to deliver more water, the engineer can only do

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POLITECHNICS OF WATER SUPPLY IN MUMBAI

so if he reallocates the water from a different neighborhood.10 Unable to respond to
the demands of all councilors at once, engineers are constantly subject to the verbal
abuse of councilors who demand quick responses to their mutually incompatible
requests. Simultaneously responsible to satiate the councilors’ relentless taunts
and demands for more water and also to manage the department’s limited water
allocation, field engineers have the unenviable task of negotiating the different
pressures of the hydraulic system. In their effort to cope with these demands,
they often reallocate water from areas of low political pressure to areas of higher
pressure, constantly making adjustments until people stop shouting.

With the water system therefore continuously in flux, settlers need to maintain
pressure on the city water department to continue to receive water. In this section,
I have focused on the most common way of mobilizing pressure—through repre-
sentations and delegations made through councilors. Pressure can also be mobilized
in other ways—through large protests at the offices of the water department or by
words written in an official complaint register. These different repertoires through
which pressure can be exerted are very familiar to settlers like Rané. To get water,
settlers like Rané deploy diverse tactics of making pressure. Yet in so doing, they
also depend on city engineers to recognize the legitimacy of their claims.

However, not all settlers in Mumbai are able to mobilize as political society or
through heterogenous claims of citizenship to access reliable water from the city.
As engineers try to deliver water with more pressure than there is in the system,
they are compelled to prioritize some localities over others. Focusing on the ways
in which engineers ignore hydraulic works projects in a neighboring settlement,
I next describe how and why its residents are unable to constitute themselves as a
deserving political society. In so doing, not only do I wish to point to the limits of
political society but I also want to describe the multiple ways in which settlers are
able to survive in the city despite the absence of municipal water pressure.

SOCIAL GRAVITY

Premnagar is one of Jogeshwari’s older settlements. Approximately 40 years
old, it precedes many of the settlements that lie on the other side of a 20-foot-
wide road. Unlike Meghwadi, which is populated primarily by Marathi Hindus,
Premnagar is primarily settled by Muslims. These two settlements are drawn
together through cycles of violence that interpellate categories of religion,
landholding, and regional belonging. Although I am unable to review this his-
tory here, it is sufficient to point out that where Meghwadi’s residents receive
water with good pressure for a few hours a day, just meters away in Premnagar

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:4

residents complain of an unreliable city supply, both in terms of its duration and
pressure.

When I initially spoke with engineers about Premnagar’s water problems,
they explained them in geophysical terms: It was located on a hill that water could
not climb up. Like other municipal engineers, Mumbai’s engineers would present
their work in technocratic and not political terms, “structured primarily by natural
principles . . . where pressure, scale, size and distance are presented as natural
‘givens’—universal imperatives, free of history—and invoked to explain the limits
and parameters within which the service must operate” (Coelho 2006:497).

Indeed, water supply is more difficult for settlers who live in hilly parts of
the city. In the absence of pumping, water does not climb as easily to homes
in hilly areas. Settlers in hilly areas and those living in the city’s high-rises alike
are susceptible to pressure fluctuations as a consequence of their living at higher
elevations. Instead of working to overcome the challenges of gravity for settlers,
the water department provides water to many settlements at the bottom of the
hill (see Patkar’s epigraph). It is then the responsibility of the settlers to purchase,
install, and maintain pumps and pipes from this point to their homes. In several
different parts of the city, settlers pay heavy costs to receive water in this way,
and they are responsible not only for municipal water bills but also for payments
made to plumbers and various intermediaries who operate the pumps and pipes
that bring water up to the settlement. Such arrangements, where the “last mile” of
service is privately managed by powerful leaders, are characteristic of settlements,
where engineers and planners are reticent to extend the public system.

In Premnagar, however, there are no public or privately operated pumps at
the base of the hill. Residents simply receive water with very low pressure. When
I asked engineers why the city didn’t install or operate pumps for settlers, they
told me that that the electricity costs of pumping alone made this an unviable
proposition. But “viability” is an effect of power. In the century and a half since
it was established, the department has always pumped water up Malabar Hill, to
the homes of the city’s economically and politically powerful. In Mumbai as in
other cities (like Los Angeles; see Davis 1998), public systems respond at least
as much to considerations of class as they do to those of topography, where the
costs of providing public services matters less if citizens are wealthy than if they
are poor.

It was quite late in my fieldwork that I came to learn that the BMC did in fact
install and operate pumps for some settlements. The municipal corporation had
installed a pump on one of the two water lines taking water up to Banjrekar Wadi,

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POLITECHNICS OF WATER SUPPLY IN MUMBAI

another settlement on a hill whose residents were primarily Marathi-Hindu. Thus,
in certain cases, settlers did compel the municipal corporation to install and operate
pumps on their water lines. The settlers of Premnagar, however, located a couple
of miles from Banjrekar Wadi, did not benefit from any municipal pumps. I found
this surprising. In the graduated legality of settlements in Mumbai, Premnagar,
an older settlement, is more legal than Banjrekar Wadi. According to the law, it
should be receiving better water. Yet, it does not.

I asked Kerkar, an engineer in the maintenance department, why this was so.
He took care to differentiate between the people that lived in each settlement.

Our people [those in Banjrekar Wadi] are from the village. They get jobs in the
city, work, and are very particular about keeping the area clean. Meanwhile,
their people are from outside. They come and want to stay in Premnagar
only. They don’t go outside. They will live in dirty conditions, no problem.
When we do work in Banjrekar Wadi, people see us doing something good
for the area, and they are helping [us do the work]. They are taking care of
the area. In Premnagar, people see us doing something and start to fight. If
we do [public] works, it’s more of a problem. . . . It’s better to do nothing
at all.

By elucidating the reasons that Premnagar is excluded from pumping services,
Kerkar drew attention to the quotidian understandings of belonging and service
delivery that have little to do with class or property claims. Kerkar recognized the
Marathi settlers of Banjrekar Wadi as “our people,” who are hardworking and clean,
and he is happy to extend them water services. Even though they live on recently
squatted land, he did not question their entitlement to water. He spoke instead
of how Banjrekar Wadi’s residents made it easy to work in the area, offering
his workers water, for instance, when they spent the afternoon working in the
settlement.

Where settlers frequently enact a “politics of conscience” to secure the help
of city government officials (Appadurai 2002), Kerkar’s work revealed both the
promise and the limits of such a politics. Although his conscience encouraged him
to help the residents of Banjrekar Wadi, it did not do the same work for the settlers
of Premnagar. He saw them as being “from outside,” not only because they were
Muslim but also because he identified them as “belonging” to other states (like
Uttar Pradesh and Bihar). Kerkar articulated a municipal idea of citizenship distinct
from that of the nation. In so doing, he excluded some national bodies from
belonging to the largest city in the nation.

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:4

Thus, while the “urban unsettling of national citizenship is significant” in the
contemporary period (Holston 2008:22), it is not a formation of citizenship that is
necessarily more inclusive or progressive. Kerkar views certain Indian citizens from
“outside” (the boundaries of the state of Maharashtra) as “dirty.” They did not work
hard, nor did they keep their settlements clean. Kerkar told me of how Premnagar’s
residents made it difficult for his workers to work there; residents shouted and
protested whenever the workers arrived. Because Premnagar’s residents did not
behave as a good public, he did not feel compelled to work on improving the public
system there.

Although Kerkar’s observations are prejudiced, they are not inaccurate. In-
deed Premnagar is a dirtier and more contentious settlement. Yet, his account
absents the degree to which municipal corporation has not discharged its respon-
sibilities in the settlement. Responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of water,
garbage, and sewage connections, the municipal corporation has seldom under-
taken any major improvement project in Premnagar. It is easier for Kerkar and
other municipal officials to ignore the area because of the exigencies of demo-
cratic politics. Premnagar’s residents had for long been part of a larger elec-
toral constituency in which they were the Muslim minority. Elected councilors
from the Shiv Sena frequently focused their attentions on projects in the adja-
cent Marathi settlements, leaving the settlers of Premnagar wanting for municipal
services.

The redistricting of council boundaries prior to the last election has made some
difference. As a result of demographic shifts, the residents of Premnagar were able
to elect their own councillor in the last election. Some municipal services have
subsequently arrived in the settlement. The engineers have installed a new valve
on a neighboring service line that makes it easier to pressure Premnagar’s lines.
They have also done some repairs to the leaky service main. Yet, as of the time
of writing this article, these projects have not substantively relieved Premnagar’s
water problems. The efforts of the new councillor are mitigated because she belongs
to the opposition party in the city government. She is neither not able to claim the
larger discretionary budgets of neighboring councilors who are on powerful city
committees nor is she able to pressure the engineers to do her work.11

As a result, several service lines within Premnagar remain old and in desperate
need of repair. Surrounded by leaky mains and inadequately pressured water,
residents in Premnagar today find it easier to engage in a host of infrapolitical
practices to access water (Scott 1990).12 They work with plumbers who promise
them water through surreptitious connections to the city’s water pipes, regardless

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POLITECHNICS OF WATER SUPPLY IN MUMBAI

of laws and practices of the water department. To draw water through these
pipes and into their homes, many use their own illegal booster pumps. Booster
pumps and illegal water connections trouble the calculations of engineers, who
see their use as a social vice that threatens their management and operation of the
entire system. They cannot control how pumps take pressure out the city’s water
network and mechanically (and politically) pressure water for the residents of
Premnagar.

Today, such infrapolitical practices are a critical way for Premnagar’s residents
to pressure municipal water through arrangements of their own. I do not wish to
consider these practices as acts of “resistance” (Bayat 1997; Gutmann 1993; Ortner
1995). Instead, I prefer to see them as politically mediated acts of unequal and
inclusive settlement, both in the legal and in the material sense. As plumbers,
politicians, and engineers sometimes assist unauthorized residents in making leaks
in the system, they constitute social relations and make material interventions that
enable settlers to live in and be accommodated in the city.

Not all residents in Premnagar use booster pumps. Many are unwilling to
pay the high electricity charges associated with their use. Having confronted water
difficulties and a leaky system for some time now, residents have also returned to
drawing water from wells in the neighborhood. Wells were heavily used before
the arrival of city water supplies in the 1970s. In his film about the water problems
in Premnagar, resident Shali Shaikh describes how wells, abandoned soon after the
extension of municipal water pipes in the settlement, are now being revitalized.

In the beginning the [BMC] supply was good. . . . Then slowly the pressure
dropped and people started to get less water, . . . so people became helpless.
If they did not get water, what could they do? They must have talked to the
MLA [state legislator] and . . . told him that the BMC water supply is low. The
MLA saw that there is no BMC water supply and what did he do? . . . He said
let’s take water out of the ground, and to give people this facility, he made a
bore well right next to it [the old well]. [Shaikh 2008]

In his film, Shaikh describes the temporary experience of municipal citizenship in
Premnagar. Premnagar’s settlers have responded to scarce municipal supplies by
returning to draw on the excess of water found in their wells. As sources of water,
wells lie outside and beyond the interests of municipal engineers, particularly be-
cause they are fickle, decentralized, and small. They are difficult for a hierarchically
structured bureaucracy to control. While conducting fieldwork, engineers told me
that well water was both insufficient and not of good enough quality to merit their

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:4

expertise. Thus, city engineers generally ignore them, allowing settlers and private
water entrepreneurs to draw water from them without much regulation.13

Unable to pressure the managers of the city’s pipes, Premnagar’s state and
federal legislators (MLAs and MPs) have therefore responded to the settlement’s
water difficulties by focusing their attentions and finances on the settlement’s
subterranean water. They have funded the construction of a few new bore
wells and pipe networks to deliver this water to residents. The networks they
have constructed are managed not by public officials but by party workers, fre-
quently running parallel to and separate from the municipal network. The different
pipes that now pervade the settlement materially indicate not just the multiple
regimes of water supply that exist in the settlement but also the diffuse multiplicity
and plurality of the state (Gupta 1995). They show how water’s excess—its avail-
ability outside city pipes—can always be drawn on to produce new, diverse, and
unstable political regimes in the city.

CONCLUSION

In this article, I have argued for an attention to the quotidian practices of
settlers and engineers in Mumbai as they make and respond to difficulties with
water pressure. By drawing attention to the ways in which settlers create pressure
through differentiated rights and material technologies, I do not seek to be clever
with a native category, by drawing attention to its power as a metaphor (Helmreich
2010). Rather, pressure helps apprehend the simultaneity of the social, political,
and physical cities of Mumbai as they matter to those who live in them. Socially,
physically, and politically constituted, an attention to pressure helps explain how
resources, particularly water, are distributed among marginal populations in urban
locations. I suggest that by focusing on the ways in which settlers are able to mobilize
pressure with the politics and materials of Mumbai’s water system, we can better
understand the critical, compromised, and graduated ways in which settlers have
been able to establish themselves in the city.

As clients of leaders they elect, settlers mobilize diverse kinds of relations to
effect their access to water. Made necessary by the city’s formal water rules, these
informal relationships—located at the blurred boundaries of legality and illegality,
and state and society—trouble attempts to theorize politics through normative
regimes of civil society (or political society), the state, and the market (Chatterjee
2004; Gupta 1995; Mitchell 1991). To draw water from the public system requires
settlers to mobilize their votes as political citizens, their relations of patronage, and
their own money. Although legal categories, rules, and policies matter, their ability

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to access water also depends on their ability to pressure the public system and its
workers. If settlers are successful in these efforts, they come to join a municipal
public, one that is entitled to and can depend on the city for a reliable supply of
water.

The entitlements of hydraulic citizenship are temporary and precarious. As
engineers continue to reorder and rearrange the diverse demands and pressures
on the water system, settlers like Rané often find that their pipes slowly go
dry over time. Thus, they always need to reiterate their claims and reestablish
their relations with the different authorities to return pressure to their pipes. As
such, hydraulic citizenship is not just experienced as a unilinear extension of the
biopolitical state. Rather, it is an iterative process that needs repetition, renewal
work, and revalidation.

Second, by describing the water arrangements in Premnagar, I build on
theorizations of the heterogeneous state by drawing attention to the heterogeneity
of the public. Seen not only as dirty but also of “not good” character, Muslim settlers
have been unable to mobilize as political society to draw water from the municipal
system. In responding to their water difficulties by making illegal connections
and by revitalizing wells, Premnagar’s residents revalidate the disinclinations of
municipal engineers to carry out improvement works in their localities. Yet, as
they draw water from renewed wells, they show how water is not controlled by the
politically powerful engineers and administrators of the municipal administration
alone.

The diverse ways that Premnagar’s settlers can claim water, both from and
outside the legitimate structures of the municipal system, point to critical ways in
which water exceeds the technopolitical systems that govern it. On the one hand,
plumbers easily and quickly are able to make illegal connections on the piped water
network. It is difficult for engineers to prevent this water from “leaking” away. On
the other hand, settlers are also able to live in the city by claiming water that lies
beyond the control of the municipal state. Not interesting to municipal officials,
well water produces other political authorities in the settlement. It is drawn on by
diverse residents, state legislators, and various religious groups throughout the city.
An attention to the practices of gathering water in Premnagar shows how water’s
excess and its availability outside the municipal system provide critical means for
settlers to live in the city despite the exclusions and laws of public systems.

