Like the Beatles and Skepta, I’ll be making the trip to the States.  I’m speaking in San Francisco on the 1st April with a bunch of other (more talented) people as part of our two-part panel session on urban infrastructures and imaginations at the AAG.  The organisers have shown a touching faith in our ability to pull a crowd by scheduling us head-to-head with the mighty Ananya Roy!  Anyway, come!  I’ll be talking about something like this…

Water Politics in ‘unauthorised’ Delhi: reforming complex urban water supply systems

This paper describes hydraulic regimes governing domestic water supply in two large clusters of unauthorised colonies on the edge of south Delhi.  These examples raise questions about decentralised co(production), limitations of public supply, and service improvement initiatives in the governance of water. Delhi’s water supply is heavily informalised with a strong localisation, and personalisation, of governance dynamics.  This can lead to challenges for external interventions and should be taken into account in efforts to understand or intervene. The discrepancies highlighted between expert knowledge about water and more local understandings could be used to develop conceptions of water governance more relevant to the north Indian context.

Keywords: water, urbanisation, politics, infrastructure, Delhi, peri-urban, groundwater

 

http://meridian.aag.org/callforpapers/program/SessionDetail.cfm?SessionID=24431

http://meridian.aag.org/callforpapers/program/SessionDetail.cfm?SessionID=23915

http://citiesgeographylse.net/archives/2396