Citizenship And Infrastructure

This book brings together insights from leading urban scholars and explicitly develops the connections between infrastructure and citizenship. It demonstrates the ways in which adopting an 'infrastructural citizenship' lens illuminates a broader understanding of the material and civic nature of urban life for both citizens and the state. Drawing on examples of housing, water, electricity and sanitation across Africa and Asia, chapters reveal the ways in which exploring citizenship through an infrastructural lens, and infrastructure through a citizenship lens, allows us to better understand, plan and govern city life. The book emphasises the importance of acknowledging and understanding the dialectic relationship between infrastructure and citizenship for urban theory and practice. This book will be a useful resource for researchers and students within Urban Studies, Geography, Development Studies, Planning, Politics, Architecture and Sociology.

This book brings together insights from leading urban scholars and explicitly develops the connections between infrastructure and citizenship. It demonstrates the ways in which adopting an ‘infrastructural citizenship’ lens illuminates a broader understanding of the material and civic nature of urban life for both citizens and the state. Drawing on examples of housing, water, electricity and sanitation across Africa and Asia, chapters reveal the ways in which exploring citizenship through an infrastructural lens, and infrastructure through a citizenship lens, allows us to better understand, plan and govern city life. The book emphasises the importance of acknowledging and understanding the dialectic relationship between infrastructure and citizenship for urban theory and practice. This book will be a useful resource for researchers and students within Urban Studies, Geography, Development Studies, Planning, Politics, Architecture and Sociology.

In Hydraulic City Nikhil Anand explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai's settlements, Anand found that Mumbai's water flows, not through a static collection of pipes and valves, but through a dynamic infrastructure built on the relations between residents, plumbers, politicians, engineers, and the 3,000 miles of pipe that bind them. In addition to distributing water, the public water network often reinforces social identities and the exclusion of marginalized groups, as only those actively recognized by city agencies receive legitimate water services. This form of recognition—what Anand calls "hydraulic citizenship"—is incremental, intermittent, and reversible. It provides residents an important access point through which they can make demands on the state for other public services such as sanitation and education. Tying the ways Mumbai's poorer residents are seen by the state to their historic, political, and material relations with water pipes, the book highlights the critical role infrastructures play in consolidating civic and social belonging in the city.

In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy’s Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape. Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto—one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle—and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa’s transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world. Democracy’s Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa’s political transformation.

This interdisciplinary edited collection brings together scholars, activists, and policy makers to build consensus around what a connected society means for Canada. The collection offers insight on the state of citizenship in a digital context in Canada and proposes a research and policy agenda for the way forward. Part I examines the current landscape of digital civic participation and highlights some of the missing voices required to ensure an inclusive digital society. Part II explores the relationship between citizens and their political and democratic institutions, from government service delivery to academic and citizen engagement in policy making. Part III addresses key legal frameworks that need to be discussed and redesigned to allow for the building and strengthening of an inclusive society and democratic institutions. This is a foundational resource for policy makers, students, and researchers interested in understanding citizenship in a digital context in Canada. Published in English.

With illustrative and detailed examples drawn from throughout the country, Green Infrastructure advances smart land conservation: large scale thinking and integrated action to plan, protect and manage our natural and restored lands. From the individual parcel to the multi-state region, Green Infrastructure helps each of us look at the landscape in relation to the many uses it could serve, for nature and people, and determine which use makes the most sense. In this wide-ranging primer, leading experts in the field provide a detailed how-to for planners, designers, landscape architects, and citizen activists

Over the last twenty-five years, garbage infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, has taken center stage in the struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor. Through strikes and public dumping, Dakar's streets have been periodically inundated with household garbage as the city's trash collectors and ordinary residents protest urban austerity. Often drawing on discourses of Islamic piety, garbage activists have provided a powerful language to critique a neoliberal mode of governing-through-disposability and assert rights to fair labor. In Garbage Citizenship Rosalind Fredericks traces Dakar's volatile trash politics to recalibrate how we understand urban infrastructure by emphasizing its material, social, and affective elements. She shows how labor is a key component of infrastructural systems and how Dakar's residents use infrastructures as a vital tool for forging collective identities and mobilizing political action. Fleshing out the materiality of trash and degraded labor, Fredericks illuminates the myriad ways waste can be a potent tool of urban control and rebellion.

Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure addresses the struggles of national and local states to fund, finance and govern urban infrastructure. It develops fresh thinking on financialisation and city statecraft to explain the socially and spatially uneven mixing of managerial, entrepreneurial and financialised city governance in austerity and limited decentralisation across England. As urban infrastructure fixes for the London global city-region risk undermining national ‘rebalancing’ efforts in the UK, city statecraft in the rest of the country is having uneasily to combine speculation, risk-taking and prospective venturing with co-ordination, planning and regulation.