To conclude, water systems are especially amenable to the application of
diverse pressures. Through manipulations of pressure, water can be made available
to diverse social groups. This is not to suggest pressure can explain everything

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:4

to do with how resources are distributed in cities or how cities are constituted.
As Hansen and Verkaaik point out, “No city can be fully known, as it is one of
modernity’s most powerful empty signifiers—too multi-layered and overflowing in
histories and meanings to be fully captured by a single narrative or name” (Hansen
and Verkaaik 2009:8). Multiply mobilized, cities are composed of many social,
political, and physical things, whose materialities matter in diverse ways. To the
extent that “the history of cities can be read as a history of water” (Gandy 2002:22),
however, I suggest that pressure helps explain how hydraulic citizenship is made
and maintained by settlers in Mumbai.

ABSTRACT
In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours
every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the
city’s upper-class residents, the city’s settlers have to consistently demand that their
water come on “time” and with “pressure.” Taking pressure seriously as both a social
and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the
pressures of politics, pumps, and pipes to get water. I show how these practices not only
allow settlers to live in the city, but also produce what I call hydraulic citizenship—a
form of belonging to the city made by effective political and technical connections to
the city’s infrastructure. Yet, not all settlers are able to get water from the city water
department. The outcomes of settlers’ efforts to access water depend on a complex matrix
of socionatural relations that settlers make with city engineers and their hydraulic
infrastructure. I show how these arrangements describe and produce the cultural politics
of water in Mumbai. By focusing on the ways in which residents in a predominantly
Muslim settlement draw water despite the state’s neglect, I conclude by pointing to the
indeterminacy of water, and the ways in which its seepage and leakage make different
kinds of politics and publics possible in the city.

NOTES
Acknowledgments. I am grateful to Hannah Appel, Elif Babul, James Ferguson, Ramah McKay,

Robert Samet, Sylvia Yanagisako, Austin Zeiderman, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of
Cultural Anthropology for helpful comments made on the draft. This article was originally presented on
the “Natureculture and Multipli-’Cities’” panel at the spring 2010 Society for Cultural Anthropology
conference. I am grateful for the comments I received in the session, particularly those from Alex
Nading and Daniel Hoffman. This article also benefited from critical comments made by Eliza Darling,
Laura Bear, and other participants at the “Waterscapes, Labour and Uncertainty” conference organized
at the London School of Economics on June 26, 2010. I would like to thank the Social Science Research
Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Stanford University
for supporting fieldwork for this project between 2007 and 2010.

1. Rs. 5 crore is roughly $1 million. Thus, these amounts correspond roughly to $298 million
and $160 million, respectively—a rather healthy revenue and profit for the water department.

2. I have changed the names of all my informants to protect their identities.
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POLITECHNICS OF WATER SUPPLY IN MUMBAI

3. Uncomfortable with the pathologies associated with the word slum, I prefer to use the terms
settlement and settler in my work.

4. Therefore, as Gandy (2008) and Zérah (2008) point out, colonial cities have been “splintered”
from their very inception.

5. The Shiv Sena is a parochial, nativist Hindu right-wing party that is particularly powerful in
Mumbai and has run its civic administration for a number of years (see Hansen 2001).

6. At today’s rates, one dollar is roughly 45 rupees
7. The city water department approves two kinds of residential connections depending on

the legal status of the residence: those for planned and approved buildings, and “standpost
connections” (for those living in settlements). Because of the low cost of water, those living in
the settlements are not eligible to apply individually for a water connection. Instead, they are
required to apply in a group of around ten, with one person nominated as secretary in charge
of paying the water bill.

8. This provides further evidence of the ways in which citizenship is tied to claims of property in
the city (see Joyce 2003).

9. For instance, amid water shortages in 2009, politicians vandalized the offices of the chief
hydraulic engineer of the city, and a crowd of over a hundred protestors assaulted an assistant
engineer in his local ward office, blackening his face with ink.

10. Unlike Coelho’s experiences in Chennai (see Coelho 2006), all the engineers I met in Mumbai’s
water department were men.

11. The Marathi residents of Banjrekar Wadi, however, were well taken care of. Kerkar suggested
this was because “there they have a strong local leader, who works with the BMC. That makes
the difference.”

12. Although Scott identifies infrapolitics to be among the “weapons of the weak,” these tactics
are by no means restricted to dominated groups. As Baviskar and Sundar (2008) have argued,
powerful groups also engage in infrapolitical practices outside of the law.

13. Of course, this disinterest is partly dependent on there being sufficient water in city pipes.
When confronted with a failed monsoon in 2009, councilors and engineers “found” more than
12 thousand wells in the city that could ameliorate its piped water supply and temporarily
began projects to improve them.

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2004 Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power.

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Editors’ Notes: Cultural Anthropology has published numerous articles on citizen-
ship in India, including Francis Cody’s “Inscribing Subjects to Citizenship: Pe-
titions, Literacy Activism, and the Performativity of Signature in Rural Tamil
India” (2009); Aradhana Sharma’s “Crossbreeding Institutions, Breeding Struggle:
Women’s Empowerment, Neoliberal Governmentality, and State (Re)Formation
in India” (2006); and Ritty Lukose’s “Empty Citizenship: Protesting Politics in the
Era of Globalization” (2005).

Cultural Anthropology has also published articles on the politics of urban poverty.
See, for example, Clara Han’s “Symptoms of Another Life: Time, Possibility, and
Domestic Relations in Chile’s Credit Economy” (2011); Jonathan Bach’s “They
Come in Peasants and Leave Citizens: Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen,
China” (2010); Danny Hoffman’s “The City as Barracks: Freetown, Monrovia, and
the Organization of Violence in Postcolonial African Cities” (2007); and Deborah
A. Thomas’s “Democratizing Dance: Institutional Transformation and Hegemonic
Re-Ordering in Postcolonial Jamaica” (2002).

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CHRISTINA SCHWENKEL
University of California, Riverside

Spectacular infrastructure and
its breakdown in socialist Vietnam
A B S T R A C T
No material resource and public good is more critical
to sustaining urban life than water. During postwar
reconstruction in Vietnam, planners showcased
urban infrastructure as a spectacular socialist
achievement. Water-related facilities, in particular,
held the potential for emancipation and modernity.
Despite East German–engineered systems, however,
taps remained dry in socialist housing. Lack of water
exposed existing hierarchies that undermined the
goal of democratic infrastructure yet enabled new
forms of solidarity and gendered social practice to
take shape in response to the state’s failure to meet
basic needs. Infrastructural breakdown and neglect
thus catalyzed a collective ethos of maintenance
and repair as the state shifted responsibility for
upkeep to disenchanted tenants. I track these
processes in a housing complex in Vinh City, where
water signified both the promises of state care and a
condition of its systemic neglect. [materiality,
infrastructure, socialist modernity, urbanization,
decay, maintenance and repair, water, Vietnam]

The reality of communism is utterly spectacular: an impeccable mon-
umental assemblage of factories, chimney-stacks, construction sites,
parading masses, flying tip-wagons, magic words and slogans, a mau-
soleum, a Mummy surrounded by the tough figures of the future.

—Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square

T
he leak had been ongoing for more than a week. At the advice
of neighbors, I had decided to ignore it. Yet, one morning, in
the midst of fieldwork in a social housing complex in Vinh City,
northern Vietnam, I woke to find the bathroom and hallway
flooded with water.1 I had traced the leak to the bathroom ceil-

ing several days earlier but had decided not to attempt to fix it. Leaks were
common in the now-decaying buildings East Germany had constructed in
a gesture of “international solidarity” in the aftermath of the war with the
United States. Here, breakdown was not catastrophic but part of a routine,
fractal “always-almost-falling-apart” world in which the residents lived
(Jackson 2014:222). Every household had leaks; generally, though, no one
knew or invested time and energy in tracing the sources. Such knowledge
meant having to confront the complicated and fuzzy issue of accountabil-
ity and to address, if not rethink, the complexities around a social and
moral ethics of maintenance and repair. Most leaks eventually stopped:
Some were self-healing; others required minor tinkering with the system.
Breakdown as routine meant a certain routine of breakdown—one that
could generate endless innovation and improvisation but that also marked
a state of increasing disaffection toward local government and its negligent
maintenance that led to unsafe living conditions in many of the apartment
blocks.2

When I first mentioned the leak to my landlord and upstairs neighbors,
they shrugged their shoulders ambivalently. But after the flooding inci-
dent, I decided to take action. I asked around for the number of a plumber,
assuming that a chronic state of disrepair meant a bustling business in
maintenance, but no one in my housing block used such services. Finally,
a friend of a friend (a nonresident), dressed in business attire, came and
opened the ceiling. Water streamed out. He then left; as a computer
scientist, he had no experience with plumbing, but he promised to find
someone who did. My landlord started to show signs of irritation. “I take
care of my house,” she told me in private, revealing a morally critical stance

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 520–534, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. C© 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12145

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Spectacular infrastructure � American Ethnologist

that lay beneath the collective facade of ambivalence about
the responsibility for upkeep. “Others don’t, and now it’s af-
fecting me.” But when it came to the issue of repairs, she
waved her hand dismissively and told me that I could worry
about it if I pleased. Clearly, and understandably, she had
no intention of investing her limited funds in fixing just an-
other problem encountered in social housing. Neither did
the upstairs neighbors.

A plumber eventually found that the leak was coming
from the upstairs neighbors’ toilet. But the neighbors also
avoided responsibility for it, even though the cause was
only an eroded steel nut. What could have been a simple fix
had escalated to a larger structural problem for which, given
the building’s existing state of decay, they could not assume
liability. A friend suggested that building management (the
Division of Housing under the jurisdiction of the Provincial
People’s Committee) should be held accountable, and
everyone laughed. The last major repair that residents
remembered had been in the late 1990s, when housing
authorities had added steel braces to crumbling support
beams along the corridor.3 Typically, residents collectively
funded repairs; in fact, the month prior to the leak, each
household had contributed 100,000 Vietnam đồng (US$5)
toward patching up broken stairs in the stairwell.

Because the dampness in my unit had begun to take on
a strong musty smell, and the walls and floor were starting
to mold in the dank winter weather, I asked the plumber to
complete the job and offered to cover the costs, despite my
friend’s protests that it was not my responsibility. My mone-
tary intervention—and bringing in an outside expert—was,
for me, the most expedient solution to maintaining a
healthful and comfortable living environment. Nonethe-
less, that action threatened to disrupt the established ethos
of improvisation and denial of responsibility that hinged
on collective rather than individuated action. This ethos
had generated important solidarities in the complex since
the late 1970s, when the blocks were built and allocated to
civil servants and workers. One week after the neighbors’
toilet had been repaired and the slats between the floors
supporting the water heater and storage tank had dried
out, the plumber reaffixed the laminated ceiling panel
and presented me with the bill for 160,000 Vietnam đồng
(US$8). The next day, puddles of water began to form on my
kitchen floor: A slow drip from the pipes under the sink had
expanded to a larger leak, requiring the plumber’s services
yet again.

I start with this story from my December 2010 field
notes to situate my discussion of the materiality of goods
and resources—those technical objects of infrastructure
at the center of urban disputes and negotiations that
unfold between (and among) state and nonstate actors and
that are vital to sustaining social and political life (Barry
2013). There is perhaps no natural resource and public
good more critical to maintaining urban life than water.

Its management, distribution, and use reveal a contested
politics of resource making, on the one hand (Barnes 2014),
and highly uneven experiences of urban infrastructure that
require diverse arrangements and practices, on the other
(Anand 2011). Here, I examine water in an urban setting
in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam as a problematic
materiality—one that emerged as a signifier both of the
promise of state care in a system of centralized distribution
of goods and services, and of an enduring condition of
neglect tied to the state’s inability to adequately provide
for its citizens. My use of “the state” here refers to the
bureaucratic apparatus of governing actors and institu-
tions, such as the People’s Committees at the provincial,
municipal, and district levels, that exercise local power
under the authority of the central government in Hanoi and
the ruling Communist Party. Among research participants,
reference to nhà nước (the state, or, literally, house and
water, to represent the spatiality of Vietnam as configured
by an encounter between land and sea) fits closely with
James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta’s model of the imagined,
all-encompassing state that was made politically legitimate
and socially efficacious “through particular imaginative
and symbolic devices” (2002:981). My interlocutors largely
conceived of the state in paternalistic terms: as caretaker
and provider, obliged to act not out of compassionate
beneficence alone but out of compulsory compensation for
citizens’ wartime service. That such imaginaries were more
of an ideal than an everyday reality is reflected in the dual
signification of water, galvanizing residents to hold the state
accountable to an ethics of provision and maintenance.

Shifting scholarly attention from megacities, this
article focuses on Vinh, a smaller, “ordinary city” aspiring
to modernity and development (Robinson 2006). Vinh, in
the province of Nghệ An, is rarely included in discussions
of Vietnamese urbanization, and yet it is the center of
industrial production in north-central Vietnam.4 With a
current population of less than half a million, Vinh holds
the unfortunate status of having been one of the most
heavily bombed and decimated cities during the U.S.-led
air war in Vietnam. Subsequently, from 1974 to 1980, East
Germany redesigned and rebuilt Vinh as a “socialist city”
as part of a larger political project of the global Cold War
that advocated the transfer of infrastructure technologies
and transnational expertise for the purpose of socialist
nation building (see also Hecht 2011).5 Foregrounding how
the Cold War shaped urban infrastructure development
in a poorer socialist country that was the beneficiary
of international solidarity, I examine the aesthetic and
ideological commitment to what I term a “technopolitics
of visibility,” that is, the strategic use of technology as a
visual tool to “constitute, embody or enact political goals”
(Hecht 2009:15). This technopolitics of visibility sought to
showcase urban networks of infrastructure as spectacular
socialist achievements that stood as emblems of progress

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American Ethnologist � Volume 42 Number 3 August 2015

and contemporaneity with the rest of the advanced socialist
world.6 Drawing on the work of Maria Kaika and Erik Swyn-
gedouw, I approach urban infrastructure as the cultural–
technical systems that appropriate human labor and
material resources to transform “nature” metabolically and
socially into “city” (2000:121). As I demonstrate, the public
celebration of urbanized nature, marking the conversion of
natural resources into a consumable commodity, allowed
infrastructure as aesthetic and technical spectacle to be-
come a biopolitical tool of the socialist state for managing
and civilizing the urban population (Collier 2011:205).

In the immediate postwar years of reconstruction,
water—as symbolic infrastructural matter—suggested an
urban futurity of socialist modernity and transnational
solidarity with ample state provision of essential goods. As
water flowed, so too would the abundance of socialism flow
to the masses. This vision of water as holding the potential
for emancipation contrasted sharply with the racialized
and class-based disparities of the infrastructure regime
under French colonialism prior to the war and revolution.
Socialist housing, in particular, represented the apex of this
achievement, with an extensive system of GDR-engineered
plumbing, drainage, piping, and water storage built to
support a concentrated population of more than 8,000
state employees. Yet this utopic infrastructuralism proved
difficult to sustain, resulting in critical shortages of re-
sources, including electricity and water. The lack of a stable
and sufficient water supply posed immense difficulties for
new urban dwellers in their modern, five-story apartment
blocks and also proved an obstacle to engineering hygienic,
urban socialist citizens as envisioned by the state.

