Product Information
Winner, 2014 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences Despite Mumbai's position as India's financial, economic, and cultural capital, water is chronically unavailable for rich and poor alike. Mumbai's dry taps are puzzling, given that the city does not lack for either water or financial resources. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters, Lisa Bjoerkman shows how an elite dream to transform Mumbai into a world class business center has wreaked havoc on the city's water pipes. In rich ethnographic detail, Pipe Politics explores how the everyday work of getting water animates and inhabits a penumbra of infrastructural activity-of business, brokerage, secondary markets, and sociopolitical networks-whose workings are reconfiguring and rescaling political authority in the city. Mumbai's increasingly illegible and volatile hydrologies, Bjoerkman argues, are lending infrastructures increasing political salience just as actual control over pipes and flows becomes contingent on dispersed and intimate assemblages of knowledge, power, and material authority. These new arenas of contestation reveal the illusory and precarious nature of the project to remake Mumbai in the image of Shanghai or Singapore and gesture instead toward the highly contested futures and democratic possibilities of the actually existing city.Product Identifiers
PublisherDuke University Press
ISBN-139780822359692
eBay Product ID (ePID)221277399
Product Key Features
Number of Pages296 Pages
Publication NamePipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai
LanguageEnglish
SubjectAnthropology, Management, History
Publication Year2015
TypeTextbook
AuthorLisa Bjorkman
FormatPaperback
Dimensions
Item Height229 mm
Item Weight408 g
Additional Product Features
Country/Region of ManufactureUnited States
Title_AuthorLisa Bjorkman