Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai

A new book review by Usmaan M Farooqui is now available to read online

Urban infrastructure is neither politically neutral nor politically deterministic. Rather, it is a dynamic social and material process that is created by and creates differentiated forms of urban living. This is the central point of Nikhil Anand’s tale about the practices, subjectivities and materiality that constitute Mumbai’s vast water distribution network. Drawing primarily on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the settlements of Jogeshwari, Anand describes how the city’s hydraulic infrastructure both facilitates and interrupts materialisations of the liberal city.

You can read the full review here