In what follows, I trace the ways that breakdown and
decay of infrastructure both exposed and reinforced exist-
ing hierarchies in a society striving toward egalitarianism
and compelled new relations of solidarity and sociability
to take shape, even across such differentiations. Collective
social practices centered on water—its flow, blockage, and
exchange—in response to the failure of local government
to provide an adequate supply to urban residents. These
practices required constant innovation and reinvention of
the system to restore moral order and combat inequality.
My approach here is inspired by the provocation in recent
scholarship to shift the locus of study from the production
of urban infrastructure to its disrepair and maintenance
(Anand 2012; Carse 2014; Chu 2014; Graham and Thrift
2007; Jackson 2014). Particularly in the Global South, it
is “impossible to ignore that the very technosocial ar-
chitectures of urban life are heavily dominated by, and
constituted through, a giant system of repair and impro-
visation” (Graham and Thrift 2007:11). Out of order is thus
seemingly the natural order of things in worlds where in-
frastructure disconnections rather than flows predominate.
Yet as generative as this literature has been in shifting the
analytical lens from how the world is produced to how it

is sustained (Jackson 2014:234), it has tended to overlook
the pronounced ways that the technical and affective labor
of improvisation and repair is corporeally grounded and
gendered in practice. Water shortages in postwar Vinh, for
example, led to a temporary suspension of the gendered
division of household labor as men and women (including
youth) mobilized collectively to secure water provisions in
the face of technical failure. The example of the leak like-
wise illustrates how these collaborations continue to play a
strong role in the postreform years of market socialism: In-
frastructural breakdown and neglect has catalyzed a collec-
tive ethos of maintenance and care since the state ended its
system of centralized distribution and transferred the onus
of upkeep (of pipes, pumps, mains, tanks, and lines) to res-
idents, who then deflected responsibility back at the state.

The in/visibility of infrastructure

The world dominated by its phantasmagorias—this, to
make use of Baudelaire’s term, is “modernity.”

—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

In their pioneering book on the technical infrastruc-
tures of urban societies, Steve Graham and Simon Mar-
vin (2001) argue for attention to the elaborate ways
that urban life is mediated by novel assemblages of network
interconnections as well as by their failure and collapse.
Graham and Marvin’s work is part of a growing body of lit-
erature on infrastructure and infrastructural politics under
capitalism, resulting in the privatization of public works.7

Here, though, I shift the political-economic context to state
socialism to examine the systemic building and mainte-
nance of urban infrastructures as the material and ideologi-
cal foundations for producing new social forms, values, and
persons (Dalakoglou 2012; Humphrey 2005:39–40). My aim
is to advance the larger project of a “critical urbanism of the
contemporary networked metropolis” (Graham and Marvin
2001:9) by tracing the generative, rippling effects of a break-
down in the public water system constructed and cele-
brated as spectacular infrastructure in a rebuilt socialist city.

Among those who study infrastructure disruption,
there is a tendency to take as axiomatic the claim that
when technical systems fail, the unseen hardware and
absent materiality of cities suddenly become visible, ex-
posed, and awkwardly present in our everyday lives.8 Such
ideas can be traced back to the Heideggerian distinction
between technologies as ready-to-hand (Zuhanden) and
present-at-hand (Vorhanden), with the former—the in-
visible, taken-for-granted utility of an object—suddenly
becoming extant, manifesting in our consciousness as the
latter through episodes of interruption and breakdown
(Heidegger 2008; Jackson 2014:230). And yet in poor urban
neighborhoods, infrastructure is typically bared, on display,
and subjected to manipulation as part of everyday routines

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Spectacular infrastructure � American Ethnologist

and relations: People illicitly tap into water lines or electric
grids in makeshift and risky operations to access public
utilities that are unavailable, inefficient, or costly. This is
not to suggest that a condition of visibility intrinsically
represents nonexistent or damaged infrastructure or vice
versa—that displacement from sight implies performance
as usual; in fact, I argue against these very presumptions.
As Bruce Robbins (2007) proposes, smell may be a more
reliable referent to the lack or disruption of infrastructure.
Moreover, Soviet infrastructure, as Todorov’s quote at the
start of this article suggests, once extolled utilitarian form
through a technopolitics of visibility that strove to convey
the emancipatory powers of spectacular public works to
an enchanted, viewing population. This intent was also
seen in the intimate spaces of everyday lives, for instance,
in the conspicuousness of Soviet pipes that revealed how
“the norms of social modernity were hardwired into the
very material structure and spatial layout” of socialist cities
(Collier 2011:202–203). We can draw parallels here with
the case of Vinh where infrastructure projects, such as the
water and sanitation works that the GDR built in a period of
high socialism after the war, embraced the modernist ideals
of “techno-utopianism” (Scott 2007) through the spectacle
of civil engineering and its potentially transformative role
in creating a prosperous and egalitarian urban society.

Discrepancies in claims between “concealed” and “re-
vealed” networks invite a deeper analysis of the histories
of infrastructure regimes, one that takes into account the
temporalities and spatialities of infrastructural worlds em-
bedded in particular political economies and attendant
incarnations of modernity. The spectacular infrastructure
politics of socialist modernity is by no means historically
unique. Beyond Soviet monumentalism, the era of early
capitalism also produced hypervisible, awe-inspiring tech-
nological innovations that captivated a marveling pub-
lic. Echoing the optimistic Geist of early socialism and its
promises of a better life, 19th-century engineering feats also
rallied the utopian and hopeful dreamworlds of moder-
nity (Buck-Morss 2002). As Kaika and Swyngedouw have
observed of such dreams, “Dams, water towers, sewage
systems and the like were celebrated as glorious icons,
carefully designed, ornamented, and prominently located
in the city, celebrating the modern promise of progress”
(2000:121). For Benjamin, such icons, detached from the so-
cial meanings and relations of production that animated
them, were but technical fetishes constituting a phantas-
magoric world of modernity that embodied the empty fan-
tasy of a better tomorrow. As hopeful dreams collapsed
and skepticism toward techno-utopia’s promise of univer-
sal progress mounted (with rampant techno-pessimism
replacing rife idealism), the “urban dowry” of network
infrastructure—those now rusting and decaying remains of
failed modernization—began to move underground (Kaika
and Swyngedouw 2000:132). Concealing infrastructure

beyond our daily sensory perception (i.e., its deliberate
invisibilization) thus emerged as a novel technical and
aesthetic imperative of late capitalism that, in espousing
ideologies of sanitization and deregulation, banished the
unruliness of pipes, ducts, wires, and lines to the subter-
ranean strata of the city.

Today in the former Soviet Union, as public–private
partnerships in infrastructure sectors—what the World
Bank refers to as PPPIs—have replaced the massive pub-
lic works projects of the socialist state, this very aesthet-
ics of the absent and the unseen, and of smooth, unin-
terrupted surfaces, has become the new “clean” standard
for landscapes. Andrew Barry (2013) outlines this process
in his account of the construction of the thousand-mile,
underground Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that sup-
planted the rusting ducts of the Soviet oil industry. As Barry
shows, the decision to reveal or conceal infrastructure was
shaped by a host of complex and interrelated factors, rang-
ing from economic, geopolitical, and logistical concerns
to technical, ecological, and ideological objectives. In the
end, the lack of any trace of the pipeline on the land-
scape appeared indicative of minimal social and ecologi-
cal impact—as though people’s lives and the environment
around them had not been disrupted and their land not
lost to capital-intensive, resource driven economies. The
invisibility of the BTC pipeline thus indexed an emerg-
ing postsocialist aesthetic of continuous flows of landscape
lines in tandem with material flows of natural resources
and profits. It likewise reflected a critical change to the
governance of infrastructure rooted in a technopolitics of
absence and amnesia: out of sight (the pipeline), out of
mind (dispossession and displacement; see Barry 2009).
This approach differed sharply from that of the socialist era,
which promoted, and indeed highlighted, historical rupture
and change—economic, technological, and ideological—by
spectacularizing infrastructure and its emancipatory possi-
bilities through unveiling, rather than masking, the human
and nonhuman labor involved in its creation.9

One of my goals here is to unsettle the strands of Hei-
deggerian thought that associate infrastructure visibility
with a moment of breakdown and crisis in the system.
Rather than think of exposed pipes, lines, and tanks as bro-
ken and contaminated matter out of place (perhaps better
situated as an infrastructural logic of neoliberal modernity),
I suggest that there is much to learn from the study of public
works and utilities that are unambiguously left visible and
even made to be performative in both public and private
space. Brian Larkin (2008:36) has made a similar argument
in his study of grand infrastructure projects in colonial
Nigeria that, in radically transforming the landscape,
invoked a sense of the “colonial sublime” through the spec-
tacle of British imperial power and the formation of new
political subjects. Transgressing the colonizer–colonized
distinction, in the postwar period of socialist reconstruction

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American Ethnologist � Volume 42 Number 3 August 2015

in Vinh,10 infrastructure visibility and performativity were
likewise essential to new strategies of urban governance
that strove to create new urban persons and to maintain the
authority of socialist rule. The conspicuousness of infras-
tructure operated “as technologies for materialising state
presence” in the most intimate spaces of everyday life (Har-
vey and Knox 2012:530). Yet such strategies to ensure the
legitimacy of local government, particularly in the domain
of municipal water systems, ultimately failed. In the early
years, water infrastructure as spectacle seemed to offer
the promises of socialist technological modernity under-
written by international solidarity, but cracks and fissures
in the materiality of the system—in the pipes, drains, and
sewers—exposed widening fractures in society that under-
mined the utopian vision of a revived and flourishing city.

The promise of progress: Spectacular
infrastructure

In the study of urban infrastructure, the promise of progress
through engagement with new technological systems has
long been connected to an everyday politics of hope and as-
piration. Celebrated in film, featured in the press, and inau-
gurated through state pageantry, infrastructure as spectacle
works to mediate relations between citizens and govern-
ment through allusions to large-scale public works as
enabling and generative. For example, the recently opened
Nhật Tân cable-stayed bridge in Hanoi that connects to a
new six-lane highway leading to the airport and new inter-
national terminal—all inaugurated in a state ceremony on
January 4, 2015—appeared on the front page of newspapers
around the capital city in colorful images that captured its
impressive, monumental design. Supplemental text lauded
the potential of the bridge (and highway) to bring economic
development to farming communities across the river and
to increase the volume of goods and number of visitors
that could be transported more quickly to the city, showing
how grand forms of spectacular postsocialist infrastructure,
funded by new aid partners (most often overseas develop-
ment assistance, or ODA, from Japan), aspire to expand,
rather than eliminate, a market economy.11

The idea that the development of infrastructure can
result in the transformation and betterment of daily life
frequently generates a sublime enchantment with large-
scale infrastructure projects (Harvey and Knox 2012),12

even as such moments of hopeful effervescence may turn
quickly to dispiriting disappointment. Roads, in particular,
are enchanted sites of modernity suggesting the possibil-
ity of both mobility and interconnectivity (Dalakoglou 2010;
Harvey 2010; see also Mrázek 2002 on colonial roads).
Power plants have their own unique history as works of
grand spectacle. In Soviet electrification programs in Mon-
golia, “electric light was metonymic for development and
enlightenment” as the darker days of the past were

metaphorically and literally left behind (Sneath 2009:86; see
also Larkin 2008 on colonial electrification). Enchantment
with lights, roads, and—in the following Vietnamese case—
water, all captured the imaginative possibilities generated
by spectacular infrastructure technologies that promised a
brighter, cleaner, healthier, modern, and prosperous urban
future.

Like the Soviet program in Mongolia, socialist modern-
ization projects in Vietnam were facilitated by “traveling
technologies” embedded in networks of technical knowl-
edge, labor, media, and material goods (see von Schnitzler
2013 on South Africa). At the request of the central
government in Hanoi, East German planners embarked
on the redesign of Vinh through the global transfer of
modernist planning and engineering technologies.13

The most spectacular and labor-intensive infrastructure
project carried out over the course of seven years was
the construction of the social housing complex where I
conducted my fieldwork. Referred to as Quang Trung after
an 18th-century emperor and general, the 30-hectare site
housed thousands of migrant workers and civil servants
with priority status.14 Toward the end of the project, the
chief waterworks engineer responsible for Quang Trung’s
water supply and sanitation system received permission to
build a water fountain in an adjacent park, one of several
green leisure spaces in the complex. While most of the
engineer’s tasks had centered on utilitarian works such as
sewage plants, pumping stations, and storage facilities, this
aesthetic work was meant to publicly mark and celebrate
the rebuilt metropolis and return to urban modernity as a
solidarity gift bestowed on the city by a fraternal (and, one
can argue, paternalist) socialist country. In the East German
press, the engineer recalled the ritual moment when the
fountain was switched on and GDR water technology be-
came a spectacular performance that elicited awe from the
crowd of viewers gathered for the inauguration ceremony
(Figure 1): “The excitement of the people, and especially
the children, as the fountain lights illuminated the darkness
and 36 water sprays between 3 and 16 meters high came
to life, was the most rewarding moment of my assignment
in Vietnam” (Stöhr 1981). Water and power—emblems of
modernity—had thus been ceremoniously restored to the
city, though provisionally at best.

In an instant—with the flip of a switch—the fountain’s
activation marked an end to the collaborative reconstruc-
tion of infrastructure, with the impending departure of
the East German team. It also signaled transition to a
new phase of urban life that promised progress, well-
being, and self-sufficiency, given that experts saw their
assistance as horizontal and enabling, unlike capitalist
development projects carried out by the West, which
they viewed as cultivating more vertical relations of
dependence. The aesthetic and technical ingenuity of
water-based architecture, Matthew Gandy (2002:32) has

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Spectacular infrastructure � American Ethnologist

Figure 1. The city’s central fountain in front of Quang Trung housing block C7 and C8, Vinh City, Vietnam, circa 1981. Courtesy of Hồ Xuân Thành.

argued, has been a historically recurring motif of urban
abundance and prosperity. In Vinh, the fountain emerged
as a symbol of both urban recovery and the new modern
lifestyle that international socialism had secured in the
aftermath of war. Media images often used the fountain
as a backdrop, showcasing the city’s advance toward pros-
perity and its embrace of scientific socialism to facilitate
rapid architectural and technical renewal. Local residents,
especially youth, flocked to the site in their best attire to
have their picture taken in front of the plumes of water,
fashioning themselves as modern urban citizens (Figure 2).

Just across the way from the fountain, residents in the
apartment blocks, especially the migrant workers, were
exposed to new ideologies and practices of hygienic urban-
ism with water and plumbing technologies available in the
privacy of their individual homes. East German planners
had designed each unit to include a private water closet
with ceramic squat toilet (imported from the GDR) and
a separate, adjacent washroom with a fresh water supply
line. Private indoor plumbing was a new convenience for
most of the residents, who had previously lived in the
countryside or in collective facilities managed by their work
units.15 For economic and utilitarian reasons, the bulky
wastewater system connecting the apartments (and the
water closet with the washroom) was not encased in the
wall but remained in plain sight, serving as a reminder of
the modern benefits that residents enjoyed with socialist
development (Figure 3). And yet the hydraulic infrastruc-
ture did not merely play a functional role here; it was not

Figure 2. Youth posing in front of the fountain, Vinh City, Vietnam, circa
1981. Courtesy of Hồ Xuân Thành.

simply a rational, pragmatic, and technical solution to
the scientific management of urban planning. Rather, the
water infrastructure’s material spectacle was also ideolog-
ically performative insofar as it was visual evidence of the
march toward modernity and the making of an egalitarian,
technologically driven society with hygienic urban persons
who were skilled in the modern ways of living. Through
the flow of water and wastewater into and out of the
home, modern dwellings “became subject to a new moral

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American Ethnologist � Volume 42 Number 3 August 2015

Figure 3. Wastewater pipes in Block C2 of Quang Trung housing, Vinh City,
Vietnam, 2011. Photo by C. Schwenkel.

geography of social behavior” based on the privatization of
domestic practices (Gandy 2004:366–367) that contrasted
with previous forms of collective living. The model of urban
reconstruction applied to postwar Vinh thus became as
much about making civilized socialist workers out of rural
migrants as about regenerating a technical infrastructure
with which to operate and regulate the city. Through the
projected design of a modern and democratic system of
public waterworks (everyone could enjoy the fountain,
and each family could have indoor plumbing), spectacular
infrastructure had the potential to create and collectively
celebrate a technologically advanced, enlightened society
inhabited by contemporary socialist men and women.

