URBAN WATERLINES: Socio‐natural Productions of Indifference in an Indian City

Karen Coelho

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2022, vol. 46, issue 2, 160-181

Abstract: How is water engaged in, or mobilized for, the production of social difference and indifference? This article proposes the rubric of ‘urban waterlines’ to examine the political agency of various urban waters in inscribing categories of personhood and effects of discrimination. Waterlines are conceived as material (socio‐technical and historical) formations that set out to channel, contain or accelerate water, but are ultimately effected by pushbacks, overflows and outbreaks, or the subsidence and vanishing of water. They are dialectically assembled by the workings of water in two registers: first, as a variable form shaped by historically shifting valorizations of water as resource, factor of production, object of consumption, aesthetic feature, or waste; and second, as a relatively autonomous natural element that resists or exceeds these shapings. The article discusses three kinds of urban waterlines—boundaries, flows and infrastructures—using case studies from Chennai to illustrate how each is assembled through socio‐natural, technological and discursive operations and works to dispossess or disadvantage specific people and places. It brings Urban Political Ecology's analyses of water forms as historically crafted socio‐natural assemblages into conversation with anthropological scholarship on how indifference is produced through the everyday workings of the state.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13087

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:46:y:2022:i:2:p:160-181

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0309-1317

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research is currently edited by Alan Harding, Roger Keil and Jeremy Seekings

More articles in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().