This article investigates the phenomenon of Bangalore?s urban 'water mafias', operators who extract and deliver groundwater to scores of informal residential areas in Indian cities. The term 'mafia' ...here is treated as a semantic area of situated meanings and cultural interpretations that needs to be historicised and prised open in order to better understand how the urban waterscape is produced and inhabited. It situates the provenance and workings of mafias within wider debates on urban informality, state formation, and urban infrastructure and space. Rather than seeing mafias as filling a gap where government water supply has failed, as mainstream narratives suggest, the paper argues that mafias must be seen as formative of the post-colonial state. It further suggests that the specific form of public authority exercised by water mafias explains the production of informality in Bangalore?s waterscape. Based on ethnographic research in 2007-2009, the paper characterises the everyday authority wielded by mafias along three main registers: (i) the ability of mafias to make and break discursive and material boundaries between the formal and informal, public and private, and state and society, (ii) the varied nature of mafias? political practices, ranging from exploitation to electoral lobbying to social protection to the provision of welfare, and iii) mafias? complicity in both water and land regimes in a neo-liberalised urban political economy.
Corruption politics have received little attention in human geography. We offer a critical geography of corruption as an alternative to economistic framings that take corruption as an objective set ...of deviant practices mostly besetting states in the Global South. Instead, we theorize corruption as a historically shifting, subjective discourse about the abuse of entrusted power. Geographic and cognate disciplinary approaches reveal how corruption narratives become politicized and yoked to symbolic, material, and territorial regimes of power. We suggest that recent theories of urban informality provide a revealing lens into the ethico-politics and territorial struggles of contemporary capitalism across the North and South.
This article studies Cape Town’s new slum “reblocking” paradigm, in which settlements are reorganized, housing upgraded, and services delivered in situ. Though not without structural and long-term ...challenges, research shows that for those waiting for post-apartheid housing, reblocking provides an alternative to eviction and resettlement. Through primary and secondary research over 2014–2016 on four reblocking pilot projects covering six hundred households, we argue that reblocking hinges not on consensus but rather the “productive tension” generated in the negotiation of visions and outcomes. We draw on critical theories of agonism and participation to suggest that such tension plays a role in producing legitimacy.
Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated ...in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.
Caste is as an under-recognized marker of environmental inequalities in urban India, what this article names as "environmental unfreedoms" for their fundamentally humanity- and dignity-robbing ...traits. It argues that a theoretical framework that is attentive to the racialization of labour and property under colonial and capitalist urban relations can reveal the making of environmental unfreedoms. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Bangalore/Bengaluru in southern India, the article shows, in particular, how the criminalizing language of "encroachment", rooted in colonial urban planning lexicon and used to justify the spatial disciplining, containment, and eviction of labouring Dalits today, has dire consequences for the making of environmental unfreedoms. In turn, ecological narratives have also provided legal grounds for caste-based slum evictions. The article concludes that a framework that weaves together analyses of caste, racialization, and environmental unfreedoms in the urban context can identify opportunities towards transnational solidarities across anticaste and antiracist struggles.
What would abolitionism mean for climate justice? “Resilience” is proposed by experts as a solution to climate change vulnerability. But this prescription tends to focus on adaptation to future ...external threats, subtly validating embedded processes of racial capitalism that have historically dehumanised and endangered residents and their environments in the first place. This article focuses on majority Black areas said to be vulnerable to extreme weather events and targeted for expert‐driven resilience enhancements in America's capital city, Washington, DC. Drawing on key insights from Black radical, feminist, and antiracist humanist thought, we reimagine resilience through an abolitionist framework. Using archival analysis, oral histories, a neighbourhood‐level survey, and interviews conducted between 2015 and 2018, we argue that abolitionist climate justice entails a centring of DC's historical environmental and housing‐related racisms, the intersectional drivers of precarity and trauma experienced by residents beyond those narrowly associated with “climate”; and an ethics of care and healing practiced by those deemed most at risk to climate change.
From Victorian England and its colonies, to cities in South Asia today, “improvement” has long infused the language of urban planning. Through the case of Bangalore, India, this article argues that ...urban improvement should be understood as a project of liberal government forged in the crucible of empire and harnessed in the service of the state’s capital and spatial accumulation strategies. Once practiced by colonial planners, urban improvement fundamentally entails enhancing the value of urban space and its circulatory infrastructures through the mobilization of corrective behaviors related to property and propriety. In the process, improvement grafts race, class, caste, and other forms of social difference onto urban space, which in turn provides the justification for further improvement. Ultimately, improvement begets cycles of inequality and exclusion, even while it promises betterment and inclusion. Three improvement regimes are identified here: racialized improvement in the colonial city (1890s–1920s), classed improvement in the industrial city (1930s–1970s), and marketized improvement in the world-class city (1980s–2010s). The article further shows that with each wave of urban improvement came vernacular and nationalist responses that sought to extend housing and services to unserved constituents. These indigenous calibrations are as important to the genealogy of improvement as its original European form.
In this coda to the intervention on slow violence and the administration of urban injustice I reflect on the role of racialization—broadly defined—in creating deeply unequal and risk‐laden wetland ...ecologies. I identify ‘racial ecologies’ and ‘ambivalence’ as two key concepts tying together wetland politics across the contexts of Philadelphia and Mumbai. While the concept of ‘racial ecologies’ underscores how systems of human valuation (including racism, casteism and religious discrimination) are ordered through ecological and property valuation, the concept of ‘ambivalence’ stresses the materiality and strategic governing logic which underpins wetland ecologies.
Deborah Cowen has written an illuminating paper on the nineteenth-century making of rail infrastructure and the Canadian metropolis. She connects the dots between the building of the Canadian Pacific ...Railroad (CPR) and its nodal North American cities on the one hand, and transatlantic finance and its bankrolling by racial slavery and colonialism on the one hand. It is a significant enterprise to write on one topic or the other - that is, on the history of urban infrastructures or on racial capitalism. But Cowen writes into view a global panoramic through which flows of British imperial capital are seen to be connected intimately with the development of rail infrastructure and metropolitan space in settler-colonial Canada.
The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan's water is popularly framed as a case of "environmental racism" given that Flint's population is mostly black and lower income. In this essay I argue that we see ...the environmental racism that underlies Flint's water poisoning not as incidental to our political-economic order, nor even as stemming from racist intent, but as inseparable from liberalism, an organizing logic we take for granted in our modern age. I expand on the idea of "racial liberalism" here. While upholding the promise of individual freedoms and equality for all, racial liberalism-particularly as it was translated into urban renewal and property making in mid-20th-century urban America-drove dispossession. In Flint racialized property dispossession has been one major factor underlying the city's financial duress, abandonment, and poisoned infrastructure. Yet, through austerity discourse, Flint is disciplined as if it were a financially reckless individual while the structural and historical causes of its duress are masked. Tracing the history of property making and taking in Flint and the effects of austerity urbanism on its water infrastructure, my central argument is that our understanding of Flint's predicament-the disproportionate poisoning of young African-Americans-can be deepened if we read it as a case of racial liberalism's illiberal legacies.