Histories of infrastructural lack

To understand postwar enchantment with infrastructure
and the significance of the fountain as it came to life that
night in Vinh, it is important to have a general overview
of the history of urban public works in Vietnam. In the
colonial era, the domain of urban infrastructure was
marked by the highly uneven distribution and accessibility
of resources, in accordance with racialized practices of
infrastructure exclusion; with some exceptions, public
works were largely provided for and enjoyed by those who
were not Vietnamese. As Antina von Schnitzler observes,
such infrastructure practices in colonial settings served
to deny full citizenship rights to indigenous populations
through entrenched processes of resource extraction and
a “biopolitics closely bound up with the project of colonial
domination” (2008:908–909). The racialization of infras-
tructure could also be read on the colonial landscape in
Vinh. Provincial officials estimated that as few as 25 percent
of the households in the urban center pre-1945 (before
the First Indochina War) had electric power, a figure that
included an elite population of foreign administrators and
merchants (predominantly French, Chinese, and Indian).16

As in the Dutch Indies, pipelines, in particular, were among
the “cornerstones of colonial power” in Vietnam (Mrázek
2002:56). In Hanoi, for example, French science and
rationality were applied to solve the problems of urban dirt
and disorder by bringing modern indoor plumbing and
sewer systems to the French quarter only, demonstrating
how “the logic of Hanoi’s urban apartheid dictated that
whites and non-whites would not share modernization
equally” (Vann 2003:193).17 Such discriminatory planning
was subject to remediation after independence in 1954,
when postcolonial urban policy, influenced by the Soviet
Union, sought to modernize and democratize urban infras-
tructure by closing the infrastructure gap and extending
public services to the masses—initiatives that were dis-
rupted with the onset of U.S. aerial bombing a decade later.

During the war with the United States, protracted
bombing from 1964 to 1973 devastated most of northern
Vietnam’s industry and infrastructure, including that in
the city of Vinh. As an important transportation hub and
center of industry, Vinh became the target of frequent air
attacks. The United States carried out more than 4,700
strikes on the city, dropping an estimated 250,555 tons
of explosives (Pha. m and Bùi 2003:217). Throughout this
time, the city was evacuated. Production facilities and
government agencies were decentralized and dispersed
to the countryside, with residents relocated to forests or
remote villages without electric power, adequate potable
water, or a stable supply of food—in short, places lacking
in infrastructure to support the evacuees. This “deliberate
demodernization” of the city by targeting its urban techni-
cal networks (Graham 2005) left the postcolonial landscape
in ruins, destroying 141 enterprises, 13 schools, 4 hospitals,
and 8,663 houses and buildings (District People’s Commit-
tee 2007:89). Transportation and communication systems
rebuilt over the previous decade were likewise decimated,
including roads, railways, bridges, and Soviet-built power,
water, and sewer systems.

It was against this historical background of absent
infrastructure—from unequal access under French colo-
nialism to its deliberate destruction by U.S. imperialism—
that socialist reconstruction of the flattened city took place,
bringing Vietnam out of the “Stone Age” and into the
contemporary socialist world.18 New electric and water
lines, roads, streetlights, factories, schools, colleges, day
cares, markets, parks, and high-rise social housing (a new
architectural form for the city) touted modern lifestyles and
state-of-the art engineering to workers and their families.
Amenities were to be practical to allow for the conveniences
of urban modernity. Water pumped into the household, for
example, would reduce the domestic burden for washing
and cooking, now to be done in one’s private kitchen. With
the expansion of public services and the concentration of
large numbers of people in social housing came a sharp
increase in the need for reliable water and wastewater

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Spectacular infrastructure � American Ethnologist

Figure 4. Laying a water supply line from the central water plant to
Quang Trung housing, Vinh City, Vietnam, 1975. Courtesy of the Nghệ An
Provincial Museum.

operations. Engineers were thus charged with the critical
task of building anew an expansive public water system
that included efficient treatment plants, water storage
facilities, and pumping stations (to meet new pressure
demands: water needed to make its way up to the fifth
floor), as well as reliable water and sewer mains. Teams of
workers laid over 14 kilometers of piping—7,884 meters
to supply water and 6,608 meters for wastewater removal
(Hội Hữu Nghi. 2011:54)—and built nine water storage
tanks across Quang Trung with a total storage capacity of
520 cubic meters, enough for an average of approximately
65 liters per resident daily (Figure 4).19

As in the case of the Soviet Union, a technopolitics of
visibility would showcase to the masses the modern, tech-
nological progress of new public works and infrastructure
development that also signaled the city’s integration into
the community of advanced socialist nations. From East
German technicians and engineers working on-site—a sign
of international expertise and global interconnectedness—
to the presence of foreign technical objects strewn across
construction sites, including imported machines, beams,
pipes, tubing, and clamps, water affirmed both the city’s in-
ternational orientation and liberation from the devastation
of war. As water flushed through exposed pipes, residents
would be able to see and hear material betterment through

the spectacle of German engineering. The utilitarian de-
sign notwithstanding (e.g., the latrine as the open end of
a sewer line20), the iron pipes and ceramic squat toilets of-
fered amenities previously unavailable to the poor. Making
infrastructure visible, if not spectacular, thus served to re-
mind urban dwellers that their new modern cityscape (and
its collective benefits) was the product of a long historical
struggle and a recent communist victory: in other words,
that the paternalistic state was making good on its contrac-
tual obligations. Yet, this utopian ideal of universal access
began to break down as the networks of urban infrastruc-
ture failed to function.

Breakdown: On the unrealized dream of
egalitarian infrastructure

Without electricity, people can still live. But life with-
out water is extremely difficult. One can survive a dark
night by lighting an oil lamp. But not to have water is an
endless grueling hardship.

—Architect and former resident of Quang Trung,
Vinh City

In the immediate postwar years of reconstruction, the vis-
ibility of water technologies symbolized the promise of the
socialist state to provide adequate and dependable public
services to urban citizens. High-rise social housing also
embodied the hope of recovery and development insofar as
it transferred workers out of collective living conditions and
into private family units. Although foreign in design, the
apartments were flaunted as ideal, modern, and desirable,
with “high technical and aesthetic qualities” and “conve-
nient amenities” for workers and their families (P.V. 1978:4).
Ideally, water supply in the home would improve the lives
of workers, especially women, by reducing domestic labor
and allowing families to enjoy more leisure time together
in the parks and playgrounds built around the complex. Yet
this was not to be the case, and the performance of water
quickly came to an end after residents moved in and taps in
the apartments ran dry. Once the GDR technicians left, the
fountain was also shut down to conserve limited resources.
At issue was not water scarcity—engineers made certain
that storage facilities would provide for the basic needs
of each household—but the technology of water flow and
distribution itself. There was only enough pressure to move
water up two flights of stairs. Nikhil Anand’s (2011:543)
work on hydraulic pressure has shown how both material
and social relations enable access to water. Likewise, in
Vinh, in the absence of vital pressure technologies (there
were no electric pumps, but even if there had been, power
shortages were common), access to water enabled, and
indeed required, new material practices that depended on
the strengthening of urban solidarities. But it also revealed
certain rifts in the system, as units on the lower floors that

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American Ethnologist � Volume 42 Number 3 August 2015

had more regular access to water were typically allocated
to higher-ranking public servants and officials.21 This
imbalance not only undermined the ideal of an egalitarian
distribution of infrastructure but also exposed in the inti-
mate spheres of everyday life the impact of prevailing forms
of stratification that were widespread in socialist systems
(Berdahl 1999:111).22

Upkeep and maintenance was another critical issue. A
tremendous amount of labor and resources had been com-
mitted to the seven-year project of reconstruction. And yet
the provincial government did not have the financial means
to maintain or expand new technical systems after GDR
material support ended. For example, streetlights burned
out or there was not sufficient power to keep them running;
the fountain also soon fell into disrepair. The dreamworld
of modernist planning ultimately depended on other crit-
ical infrastructure and systems of maintenance that could
not be guaranteed in the aftermath of war. Instead, the
experience of infrastructure so fundamental to hope in a
prosperous postwar futurity remained a mere potentiality
(von Schnitzler 2008:904), leading to growing disenchant-
ment with the facade of urban infrastructure that was
technologically nonperforming. The words of one elderly
woman who received a unit through the state pharma-
ceutical company in 1980 captured this disenchantment:
“I didn’t want to stay here. I applied for a piece of land [a
decade later], but was denied. There were problems with
water, and fees for everything.23 I thought I would stay
temporarily, but I haven’t had the opportunity to leave.”
Rather than a sign of progress and prosperity, then, the
visibility of infrastructure spoke to a state of enduring
hardship and “backwardness” (la. c hậu), and to the failure
of the provincial government to deliver the public services
necessary for future betterment.

The water shortage on the apartment blocks’ upper
floors created immense difficulties for the newly settled res-
idents. Technologies such as indoor plumbing, intended
to eliminate laborious tasks in the home, paradoxically,
rendered many daily acts even more cumbersome. Like-
wise, the attempt to privatize hygienic practices—including
bathing and laundering—by bringing them into the domain
of the home (to the washroom) resulted in public or com-
munal practices that planners had sought to prevent. Men
and children, for example, continued to bathe outdoors,
as they had in shared housing where plumbing had been
largely unavailable, and women continued to wash clothes
jointly. Many residents felt an initial excitement at being
offered a self-contained apartment with modern conve-
niences: “It was upscale, hygienic, and civilized living!” one
woman exclaimed. Gradually, though, that sentiment gave
way to a more critical reassessment of the socialist urban
project: “Ideal living, with no water or electricity? A symbol
of socialism? Not at all!” said one man, a retired journalist.

In the face of such breakdown, the residents them-
selves became the pillar of infrastructure (Simone 2004),
in ways that both reinforced and suspended the gendered
division of domestic labor. Women, in particular, remem-
bered the exhausting nightly routine (after a full day at
work and an evening of chores) as a battle with time: When
would water flow, and for how long? Typically, at some
point between 11:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., the water would be
turned on, but the flow was not long or strong enough for
it to reach the upper floors. Residents would then descend
quickly and walk to the nearest public spout to collect
water to bring home. Each person could carry 30 liters:
two buckets attached to the ends of a yoke balanced across
one shoulder to distribute the load. “It was so arduous!”
one woman, a retired factory worker, recalled of the early
years in Quang Trung before UNICEF came and built wells
on-site. “When the water would start to run, we had to wake
up and walk several blocks to the pump where we would
get in line and wait. Sometimes we had to go back and forth
several times in one night!” Because families would have to
haul water (gánh nước) as many as ten times a day to fill the
cement cisterns in the washroom, the gendered division of
labor that associated women with water (hauling, washing,
cleaning, etc.) was provisionally abandoned. “Everyone
in the family had to help,” the woman pointed out. One
male resident remembered his evening task: “Yes, it was
burdensome. For years, we had to bring water upstairs
in the middle of the night.” But, he reasoned, the family
apartments were still more comfortable than the thatched,
collective housing where he had lived before. Residents
also reflected on the deep sense of solidarity that formed
around the communal experience of hardship. Another
man recalled, “It was hard work to haul water every day,
but fun as well. People were always on the stairs convers-
ing with one another at that time.” Water scarcity thus
engendered new forms of sociability among neighbors
from different work units, making water a focal point,
not of the privatized family, but of public activity once
again.

The frustration that residents felt—not only those with-
out water but also those with water availability who strug-
gled to help their neighbors—intensified over time. The
year 1986 saw the introduction of economic reforms (Đổi
mới) that would put an end to centralized distribution, in-
cluding housing allocation and free public services such
as health care and education. That same year, the official
city newspaper published an anonymous poem, “Gửi nhà
máy nước Vinh” (To the water company of Vinh), in which
the author declared that Quang Trung residents had waited
long enough for their right to a regular supply of clean water.
Applying political pressure through public chastisement,
the poet berated apathetic authorities who “sit on clouds”
and do nothing to alleviate the problem:

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Spectacular infrastructure � American Ethnologist

You pump the water so carelessly
It hasn’t even ascended before it starts to go down!
How miserable for the people who live on the upper
floors
They wait and wait at night until their eyes turn red
with anxiety . . .
Their bodies dry and thirsty
Come and see for yourself. [Báo Nghệ An 1986:3]

Although the critic blamed vain and indifferent provin-
cial authorities for the dry taps, municipal officials and
Quang Trung residents understood accountability for water
shortages and infrastructure breakdown as something far
more complex. Views about responsibility for maintenance
and disrepair revealed other measures of social differentia-
tion that structured social life in the complex according to
the residents’ trı̀nh độ văn hóa (level of culture, or cultural
capital), which reinforced distinctions between workers
and civil servants. Cadres who embraced the civilizing
project of socialist modernity and fashioned themselves as
civilized urban subjects saw themselves as more refined and
educated than the postwar rural migrants to the city whose
inurbane practices were in need of reform.24 Elsewhere I
have argued that local officials and urban planners (both
Vietnamese and East German) considered the cultural and
economic activities of Quang Trung tenants to be too rural
for a modern, industrial city—for example, the practice of
raising livestock in the apartments (Schwenkel 2013:272).
And yet the extent of such worker–cadre distinctions was
often exaggerated: Cadres too had rural backgrounds, and
they too turned to raising livestock to survive the subsidy
era. Nonetheless, in a moral order of culpability that
typically identifies marginalized populations as incapable
of living in modern dwellings (Lea and Pholeros 2010),
workers, more than cadres, were held responsible for the
rapid decay of the buildings—transforming the spectacle of
infrastructure from the possibility of a modern future to a
state of enduring abjection (Larkin 2013:333).

Likewise, when it came to the nonperformativity of the
water system, migrant workers who were new to the city and
to modern urban housing were also the targets of blame. In
an anonymous 1985 editorial published in the city newspa-
per and signed by “Administrator,” the author investigated
the cause of water disruption in Quang Trung and its effects
on the population: namely, that hauling water up several
flights of stairs in the middle of the night had a strong im-
pact on workers’ health and productivity. Questioning the
infuriating lack of water in the apartments that persisted
despite a sanitation infrastructure in place to service each
unit, the writer uncovered a host of technical issues, such
as cracks and leaks in the pipes, that contributed to defi-
ciencies in pressure. While holding the Division of Housing
responsible for not maintaining the system and attending to
routine repairs, however, the author also faulted residents

and their misuse of infrastructure as the source of breaks
and low pressure: “Many people on the upper floors of the
housing blocks have no sense (không có ý thức) how to use
and care for the water supply system; some turn the faucet
on, but do not shut it off completely, reducing the pressure
for others” (Người quản lý 1985: 3–4).25 Such laments against
the urban poor are not confined to Vietnam. “The unhy-
gienic and undisciplined indigenous tenant who needs
further tutelage in the arts of living in a house” is often
the convenient culprit for disrepair (Lea and Pholeros
2010:197).

