Gray Zones: Pluralizing the Governance, Infrastructure and Hydro-Social Geographies of Water in Delhi
By Dr. Yaffa Truelove, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of Colorado at Boulder
When: Thursday 31st May 3.30-5.00pm (followed by refreshments)
Where: Training & Skills room, ECCI (https://edinburghcentre.org/contact/how-to-get-here)
Abstract
In cities of the global South such as Delhi, infrastructures are often co-constructed by urban inhabitants. With regard to water services, Delhi’s networked supply reaches less than half of residents on an everyday basis. As a result, urbanites across social groups co-produce water infrastructure through reliance on a host of alternate sources, technologies, and political actors. However, such diverse infrastructural configurations do not fit the conventional dualistic framing of urban water infrastructure and governance as either state or private, legal or illegal, and/or divided along the geographies of formal or informal settlements. This paper instead demonstrates that everyday water is procured and governed through a “gray zone” of hybrid institutional and infrastructural arrangements. Drawing on fieldwork in South and Southwest, I first trace constellations of state and non-state actors that enable differing “powers of reach” over the materiality and governance of water in particular neighborhoods. These plural water regimes are neither spatialized solely within, nor outside, state hierarchies. Rather, everyday water governance operates topologically, through the intense experimentation of a range of state and informal political actors and residents with the diverse infrastructures of water in the city. Second, I show that gray zones are inflected by differing subjectivities and intersecting gender/class/ethno-religious power relations, and consequently (re)produce patterns of social differentiation and the unequal experience of urban space and governance. These findings contribute to pluralizing theorizations of urban water infrastructure and governance beyond dualistic frameworks to more fully account for the diverse practices, materials, actors and institutional constellations that shape how water and forms of social and political power are negotiated in the everyday city.
Yaffa Truelove
At the nexus of urban geography and human-environment relations, my research primarily examines precarious urban waterscapes and socio-political processes in South Asian cities. Through long-term ethnographic research in informal settlements of Indian cities, I use water infrastructure as a lens for analyzing social and material relations of urbanism, the production of social inclusion and exclusion, and differing regimes of everyday urban governance. My current research predominately focuses on Indian metropoles, including Delhi and Indore, contributing to theorizations of urban and feminist political ecologies, southern and comparative urbanism, and “actually existing” modalities of urban governance in postcolonial cities. I am also currently co-editing a book Gendered Infrastructures with Dr. Anu Sabhlok, to be released by West Virginia University Press. Prior to joining the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado, I completed my PhD in Geography at the University of Cambridge in 2015, and was Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College until 2017.