Charges of disruptions in the wastewater system also
were leveled against residents thought to possess lower lev-
els of cultural capital, even though modern conveniences
such as private indoor plumbing were a novelty for most.
One engineer who lived in block C6 until 1992 saw a fun-
damental conflict between urban and rural practices of
dwelling that led to disorder and breakdown in Quang
Trung:

There was a water disposal system in place, but it was
always backed up. [CS: Why?] Because of lack of use
[from little water] and wrong use. People threw all kinds
of things into the drain: paper, fabric, bamboo, and
food. These were people from the countryside who
didn’t know how to live in the city. So they continued
to live like they did in their village, and they would clog
the system. It was especially bad for the people on the
first floor who had to put up with the waste and awful
smells.26

In an ironic twist, wastewater pipes—observable and pro-
truding in each home, a profane, everyday reminder of a
new urban order—inadvertently became a technology for
undermining the project of a civilized modernity by expos-
ing the aberrations and inequalities of infrastructure. Here,
waste became an unethical object (cf. Hawkins 2005) that
evoked moral anxieties about the failures of an urbaniza-
tion still tainted by the rural. Residents without water on
the upper floors, mostly workers and lower-level public ser-
vants who queued nightly at a public tap, had their own
ideas about modern amenities and the proper disposal of
solid waste. Yet, by dumping trash down the open drains
(in accordance with municipal directives to rid the home of
waste), residents clogged the pipes, causing overflow on the
lower floors inhabited by higher-ranked tenants who had
access to water in their homes. This outcome was not inten-
tional; such acts were not an expression of outright protest
of living conditions or persistent stratification. In general,
cadres on lower floors were sympathetic to the plight of
their neighbors, and many made efforts to share water over
two decades of shortage. The differentiations between the
floors also began to blur as apartments were traded and ten-
ants moved around to other blocks (or out of the complex),
especially after reforms. Nonetheless, as the performative

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American Ethnologist � Volume 42 Number 3 August 2015

role of the sewer pipes changed beyond their intended use
and meaning, waste became an ethical matter of infrastruc-
ture and a point of state intervention.27

Overflow: Contested liabilities of maintenance

By the mid-1990s, almost 20 years after the first tenants had
moved in, most apartments had regular access to water.28

And yet, by the time I started fieldwork in the housing
complex in 2010, a new chain of complications associated
with the public water system had emerged. The issue was
no longer a shortage of water as experienced in the postwar
years but, rather, its surplus. Today, water does not just
flow—it often overflows. Leaks, drips, and flooding are part
of everyday life and have been for many years, contributing
to (and reflecting) the buildings’ rapid decay. This situation
has generated dangerous and unhealthful living conditions
across the complex. Sections of the corridor have eroded
from long-term water damage, exposing rusted steel rods
(hence, the need for supporting braces). Large plaster
pieces from apartment ceilings in several of the blocks have
been known to break off and injure occupants. The press
regularly covers such occurrences, exposing the Division
of Housing’s lack of action. Despite such conditions (or
perhaps because of them), tenants have been hesitant to
self-repair (tự làm) in ways that would preserve the struc-
tural and infrastructural integrity of the buildings. Although
residents have long engaged in improvisational practices
to maintain a livable environment within their individual
units (Schwenkel 2014:168–170), they have begrudgingly
paid mandatory fees for upkeep and repairs of common
space. “Why should we have to pay for this?” a man in B5
asked about a communal electric bill and upgrade to the
lights in the stairwell. “We didn’t have to pay anything like
this before when [East] Germany built these homes.”

More than material forms and networks of technol-
ogy, infrastructures, as Susan Leigh Star (1999:381) has
observed, are learned arrangements that constitute mem-
bership in particular communities of practice. I too had to
learn the erratic flow and temporal idiosyncrasies of the
water system, as well as cultural expectations about the
routine use of water, to find a balance between having too
much water—overflowing the tank, running down the walls
and across the floor—or none at all. I also had to be trained
for proper, not excessive, use. Thus, my water consumption
was scrutinized by the landlord, who wondered why my
monthly bill of 55,000 Vietnam đồng (US$2.75) vastly
exceeded hers (30,000 Vietnam đồng, or US$1.50). And yet
I was not the only one struggling with an excess of water.
Almost every apartment battled with water—potable water,
wastewater, or rainwater—in some way through blockages,
leaks, cracks, and holes. For instance, one Saturday morning
I visited a neighbor in another block and found him outside
tending to his plants. As we walked into his flat, I noticed a
large poster he had hung on the wall across from the bath-

room door. He explained that it was covering damage from
mold, which I could see spreading slowly beyond the pic-
ture, from a leaky water tank in the upstairs apartment. “It’s
been dripping a long time and I’ve talked with the neighbors
several times already, but they refuse to fix it,” he said with
some irritation. Not unlike my experience in my own apart-
ment, this man and his neighbor could not agree on a clear
line of responsibility for the necessary repair, nor would
there be an agreement on liability for associated damages—
did it extend to the man’s walls, for instance? This lack of
clarity had much to do with the ambiguous ownership
history of the apartments: built by the GDR, gifted to the
city, allocated to state employees, managed by municipal
authorities, and then, most recently, privatized, turning
tenants into bona fide owners. Who then is liable for years
of infrastructure neglect resulting in routine breakdowns,
dilapidated systems, and the material deterioration of the
buildings?

Scholars have argued that disputes over infrastructure,
rather than simply create rifts between people, generate
possibilities for new social and political collectivities to
emerge around the deployment, upkeep, and breakdown
of technical systems. Similarly, the refusal to fix the toilet
or the water tank in my field site was more than a mere
dispute over liability between neighbors. Although they ex-
pressed frustrations, tenants did not assign total blame to
the owners of the objects that caused the leaks. Rather, their
facade of collective ambivalence hinged on the refusal to
shift the locus of liability from the state to the individual (a
refusal that my act of payment then violated). In a moral
order that saw infrastructure as the domain of state care,
the source of the leak became secondary to its destructive
result: water seeping through already crumbling floors and
walls, placing the issue of repair squarely in the hands of
managing authorities. Such expectations stemmed from an
ethos of reciprocity found among older tenants who held
the state accountable for provisions and maintenance, men
and women who believed they were owed infrastructure in
exchange for their labor and military service. “I helped build
this country,” complained one disgruntled man, echoing a
frequent lament heard across the complex.

Conclusion: Moral orders of broken waterscapes

Recent scholarship has noted how infrastructural inter-
ruptions in neoliberal economies have emerged as occa-
sions to galvanize new political subjectivities and make new
claims to belonging, especially for marginalized popula-
tions (see, especially, Anand 2011). Conversely, in the case of
Vinh, Quang Trung residents were not underprivileged cit-
izens adversely affected by uneven geographies of capital-
ism; they were the targeted beneficiaries of socialist infra-
structure (right division of word) and its public services.29

And yet, the examples presented here—from the poem writ-
ten to the water company to tenants’ refusal to pay for

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Spectacular infrastructure � American Ethnologist

repairs—reveal claims to certain rights and protections that
citizens articulated in the aftermath of the collapse of in-
frastructure: namely, the right to provision, proper opera-
tion, and supervision of the system of public waterworks.
Plumbing and its dysfunction—the failure to perform prac-
tically (water distribution) and ideologically (state legiti-
macy in bringing the fruits of socialist modernity to the
masses)—became a key technology in mobilizing social col-
lectivities and mutual acts of care in the face of persis-
tent, though unevenly experienced, adversity. The shared
physical and affective labor that went into securing an ad-
equate, daily supply of water also came to shape a collec-
tive ethos and ethics of care around infrastructure practices
(see Jackson 2014:233). This labor of care included the re-
distribution of critical resources within the housing units,
such as leaving water in the corridor to share with others
so as to mitigate the glaring inefficiencies and inequities of
socialist urbanization. Moreover, I have argued that there
was an important gendered dimension to this moral or-
der that remains largely unaddressed in the literature on
the politics of maintenance and repair: The everyday strug-
gle for water required the collaborative efforts of both men
and women, temporarily suspending the gendered divi-
sion of labor around infrastructure and the expectation that
women should secure critical resources, while men—like
the plumber—repair and restore technical systems.

The water system’s breakdown also revealed the fail-
ure of European ideas of modernity to achieve a state of
recovery and contemporaneity in Vinh on par with the rest
of the socialist world. The malfunction of indoor plumbing,
designed to bring the “good life” to workers by moving the
domains of domestic work and hygiene into private homes,
forced residents back outdoors to reengage in communal
water practices.30 This turn of events undermined the
emphasis in urban planning, spearheaded by the GDR, on
the family as the locus of modernization, which dovetailed
with the shift in Vietnamese party policy from a collective
to a family economy (kinh tế gia đı̀nh).31 And yet the lack
of water obliged women to carry out their household work
in communal spaces (as they had in collective housing)—a
form of sociality many preferred—rather than alone in
their homes. Older women frequently recalled with a hint
of wistfulness the conviviality of such arrangements. Today,
some neighbors continue outdoor practices of cooking or
washing, despite having more reliable water and power
supplies in their homes (Figure 5). Other women continue
to gather water from the public well to supplement their
household reserves and reduce monthly utility expendi-
tures. These simple tasks become small political acts that
defy the shift of liability for the use and upkeep of infras-
tructure from local government to retired state employees.
Here, the emancipatory potential of maintenance and
repair lies not with improvisation and innovation (Graham
and Thrift 2007:2) but with evasion and circumvention.

Figure 5. Women washing clothes together outside Block C6, Vinh City,
Vietnam, 2011. Photo by C. Schwenkel.

Today the original inhabitants of Quang Trung, many of
whom proudly display on flaking walls their distinguished
service awards for their role in the war, remember these
histories of sociability with a note of nostalgic desire for the
moral values of the postwar years. They lament what they
feel to be a decline in social cohesion as the loss of a com-
munal ethics in the housing complex and, more broadly,
what many see as the moral degradation (xuống cấp đa. o
đức) of society since the end of the subsidy period, an
observation also noted in other parts of Vietnam (see, e.g.,
Leshkowich 2014). My landlord, who grew up on the second
floor of building C2, described the collapse of the moral
order that had formed around broken waterscapes through
her own family’s experience of providing for neighbors: “We
helped and took care of one another then—unlike today.”
Nostalgia for cooperation and an ethics of care that proved
vital to coping with water shortages invoked a past that was
largely devoid of inequity between neighbors, even as those
overlooked hierarchies of the socialist era pale in compar-
ison to the widening gaps in wealth and opportunity today
that have allowed some families to buy property elsewhere
and relocate. And yet, for those tenants who remain in
their crumbling, mildewed apartments tinkering with
leaky systems, spectacular infrastructure, with its visual
technopolitics that promised a better world, is now an
abject sign of future uncertainty with the looming prospect
of demolition. This condition of uncertainty and economic
precarity is perhaps best represented in the fountain across
the way, which still stands—and, in fact, was recently
renovated—and yet remains dry: an apt symbol of the
facade of urban modernity that could not be maintained
without plumes of cascading water to hold the fantasy in
place.

Notes

Acknowledgments. Research for this article was supported by
Fulbright-Hays, the American Council of Learned Societies, the

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American Ethnologist � Volume 42 Number 3 August 2015

Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the UC Pa-
cific Rim Research Program, and the National Endowment for
the Humanities. I am also grateful for the support of the Uni-
versity of California Humanities Research Institute and the “Ur-
ban Ecologies” Residential Research Group, which provided a
stimulating intellectual environment in which to draft this ar-
ticle. Kavita Philip and Saloni Mathur provided especially use-
ful suggestions. An earlier version of the article was presented
at the international conference “Ecologies of Urbanism in Asia
II: Cities, Towns, and the Places of Nature” at the University of
Hong Kong. I wish to thank Anne Rademacher and K. Sivarama-
krishnan, as well as conference participants for the valuable feed-
back I received. Thanks are also due to Kirsten Endres for the op-
portunity to present these ideas at the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. I also gratefully acknowl-
edge the anonymous reviewers for AE and the editor, Angelique
Haugerud, for their incisive and constructive comments.

1. Fieldwork for this article took place in Vinh City in 2006, 2009,
2010–11, and 2012. In addition to living in the East German–built
housing complex for nine months, I conducted archival research
in the newly accessible collections at the Provincial People’s Com-
mittee in Vinh as well as at national archives in Hanoi and Berlin.
Interviews with East German technicians who worked in Vinh on
postwar reconstruction took place in Germany in 2006, 2008, 2011,
and 2012.

2. According to municipal authorities, of the remaining 19 hous-
ing blocks in the complex, three had degraded to below 40 percent
of their original structural capacity. Fear of collapse was a common
anxiety expressed by residents in these buildings.

3. In the words of the managing official responsible for the hous-
ing complex, demand for repairs is high and funds are low. The
Division of Housing receives just 700 million Vietnam đồng (ap-
proximately US$35,000) every two years for maintenance and re-
pair. “That is not a lot for 19 buildings,” he explained. “With this
money, we cannot carry out major repairs, only small jobs such as
whitewashing the exterior (quét vôi).” Interview, Vinh City, March
8, 2011.

4. Decision 239/2005/QĐ-TTg of the central government, signed
by the prime minister on September 30, 2005, affirmed the city’s
goal to become the “economic and political center of the north cen-
tral region (trung tâm kinh tế, văn hóa vùng Bắc Trung Bộ).” On
September 5, 2008, Vinh’s status was elevated to a Grade 1 city as
per Decision 1210/QĐ-TTg. There are currently only five Grade 1
cities in the country (they do not include the “special status” cities
of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City).

5. In planning documents, East German planners typically re-
ferred to the reconstruction of Vinh as the building of a socialist
city (sozialistische Stadt).

6. Contemporaneity, Giorgio Agamben (2009:41) has argued,
marks an individuated relationship with disjunctive time. Yet,
unlike Agamben’s contemporaries, the ideal socialist contempo-
rary positioned him- or herself to face a bright future (“forward-
looking”) instead of a foreboding past. In both senses, though, to
be contemporary implied a “return to the present where we have
never been” (Agamben 2009:51–52).

7. For an overview of anthropological literature on infrastructure
as technical, aesthetic, and poetic, see Larkin 2013.

8. One exception here is Brian Larkin, who argues that in colo-
nial and postcolonial states where “infrastructures command a
powerful presence,” breakdown serves to enhance their visibility,
thus revealing “governments’ failed promises to their people as
specters that haunt contemporary collapse” (2008:245).

9. Dimitris Dalakoglou (2010:571) has observed that much of the
labor involved in constructing large-scale Albanian public works

projects was forced or voluntary. Vinh’s postwar recovery also re-
lied on obligatory “socialist labor” (lao động xã hội chủ nghı̃a) as
service to the state, especially from youth brigades who provided
supplementary labor to repair and expand urban infrastructure, in-
cluding filling in bomb craters and digging a man-made lake in the
central park. The press commonly photographed and documented
such collective efforts. On the mobilization of collective labor (both
conscripted and voluntary) for postcolonial infrastructure projects
in the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam in the 1950s, see
MacLean 2007.

10. This 1974–80 period of reconstruction (xây dựng la. i) differs
from the 1954–64 decade of postcolonial, socialist city building, re-
ferred to as renovation (khôi phu. c) (Schwenkel 2015).

11. See, for example, the front page of the newspaper Lao Động
(Labor) from January 5, 2015, with the headline “New Look of the
City.”

12. Thus, my taxi driver, on the way to the airport, showed me
a video he had shot while driving across the bridge on the day it
opened.

13. For an analysis of the “open hand” design of Vinh City based
on planning principles put forth by the International Congresses
of Modern Architecture (CIAM), see Schwenkel 2015. The central
government in Hanoi requested “fraternal” assistance with the re-
construction of seven urban areas in northern Vietnam.

14. Each housing block was allocated to several state factories or
government agencies, which in turn allocated the individual apart-
ments to employees according to a point system that assigned a
numerical value for participation in the revolution (hoa. t động cách
ma. ng), excellent labor performance (lao động xuất sắc), size of fam-
ily, and need for housing. Those with the highest number of points
were considered priority (ưu tiên) and allocated an apartment ac-
cording to supply. Those with fewer points remained in collective
factory housing.

15. Most had also evacuated during the air war and lived for sev-
eral years in the mountainous regions in makeshift conditions.

16. File 575, Tài liệu về xây dựng nhà máy điện Vinh, năm 1954,
Nghệ An Provincial Archives. Bricks were another infrastructure
technology used largely by the elite, while poorer families lived in
thatch or wooden structures (Schwenkel 2013).

17. Similarly, in the Dutch Indies, sewer systems came to define
the colony as both “clean” and “dirty” along sharply demarcated
lines between Dutch–European and local kampong living quarters
(Mrázek 2002:57).

18. Here I am referring to an East German architect’s description
of Vinh in 1974 as “bombed back into the Stone Age,” echoing the
well-known wartime threat by U.S. General Curtis LeMay against
the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Interview, Berlin, September
9, 2011.

19. In Area A, one cement tank was built with a capacity of 104
cubic meters, and in Areas B and C, four tanks were built per area
to hold a total of 208 cubic meters for each area.

20. As Milan Kundera also noted of Soviet-era plumbing in The
Unbearable Lightness of Being (see Robbins 2007:29).

21. Residents faced other problems, though—such as unfiltered
water that was murky and “red as crab” with tadpoles sometimes
swimming in it (Báo Nghệ An 1986:3).

22. High-ranking cadres or public servants were allocated apart-
ments on the second floor (most desired), while midlevel employ-
ees typically received apartments on the first floor (and sometimes
the third). Units on the third through fifth floors were allocated to
regular workers and civil servants. Note that during the subsidy pe-
riod (1975–86), goods were also distributed in accordance with a
rank system that privileged higher officials.

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Spectacular infrastructure � American Ethnologist

23. Here the speaker alludes to the small amounts tenants paid
monthly for rent and utilities. This money was supposed to go to-
ward maintenance of the buildings—another reason residents re-
fused to invest their own funds in repair.

24. The press likewise served as a “civility tracker” of sorts. For
example, in the article “Xây dựng nếp sống mới ở tiểu khu Quang
Trung” (Building a new lifestyle in Quang Trung), residents in build-
ing B4 were praised for their model (mẫu) behavior in taking out the
garbage and for increasing the number of party members, suggest-
ing a correlation between self-cultivation and party membership.
Scandalous behavior (bê bối), such as market profiteering, was also
reported (Tủ An 1981:4).

25. International organizations involved in projects to upgrade
Quang Trung (advocating its demolition and reconstruction) have
also faulted residents for the buildings’ rapid decay, in addition
to bad urban policy and substandard East German engineering
(Schwenkel 2012:454–455).

26. Interview, Vinh City, February 26, 2011.
27. Even as late as December 1997, the Municipal People’s Com-

mittee reported that the majority of urban residents still did not
have a sense of proper solid waste practices to maintain a civilized
living environment (Uỷ Ban 1997:31).

28. With the dissolution of East Germany, GDR loans were con-
verted to new aid programs by the reunified German state, which
set about refurbishing the broken system.

29. This is not to argue that socialist urban geographies were
just—my discussion in this article clearly shows otherwise—but
that other operations of power beyond capitalism shaped them.

30. Such efforts to civilize urban life by privatizing daily prac-
tices resonate with observations on internalization in contempo-
rary Vietnamese society, which continues to adhere to discourses
of urban civilization (Harms 2009).

31. According to Lisa Drummond (2000:2385), this shift served
to increase the burden of domestic labor (rather than reduce
it through private amenities, as the GDR envisioned), especially
for women workers who took over the role of caregivers from
the state as the family unit assumed increasing importance in
society.

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Article

Urban Studies
1–18
� Urban Studies Journal Limited 2023

Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00420980221144575
journals.sagepub.com/home/usj

Storage city: Water tanks,
jerry cans, and batteries as
infrastructure in Nairobi

Moritz Kasper
Technical University Dortmund, Germany

Sophie Schramm
Technical University Dortmund, Germany

Abstract
Against the ‘normative concept of the networked city’, urban studies and infrastructure research
have seen a shift towards investigations beyond the network that engage with the post-networked
city, heterogeneous infrastructures, and other situations ‘on, off, below and beyond’ the grid, espe-
cially in southern cities. Expanding on debates around southern urbanisms and their socio-technical
infrastructures, we explore a ubiquitous yet rarely discussed element of contemporary urban infra-
structures: storage. In Nairobi, a city shaped by infrastructural heterogeneity and uncertainty,
households of all backgrounds and sizes store water and electricity within various constellations of
actors, practices and artefacts. We show how domestic storage, its artefacts and practices cumulate
in a storage city that is not opposed to a networked or post-networked city but rather entangled
with it. We present domestic storage as crucial infrastructure to the socio-technical functioning of
Nairobi, discuss diverse storage artefacts and practices, and highlight how a focus on storage can
contribute to re-imaginings of infrastructural articulations beyond networks and flows.

Keywords
electricity, infrastructure, Nairobi, storage, water

Corresponding author:

Moritz Kasper, Department of Spatial Planning

(International Planning Studies research group), Technical

University Dortmund, August-Schmidt-Str. 6, Dortmund

44227, Germany.

Email: moritz.kasper@tu-dortmund.de

https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions

https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221144575

journals.sagepub.com/home/usj

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1177%2F00420980221144575&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2023-02-01

Received May 2022; accepted November 2022

‘It’s so ingrained in us . I am storing electric-

ity and water because my country is like this .
You don’t think about it, it’s just instinct’. (resi-

dent interview in Ruaka)

Introduction

Despite the importance of infrastructures and
basic services for urban lives and economies,
many cities across the globe struggle with
universal and centralised provision of water,
electricity and other essential resources.
Especially in southern cities, basic supply is
less defined by the ideal of the networked city
but rather by heterogeneous infrastructure
configurations (HICs) involving diverse
socio-technical sets of providers, sources,
materialities and practices (Lawhon et al.,
2018; Jaglin, 2014). Amidst such configura-
tions, urban residents – for example in
Nairobi, Kenya – have to navigate infrastruc-
tural uncertainty caused by rationings, black-
outs and other interruptions. One way of
making urban life possible amidst unreliable
or heterogeneous infrastructures is storage.

For a long time, academic engagements
with urban infrastructures have focused on

the spatialities, temporalities, materialities,
and politics of flows, circulations, mobilities
and other kinds of movements (e.g. Bender,
2009; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Kaika,
2005). In line with recent provocations on
infrastructural containment or confinement
(e.g. Banoub and Martin, 2020; Furlong,
2022), we suggest expanding our understand-
ing of infrastructures towards the artefacts
and practices of domestic storage of water,
energy and more. Focusing on the household
and its storage artefacts, that is containers, as
key sites and technologies of storage, this
provides a new venue for investigations and
imaginations beyond dualisms of connected/
unconnected, rich/poor, formal/informal, etc.
Simultaneously, the everyday deployment of
storage in Nairobi and elsewhere does not
conflict with notions of networked or post-
networked cities. Instead, in regards to
uncountable sites, artefacts and practices of
storage, we propose the notion of a storage
city with multiple relations and connections
to other systems and conceptualisations.
Ultimately, we advocate for storage as infra-
structure, given its enabling, imperative role
for urban-infrastructural functioning in
Nairobi. Such deliberate inclusion and shift

2 Urban Studies 00(0)

in perspective may provide crucial insights
for planning, design and governance of place-
specific HICs across the networked/post-
networked spectrum.

As a first step to grasp storage as infra-
structure, we use the examples of water and
electricity in Nairobi, Kenya. Drawing from
existing literature, our paper is grounded in
qualitative fieldwork in the wider Nairobi
area in 2021 and 2022: more than 20 struc-
tured key informant interviews (government,
utilities, NGOs, etc.); close to 30 semi-
structured resident interviews; and multiple
visits, strolls and informal conversations. We
recruited resident respondents via existing
contacts, social media and snowballing, and
we based our final selection on diversity in
terms of socio-economic situations, geo-
graphic location, residential architectures and
infrastructural connectivity. We conducted
the majority of resident interviews – which
always discussed both water and electricity –
in Eastleigh (dense central neighbourhood),
Kibera (large informal settlement), Westlands
(up-market area) and Ongata Rongai (rap-
idly urbanising suburb). The paper is orga-
nised in three sections: a theoretical and
conceptual framing based on existing litera-
ture; an exploration of the underlying reasons
for, and expressions of, domestic water and
electricity storage in Nairobi; and a final dis-
cussion opening up tasks and questions for
further engagements.

Networked, post-networked,
storage city: From flows to
storage

Our understanding of modern cities and their
infrastructural functioning has been shaped
by the universalising promises of ‘distribu-
tive infrastructures’, largely ‘comprised of
pipes, cables, wires and tracks’ (Marvin,
1992: 228). As crucial parts of the ‘normative
concept of the networked city’ (Graham and
Marvin, 2001: 387), these infrastructures –

and the flows, circulations and mobilities
they enable – promised the ideal of a ‘uni-
tary, orderly city’ (Monstadt and Schramm,
2017). However, the modernist vision of the
‘networked city’ was rarely ‘perfectly ‘rea-
lised’’ neither was it ‘a universal and uniform
‘thing’’ (Graham and Marvin, 2001: 88). For
many southern cities, centralised networked
infrastructures have rarely provided the
promised services and supply in a universal
manner (Furlong and Kooy, 2017; Graham
and Marvin, 2022; Munro, 2020). Yet, urban
residents as well as governmental and private
actors have found myriad ways to distribute
water, electricity and other resources or ser-
vices: tapping of wires and pipes; decentra-
lised distribution systems; off-grid supply
modes; etc. (Chakava et al., 2014; Cirolia
et al., 2021; Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021;
Silver, 2015).

By highlighting the ‘vitality and multipli-
city of actual delivery systems’ in southern cit-
ies, Jaglin (2014) questions the applicability of
the networked city notion as a starting point
for urban-infrastructure research and prac-
tice. Accordingly, calls for new vocabulary
through more situated research in southern
cities (e.g. Bhan, 2019) have contributed to a
rise of new notions, such as HICs or the post-
networked city. The post-networked city
stands for ‘an urbanism of infrastructure that
no longer assumes . convergence of socio-
technical systems around a networked config-
uration’ (Rutherford and Coutard, 2016:
258), and often refers to off-grid infrastruc-
tures, for example boreholes and small-scale
solar. Contrastingly, HICs include ‘the
diverse ways that people access services within
and beyond conventional city networks’,
which conceptually ‘challenges the binary
between networked and non-networked’
(Cirolia et al., 2021: 1611). Referring to differ-
ent yet overlapping conceptualisations, both
notions have been shown to be characteristic
for many African cities (Hyman and Pieterse,
2017; Jaglin, 2016).

Kasper and Schramm 3

As part of the global ‘infrastructural turn’
(Graham, 2010), we have also seen a general
expansion of what infrastructures are (or
might be), from Simone’s (2004) ‘people as
infrastructure’ to recent provocations on
human bodies, non-human beings, time and
more ‘as infrastructure’ (e.g. Andueza et al.,
2021; Barua, 2021; Besedovsky et al., 2019).
Other authors have pointed out that the
increasingly ‘fuzzy boundaries’ of infrastruc-
ture may jeopardise sharpness and useful-
ness for academia and practice (Baptista and
Cirolia, 2022: 930; see also Howe et al.,
2016). Yet, a ‘wider infrastructural ontology’
(Barua, 2021; see also Addie, 2021) holds
opportunity and value to fully grasp how
basic services and resources are provided,
distributed and accessed within and through
configurations or systems ‘without which
contemporary societies cannot function’
(Edwards, 2003: 188). From all the engage-
ments and debates of the last decades, four
key aspects define how we approach urban
infrastructures for this paper. Firstly, we see
the urban and its infrastructures as socio-
technical assemblies of ‘materials, technolo-
gies, social institutions, cultural values and
geographical practices’ (Graham and
Marvin, 2001: 214), including diverse sets of
human and non-human actors as well as
processes of becoming (Alda-Vidal et al.,
2018). Secondly, for the continuous becom-
ing of infrastructure – for ‘infrastructuring’
(Simone, 2022) – we stress the importance of
everyday practices and labour of urban resi-
dents in making the city work (Graham and
McFarlane, 2014). Thirdly, we acknowledge
infrastructural configurations in many
southern cities as indeed heterogeneous.
This involves ‘many different kinds of tech-
nologies, relations, capacities and opera-
tions’ (Lawhon et al., 2018: 726) and is
mirrored in individual household dispositifs,
a distinct socio-technical situation with ‘a
specific set of actors, resources, material
artefacts, technical knowledge, and formal

and informal institutions’ (Rateau and
Jaglin, 2022: 185). Finally, we do not see
heterogeneity or any other deviation from a
networked infrastructure ideal as develop-
mental failures but – to the best of our abil-
ities – we try to ‘provide a proper reading of
infrastructural articulations’ (Guma, 2022:
63), as they actually are and not as they
should be.

Following the infrastructure propositions
above, and in line with the expansion of
notions and definitions, our investigation
approaches storage as infrastructure. Given
their often distributive character, infrastruc-
tures remain predominantly conceptualised
through circulation, flows, networks, or the
lack thereof (e.g. Barua, 2021; Cirolia et al.,
2021; Lemanski and Massey, 2022). As oth-
ers have already pointed out, urban studies,
infrastructure studies and related disciplines
have rarely specifically addressed the
moments, spaces, practices and artefacts of
infrastructural containment or confinement
(Banoub and Martin, 2020; Furlong, 2022;
Millington, 2018; Shryock and Smail, 2018).
Research on domestic storage in Nairobi
may thus contribute to a wider infrastruc-
tural ontology – beyond the network,
beyond the West, etc. – by building ‘expla-
nations from empirical observations of what
[urban residents] actually do, the practices
they perform’ (Alda-Vidal et al., 2018: 105).
For this, we start with analysing everyday
entanglements of society and technology
and merge those with the critical situated-
ness of postcolonial urban studies (Guma
et al., 2019). It is not our aim, however, to
come up with a definite conceptualisation of
infrastructure. Instead, for the socio-techni-
cal, place-specific and constantly becoming
infrastructural configurations of water and
electricity in Nairobi, we simply aspire to
show that domestic storage is more than
‘appliances’ or ‘ordinary tools’ but indeed
infrastructure (Meehan, 2014; Shove, 2016).
Ultimately, this shall contribute to the

4 Urban Studies 00(0)

ongoing endeavour of a critical urbanism
beyond the network towards heterogeneous
and/or post-networked urban realities.

Domestic storage as diverse infrastructural
practices and artefacts

Especially within highly erratic or heteroge-
neous infrastructural conditions – shaping
much of urban Africa – storage of essentials
becomes a highly visible, everyday phenom-
enon (Alba, 2018; Dakyaga et al., 2018;
Munro, 2020; Rateau and Jaglin,

2022).

Nairobi’s landscape is clustered with water
tanks, jerry cans, so-called super drums and
other water containers. Small power banks,
larger battery systems, re-chargeable lights
and comprehensive back-up battery technol-
ogies are on the rise also. While electricity
storage is currently receiving much attention
in techno-managerial and engineering disci-
plines (e.g. Elshurafa, 2020; Stadler and
Sterner, 2018), its role in producing distinct
urban-infrastructural realities – especially in
southern cities – has only been addressed
peripherally (e.g. Munro, 2020; Rateau and
Jaglin, 2022). For water storage, non-
domestic forms and scales – such as reser-
voirs and dams – have been investigated
(e.g. Bijker, 2007; Kaika and Swyngedouw,
2000), and domestic water storage has been
discussed as a vector for disease transmission
or as a distinct cultural phenomenon (e.g.
Acevedo-Guerrero, 2022; Lavie et al., 2020).
However, the domestic storage of both water
and electricity is rarely approached as key to
urban-infrastructural functioning specifi-
cally. This leaves room for further investiga-
tions into situated, everyday infrastructuring
through the use of and practices around
‘boring’ and understudied ‘things’ (Star,
1999), such as jerry cans and batteries.

Banoub and Martin (2020) describe sites
of commodity storage as ‘more-than-human
assemblages’ that simultaneously ‘constrain
and enable accumulation’ (p. 1102). This

mirrors the reflections of Shryock and Smail
(2018) on ‘containers’, which ‘both enable
and inhibit transaction’. Accordingly, the
notion of storage is not juxtaposed or in con-
flict with infrastructural notions of networks
and flows but is rather entangled with those
through specific sites and artefacts, namely.
For our paper, we focus on domestic spaces,
that is the household, as sites of storage where
infrastructures and resource flows become
‘integrated in the practices of everyday life’
(Rohracher and Köhler, 2019: 2375). Further,
we start our investigations from the artefacts
of domestic storage, the containers, that are
crucial for the production of urban space and
infrastructures in Africa. Consequently, we
approach domestic storage as a socio-
technical hybrid of human storage practices –
in short, storing – and its artefacts – the stor-
age containers. From this position, we unravel
how those artefacts work, what domestic
storage means for the notion and functioning
of urban infrastructures, and how this relates
to everyday practices of storage.

We focus on two key infrastructures and
their usually flowing resources: water and
electricity. From accounts on domestic
water storage, we know that it is prevalent
and diverse in southern cities and usually
used to mimic continuous networked sup-
ply with tanks, jerry cans and such like (e.g.
Burt and Ray, 2014; Furlong and Kooy,
2017; Garcı́a-Betancourt et al., 2015;
Kjellén, 2006). As one of the few works that
not only describes but also conceptualises
domestic water storage infrastructurally,
Millington’s (2018) analysis of São Paulo’s
water crisis in 2014/15 shows how ‘differen-
tiated abilities of residents to store water’
produce individually experienced scarcity of
water. According to Millington, in an acute
water crisis, storage becomes a ‘visible’
infrastructure (see also Star, 1999) and thus
a ‘point of contact – an intermediary infra-
structure – between the household and the
system’ (Millington, 2018: 31–32).

Kasper and Schramm 5

However, focusing on a specific crisis and
the allegedly sudden visibility of storage is
not taking into account the potential regu-
larity and constant visibility of domestic
water storage, as infrastructures in general
are often ‘anything but invisible’ but rather
located along a ‘range of visibilities’
(Larkin, 2013: 336). For example, Alba
(2018) highlights the prevalence and diver-
sity of water storage in Accra where buck-
ets, jerry cans, large water tanks, and more,
are constantly visible and used by house-
holds with and without piped connections.
The artefacts and scope of storage vary by
socio-economic situation, and differences in
storage styles and capacities can define
‘how residents access water in terms of
quantity, quality and means of access’.

Electricity storage has become a common
feature of urban life also and helps to ‘main-
tain modernity’s illusive promise of continu-
ous, uninterrupted supply’ (Cross, in De
Seta et al., 2017). Simultaneously, transi-
tions towards renewables, e-mobility and the
promises of smart cities are prominent in
societal and academic discourses, potentially
cumulating in a future ‘storage city’ full of
‘battery-powered gadgets and vehicles’
(Xylia et al., 2019: 40). However, accounts
from urban Africa show that electricity stor-
age is not just a topic for smart, future,
world-class cities but is practised in diverse
ways within heterogeneous and often
unequal infrastructure configurations. From
Rateau and Jaglin (2022) we know that in
Cotonou and Ibadan some households use
battery systems as back-ups for outages.
Together with myriad other batteries, those
systems have become part of individual elec-
tricity dispositifs for some, albeit rather
affluent residents. From Gulu Town in
Uganda, Munro (2020) tells stories of urban
residents that use batteries and battery-
linked solar panels to navigate an erratic
and uneven electricity configuration. For
both water and electricity, the universality

and diversity of storage show how it relates
to a lack of regular supply, how all kinds of
households are affected and react to it, and
how storage inspires thinking beyond the
on-/off-network dichotomy.

Nairobi, a storage city: Water and
electricity

Nairobi has always been shaped by infra-
structural heterogeneity and inequality,
largely rooted in ‘fast growth, colonial heri-
tage, and lack of formal urban planning’
(Ledant, 2013: 338). While centralised, public
infrastructures – such as piped water and
electricity – were installed in settler-colonialist
areas, the early decades of Nairobi saw little
infrastructure provision to so-called ‘native
locations’ (Ogot and Ogot, 2020; Slaughter,
2004). After independence, a ‘period of
growth and optimism’ in the 1960s and
1970s, Nairobi struggled to expand basic ser-
vices and infrastructures to its rapidly grow-
ing population. In the following decades,
Nairobi experienced a surge of underserved
informal settlements, a dismantling of urban
services, such as waste disposal and public
transport, and a decreased reliability of net-
worked services, such as water and electricity
(Ogot and Ogot, 2020; key informant inter-
views). From colonial times to the end of the
20th century, marginalised Nairobians lived
without networked infrastructures (Akallah
and Hård, 2020). Simultaneously, some
urban elites unbundled themselves with gen-
erators, gated communities or the creation of
an independent water network in the affluent
suburb Runda (Wa Mungai, 2019; key infor-
mant interviews).

Since the 2000s, Nairobi has undergone
massive urban-infrastructural transforma-
tions. While not without problems, slum-
upgrading efforts have increased access to
water, electricity and health facilities for
some marginalised areas. At the same time,
private and non-governmental actors

6 Urban Studies 00(0)

provide services beyond centralised infra-
structures (Chikozho et al., 2019; Corburn,
2021; Schramm, 2017). Nairobi of the 21st
century is a place where urban forms and
infrastructure conditions are heterogeneous
(Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021; Wamuchiru,
2017). Amidst this heterogeneity, all resi-
dents face – directly or indirectly – persistent
shortcomings of networked infrastructures,
in the form of low pressure or voltage, lack
of connections, planned and unplanned
outages, and more. Despite recent improve-
ments, and in light of rapid urbanisation of
Nairobi, many of our respondents are cer-
tain that universal services and centralised
infrastructures will remain challenges for
decades to come (key informant interviews).
In the past, present and future, Nairobians
across the city ensure the availability of elec-
tricity, water and other resources through
artefacts and practices of storage. Against
the prevalence and scope of domestic storage
stands a lack of recognition by utilities, offi-
cials and urban planning documents of its
importance to the everyday functioning of
Nairobi (e.g. NCC, 2014; key informant
interviews); or as the water utility puts it,
‘our responsibility ends at the meter point’
(key informant interview). Apart from out-
dated guidelines on water storage in Kenya’s
1968 Building Code as well as technical stan-
dards and solar-specific import tax benefits
for batteries, storage of both water and elec-
tricity is hardly subject to any governmental
regulations or policies (key informant inter-
views). With virtually no interventions from
above, but triggered by rationing pro-
grammes and reoccurring interruptions,
Nairobi has become a storage city.

Mitungi and water tanks: Domestic water
storage in Nairobi

The historically rooted inequalities as well as
the current unreliability and heterogeneity of

Nairobi’s water supply system have been well
elaborated (e.g. Akallah and Hård, 2020;
Gulyani et al., 2005; Ledant, 2013;
Wamuchiru, 2017). The city’s networked
water supply by the Nairobi County Water
and Sewerage Company (NCWSC) is heavily
affected by a massive daily water deficit of
300,000 cubic metres, against a demand of
over 800,000 cubic metres. As a response,
NCWSC has implemented a so-called equita-
ble distribution programme, meaning water is
distributed to neighbourhoods on specific
days of the week only, with different days for
different locations (key informant interviews).
However, the programme has been shown to
favour higher-income areas and the actual
number of days as well as the amount and
hours of water can be unreliable and unequal
(resident interviews; Mutono et al., 2022;
Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021). While geo-
graphic locations and socio-economic situa-
tions may define how much water connected
households store, scarcity of piped water is
universal and thus results in a heterogeneous
universality of domestic water storage. More
so because, despite improvements in recent
decades, official numbers show that only
76% of households can access piped water,
and even lower connectivity rates remain
common in low-income areas and informal
settlements (key informant interviews;
Ledant, 2013; Mutono et al., 2022).
Consequently, a heterogeneous landscape of
water supply has emerged, in which house-
holds – connected or not – rely heavily on
non-networked supply modes, such as water
points. Water points usually feature large
water tanks fed by the network or unknown
sources, from which water users – mostly
women and children – fetch water with jerry
cans to then store at home or use to fill larger
containers (resident interviews; key informant
interviews; Sarkar, 2020). With or without
access to the network, Nairobians across the
city rely heavily on water storage.

Kasper and Schramm 7

For fetching, storing and water delivery
services, jerry cans play a central role across
the city. Called mitungi in Swahili, they are
the unit of water pricing in many areas, usu-
ally selling from 0.5 to 5 Kenyan shilling
(KES) for fetched water and up to KES 100
for delivered jerry cans. Mitungi hold 20–
23 L and are usually made of plastic, often
in yellow. Some of them have a boxy jerry
can design but many are reappropriated,
round, 20-litre cooking oil canisters (see
Figure 1). Private vendors also deliver
mitungi but usually take them back after
they are emptied into the containers of the
household. Since delivered water is signifi-
cantly more expensive, mitungi handcarts
are more prevalent in middle-income areas.
In all cases, people use jerry cans and other
small containers – such as buckets, old paint
containers, and larger super drums of 100–
250 L – to store water. The prevalent use of
jerry cans extends to estates and households
with piped connections or boreholes but
where single units do not have larger water
tanks, either due to financial or spatio-
architectural reasons. In informal

settlements, jerry cans fill up large chunks of
the already small homes, while in under-
served (lower-)middle-class areas they fill
balconies, kitchens, bathrooms, stairways
and other common areas (observations; resi-
dent interviews; Chakava et al., 2014;
Sarkar, 2020). Mitungi are thus not only cru-
cial for non-connected households but also
for ‘grid-dependent middle-income neigh-
bourhoods [that] are now more marginalized
by water flows than are some of the poor
neighbourhoods’ (Schramm and Ibrahim,
2021: 355). Jerry cans and the diverse prac-
tices they require – fetching, delivery, carry-
ing up stairways, filling up when water
comes, stacking, emptying into larger con-
tainers, etc. – have become crucial infra-
structures for many Nairobians.

On the other side of the storage spectrum
are large-scale water tanks made of poly-
ethene with the most common sizes being
between 1000 and 3000 L for single house-
hold use. Placed in yards, underground, on
flat rooftops or elevated metal structures,
plastic water tanks are the most visible arte-
fact of domestic water storage in middle-

Figure 1. Artefacts of water storage in Pipeline, Buru Buru and Ongata Rongai (from left to right).
Source: Moritz Kasper, 2021/2022.

8 Urban Studies 00(0)

and upper-class neighbourhoods (see Figure
1). Water tanks either are used by individual
households or are shared within buildings
with multiple units. In addition, homes may
feature smaller tanks in their attics, or above
their bathrooms, to ensure direct availability
and water pressure in-house. Each building,
and each household, has a very specific
water storage dispositif with varying sizes
and numbers of tanks, connections to under-
ground or ground-level tanks, pumps,
responsibilities for filling and potential
cleaning, additional use of jerry cans and
different water sources. For cases with piped
connections, on the days with supply, water
usually runs into a larger underground or
ground level tank and is then pumped up to
smaller ones. In case of water shortages, res-
idents or property owners can order water
via trucks that fill up tanks via large water
hoses. Given the weight of thousands of
litres of water, tanks require a stable founda-
tion or structure. New residential develop-
ments usually have designated spaces for
water storage underground and on flat roof-
tops, while older properties often place them
in gardens or have retrofitted metal struc-
tures on pitched roofs (observations; resi-
dent interviews; key informant interviews).
In all cases, water tanks demand investments
of several thousand KES as well as space
and alterations to architectures.

In recent years, Nairobi has also experi-
enced a surge in private and public boreholes
that has led to diminishing groundwater lev-
els (Oiro et al., 2020). Boreholes always
necessitate massive water tanks connected to
other tanks within buildings or, in the case
of multi-unit compounds, directly linked to
outlets in single households. No matter if
water comes from pipes or trucks or bore-
holes, domestic water storage with large
tanks is performed in complex assemblies of
various storage artefacts, pipes and other
technical equipment as well as human prac-
tices of plumbing, pumping, filling and

more. Together with property owners, house
helpers, caretakers and others, urban resi-
dents with the financial and spatio-
architectural capacity to use large tanks are
constantly infrastructuring their own water
security. There are, however, cases where
residents are largely removed from the
labour and intricacies of water storage, when
– for example, in luxury high-rises or gated
communities – the property management
takes complete responsibility (observations;
resident interviews; key informant inter-
views). Yet, Nairobians across the city are
actively involved in the usage of water tanks
on a household level, and – as for jerry cans
– those have become crucial infrastructures
in the city’s waterscape.

The prevalence and diversity of storage
artefacts and practices show how, against the
uneven geography of supply, water storage has
become a nearly unifying feature of Nairobi’s
urban-infrastructural lives. However, beyond
narratives of connected versus non-connected
or formal versus informal, individual water
storage dispositifs tell stories about multi-
layered inequalities and contestations. When
low-income Nairobians lack the means to
store, they are more vulnerable to water
shortages, and the privileges of large-scale
storage represent general socio-economic
inequalities in Nairobi (Gerlach, 2008;
Sarkar, 2020). While socio-economic factors
are important, they do not tell the full story.
Space and structural integrity of architectures
define how and how much water can be
stored – a 10 m2 shack or an older building
not designed for rooftop storage cannot hold
a lot of stored water. The proximity and reg-
ularity of water supply is crucial as well –
households not connected to the grid but
close to a reliable water point have less need
to store than households on upper floors of
apartment buildings with defective piped sup-
ply. Lastly, tenure status comes into play,
and Nairobi has high rates of renting
(KNBS, 2018). While homeowners can adapt

Kasper and Schramm 9

their water storage dispositif to their needs,
most tenants have agency over small-scale,
in-house storage only. Since alterations and
expansions of domestic water storage can
lead to contestations between households
and property management, this may decrease
solidarity and further detach people from
each other (Bize, 2017).

‘My stuff is just always charged’: Domestic
electricity storage in Nairobi

To nuance and expand the notion of domestic
storage as infrastructure in Nairobi, we turn
to the city’s electro-infrastructural configura-
tion. Kenya’s 2019 Energy Act mandates the
government to ‘ensure all households are elec-
trified’ (EED Advisory, 2020: 20). The electri-
fication of the country lies largely in the
hands of the Kenya Power and Lighting
Company (KPLC), or for short Kenya
Power, the country’s only large-scale electric-
ity distributor, operating a national grid and
some off-grid infrastructures. As the only off-
taker in Kenya, the utility sources its electric-
ity largely from the Kenya Electricity
Generating Company (KenGen), and some
smaller suppliers. Kenya’s landscape of provi-
ders is currently diversifying, as are its modes
of electricity generation (e.g. the expansion of
solar and wind power), but the country’s net-
worked power supply has been, and will likely
remain, dominated by hydropower, geother-
mal and fuel-based power plants (key infor-
mant interviews; EED Advisory, 2020;
USAID, 2016). Domestic consumers in
Nairobi, however, have little to no direct rela-
tions with KenGen and the different modes
of power generation. When it comes to indi-
vidual connections, service provision, meter-
ing and billing, households are solely in
contact with KPLC.

Unlike the water deficit in Nairobi,
‘Kenya does not suffer from shortfalls in
available [electricity] generation’ (Taneja,
2018: 5). A key issue, however, has been the

lack of connections. The 2010s have seen a
steep increase in connectivity rates with a
reported 70% of the country’s population
connected to the grid in 2017 (Smith, 2019;
Taneja, 2018). For Nairobi, more than 90%
of the population uses electricity as their
main source of lighting (KNBS, 2018).
According to Njoroge et al. (2020); this num-
ber mirrors connection rates in the informal
settlement of Mathare, yet half of the self-
reported connections in their study were
unofficial, meaning without a KPLC meter.
While upper- and middle-income Nairobi
experiences a near to universal access to elec-
tricity, residents of informal settlements
might still not be connected or resort to
informally provided or shared access modes
due to lacking infrastructure, high connec-
tion fees, and sabotage (observations; resi-
dent interviews; key informant interviews;
Karekezi et al., 2008). Nevertheless, com-
pared with Nairobi’s water configuration,
and considering network connectivity only,
the electro-infrastructural geography of the
city is not as uneven, and at first glance indi-
vidual electricity dispositifs appear to be less
heterogeneous.

In the form of localised and large-scale
blackouts as well as planned and unplanned
interruptions, Nairobi experiences 90,000
power outages every year (Taneja, 2018).
KPLC explains these outages by natural
causes, sabotage and vandalism (key infor-
mant interview with KPLC) but failing
equipment and accusations of mishandling
and corruption by KPLC have been men-
tioned as well (Ombati, 2022; Taneja, 2017).
Faced with a constant risk of outages,
caused by an assemblage of human and
material failures, Nairobians across the city
are constantly working towards electricity
security. On the one hand, back-up genera-
tors are prevalent in affluent areas (observa-
tions; Taneja, 2018). On the other, even
those with generators – but particularly
those without – are partially substituting

10 Urban Studies 00(0)

interrupted supply by storing electricity.
When roaming the streets and buildings of
Nairobi, one can spot people charging
devices at work or in public places to reduce
costs or due to missing or cut-off connec-
tions at home. The domestic space is, how-
ever, the site where most of the charging –
the storing of electricity – is performed
(observations; resident interviews). As one
respondent in Ruaka explains:

It’s not really a conscious thing that I do, but I
never want to be in a situation when the lights
go out at home and my phone is at 4%, and
my laptop at 12% . my stuff is just always
charged.

With a large proliferation of smart phone
ownership in Kenya, and considering
Nairobi’s digitalisation (Guma, 2019; Silver
and Johnson, 2018), charging phones, lap-
tops and other smart devices has become a
routine habit. For those with the financial
capacity and the need, or desire, to be con-
nected as much as possible, small power
banks require additional attention, so that
devices can be charged when the lights go

out. For a long time, so-called uninterrupti-
ble power supply (UPS) batteries – back-up
systems installed between a socket and an
electric device, for example desktop comput-
ers – were used in offices and other commer-
cial spaces but adaptations of this
technology have made it to households. In
affluent areas, as an alternative to genera-
tors, households might use inverters con-
nected to in-home battery systems:

When Kenya Power is working, then it charges
the batteries, and then when the power goes
out, it automatically switches . So, we have
the light and the refrigerator, and a couple of
outlets for charging devices (resident interview
in Runda).

Individual dispositifs of electricity storage
vary significantly, and households with more
financial means are able to invest more and,
thus, store more. While socio-economic
inequalities in Nairobi permeate into the
electric storage city, lights that are charge-
able via cables or internal solar panels have
spread across all strata (see Figure 2).
Starting from small torches to nightstand

Figure 2. Artefacts of electricity storage in Eastleigh, Buru Buru and Ongata Rongai (from left to right).
Source: Moritz Kasper, 2021/2022.

Kasper and Schramm 11

lamps to bright outdoor lighting, lamps with
in-built batteries are prevalent artefacts in
many households (observations; resident
interviews).

What all alterations of domestic electricity
storage have in common is that they do not
mimic continuous, full-power supply but pro-
vide a base level for electric necessities (e.g.
light) and a temporally limited fix until regu-
lar, networked supply is restored. With some
exceptions, however, electric storage artefacts
in Nairobi are yet again ‘intermediary infra-
structures’ (Millington, 2018) in between
households and a networked system. As urban
life increasingly depends on electronic, digital
communication and work, the artefacts used
and the daily routines of charging – automati-
cally or deliberately – have become important
to the electro-infrastructural functioning of
Nairobi as of today. Yet, batteries play also
an increasingly crucial role in (urban) energy
transitions in Kenya and elsewhere. With a
global push towards renewables, e-mobility
and smart technologies, electricity storage
technologies are poised to become even more
prevalent in the large and small infrastructures
of nations, cities and households (cf. Gold and
Foldy, 2021; Ngugi and Munda, 2021;
Republic of Kenya, 2019; Xylia et al., 2019).

While an in-depth exploration of battery-
supported electricity generation by house-
holds in Nairobi is beyond the scope of this
paper, we want to highlight that the city and
its surroundings have experienced a surge in
small-scale domestic solar-power, with
which homeowners move away from the net-
worked city. Scope and technicalities vary
but solar-power systems are often linked to
in-house battery systems (see Figure 2) –
similar to water tanks for boreholes – and
households usually keep the pre-existing
connections to KPLC – either with solar as
the back-up or vice versa (resident inter-
views; key informant interviews; cf. EnDev
and SNV, 2021). Should this trend continue,
we are likely to see an increase in domestic

storage capacities. Through non-generative
uses and small-scale storage, Nairobi’s elec-
tric storage city is already entangled with
networked supply. Through a further ‘splin-
tering from below’ (Kooy and Bakker,
2008), triggered by individual power genera-
tion, the artefacts of domestic electricity
storage and daily practices of plugging
cables, turning switches and monitoring
charging levels are now becoming an increas-
ingly important part of the everyday infra-
structuring of some Nairobians beyond the
network. No matter if in relation to a net-
worked city or its post-networked counter-
parts, the storage city of Nairobi with its
heterogeneous, individual dispositifs is
already here and likely to grow.

Storage as infrastructure: Key
points, implications and open
venues

Our situated exploration of domestic storage
needs to be read and understood within mul-
tiple transformations that are currently re-
shaping Nairobi, such as the increased vola-
tility of water supply due to anthropogenic
climate change, ongoing energy transitions,
the increasing application of smart technolo-
gies and rapid urbanisation (EnDev and
SNV, 2021; Guma, 2019; Myers, 2015;
WASREB, 2018). These processes are recon-
figuring Nairobi’s ‘infrastructure space’
(Easterling, 2016) and residential spaces as
well as the conditions of and relations
between the networked, post-networked,
and storage city. As we have shown, how-
ever, domestic storage is already shaping
residential architectures, urban spaces and
everyday practices, all while it is simultane-
ously being shaped by place-specific infra-
structural supply configurations, available
materials, intended uses for stored resources,
and individual situations (space, finances,
architectures, need and desire to store,
tenure status, etc.). Despite the diversity of

12 Urban Studies 00(0)

storage artefacts and practices, it is evident
that many Nairobians are constantly infra-
structuring the availability of water and elec-
tricity by investing in, caring for and using
various containers. Looking at all those
activities that are hardly subject to formal
rules and regulations, Nairobi is not simply
a splintering or fragmented networked or
post-networked city but, simultaneously or
even more so, a city unified in its everyday
task to contain resources that are usually
flowing or otherwise moving through ‘pipes,
cables, wires and tracks’.

All the above considered, it becomes evi-
dent that storage of water and electricity –
and potentially of other resources – is an ele-
mental part of urban life and infrastructural
functioning. The deployed artefacts and per-
formed practices form an ‘intermediary
infrastructure’ (Millington, 2018) through
which urban households either mimic the
idealised, universal supply of the networked
city, or find temporal fixes, or even enable a
post-networked city. The domestic storage
of water and electricity thus works as a buf-
fer – in-between users and systems but also
as an enabling buffer for the actual function-
ing of networked and non-networked sys-
tems and individual supply situations –
which ultimately makes urban life possible
in Nairobi. This enabling, imperative role of
domestic storage for urban-infrastructural
functioning elevates it beyond the status of
an appliance or tool. According to Shove
(2016: 246), appliances inhabit a mediating
role between infrastructures and people, and
constitute ‘the sensitive tips of infrastruc-
tures’, but – although they might affect sup-
ply and demand patterns – they are not
imperative to urban-infrastructural function-
ing per se. Further, seeing storage containers
in Nairobi as ‘ordinary tools’ that only help
to perform ‘infrastructural work’ would
negate the ‘proliferation of infrastructure’
into domestic spaces and everyday practices,
as laid out by Meehan (2014) for water

barrels and buckets in Tijuana. Artefacts
and practices of storage are arguably located
somewhere between systems and household,
between our traditional understandings of
infrastructure and of appliances or tools.
Based on our investigation, we argue how-
ever that – at least for the case of water and
electricity in Nairobi – domestic storage is
more than appliances or connecting tips or
stopgap-tools. Storage is infrastructure, and
not just as a back-up for acute shortages,
interruptions or other crises but as an every-
day ‘point of contact’ (Millington, 2018)
between households and various supply sys-
tems that all depend on it.

The constant and literal visibility of stor-
age in Nairobi – juxtaposed with its relative
invisibility in planning, policies and academia
– is everything but a symptom of infrastruc-
tural failure. Indeed, it is an important part of
infrastructuring contemporary cities. Storage
‘becomes a highly visible and charged element
of the socio-material apparatus of household
infrastructure’ (Bize, 2017: 1) that also shows
how inequalities within HICs have diverse
effects on different people. Individual water
and electricity storage – in its quantities and
qualities – depends on the supply dispositifs
of households and their spatial, financial and
architectural situations. Hence, individual
storage is its own socio-technical dispositif,
constituted by various, often interconnected
containers, other technological artefacts and
human actors within and beyond the house-
hold. An urban-infrastructural condition with
various individual dispositifs emerges from
practices and artefacts that all demand space,
alterations to architectures, a slot in daily rou-
tines, and other practices of charging, plumb-
ing, pumping, filling, plugging, fetching,
cleaning, etc. This urban-infrastructural con-
dition – the storage city – does not replace or
stand in conflict with the networked city or
post-networked city but forms intertwined
relationships. While the networked city and
post-networked city stand for mutually

Kasper and Schramm 13

exclusive yet potentially overlapping urban-
isms that revolve around universal, socio-
technical networks or the lack thereof, the
storage city is embedded in both, binds them
together within households and their storage
artefacts, and – ultimately – enables urban-
infrastructural functioning across the networ-
ked/post-networked spectrum.

Implications for a ‘critical urbanism of the
networked city’ and city making

Graham and Marvin’s (2001) postulated
goal of a ‘critical urbanism of the net-
worked city’ remains on the forefront of
urban studies, especially because of expan-
sions beyond the networked city notion.
With universal network coverage becoming
a ‘crumbling objective’ (Munro, 2020) in
many southern cities, we advocate for more
academic engagements with infrastructural
moments and spaces of storage, confine-
ment, containment and similar phenomena
or notions.

For domestic storage of water and elec-
tricity, many questions remain open and
leave plenty of venues for further investiga-
tions, in Nairobi and elsewhere. The materi-
alities and artefacts of storage warrant
further research on how and why they are
produced, designed, sold, appropriated,
maintained, and disposed. In Nairobi, for
example, local but internationally connected
economies of storage-artefact retail are
highly prevalent. The specific activities, the
everyday practices of households in ensuring
and caring for storage need further unravel-
ling as much as (power) relations, negotia-
tions, potential contestations within,
between and beyond households around
storage need to be untangled. Additionally,
domestic storage stands in relation to other
forms of infrastructural storage, for example
water tanks of vendors or large reservoirs of
utilities. How different scales of storage are
connected or rely on each other is as unclear

as the specific implications of domestic stor-
age for cohesion, fragmentation and (re)dis-
tributions within cities. Lastly, domestic
storage can and should be investigated for
other resources than water and electricity,
such as other forms of energy, digital data
and files (e.g. on phones and laptops), or
money. When expanding the notion of the
storage city towards other resources, we
should be aware of the entanglements of dif-
ferent systems of supply and storage (Castán
Broto and Sudhira, 2019). For example,
water storage for multi-story residential
buildings in Nairobi depends on electricity
supply, as water needs to be pumped to
rooftop tanks, and thus ‘water is powered’
(resident interview in Ruaka).

Ultimately, for present and future cities –
especially but not only in the Global South –
researching storage can provide new insights
and recommendations for urban making
through infrastructures. Recent provoca-
tions build on critical analyses of urban
infrastructures in Africa to provide proposi-
tions to explicitly influence ‘decision-making
processes with a diversity of possibilities for
action grounded on situated knowledges and
practices’ (Baptista and Cirolia, 2022: 936;
see also Lawhon et al., 2022). Accordingly,
the notion of the storage city, and further
related research, may provide material for
various disciplines of city-making – from
design (e.g. of containers) and architecture
to urban planning and governance – to reim-
agine and ultimately deploy place-specific
infrastructural articulations beyond net-
works and flows.

Acknowledgement

A first draft of this paper was presented and dis-
cussed during the Beyond Splintering Urbanism
workshop in March 2022. We want to thank the
organisers, discussants, and other participants –
especially Andy Karvonen, Jon Rutherford, Colin
McFarlane, Alan Wiig, and Jochen Monstadt –
for their critical and influential feedback.

14 Urban Studies 00(0)

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of
interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for
the research and/or authorship of this article. The
open access publication of this article is supported
by SAGE’s Open Access agreement with German
Academic Institutions.

ORCID iD

Moritz Kasper https://orcid.org/0000-0003-
1566-3045

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