Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post‐Colonial Bombay

Abstract

. (2008) 'Governing the contaminated city : infrastructure and sanitation in colonial and postcolonial Bombay.', International journal of urban and regional research., 32 (2). pp. 415-435. Further information on publisher's website:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j. 1468-2427.2008.00793.x Publisher's copyright statement:The denitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com. Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. 2 AbstractThis paper examines specific ways in which sanitation infrastructure matter politically both as a set of materials and as a discursive object in colonial and postcolonial Bombay. It reflects on a history of sanitation as a set of concepts which can both historicise seemingly "new" practices and shed light on the contemporary city. It considers two moments in Bombay"s "sanitary history" -the mid-nineteenth century and the present day -and elucidates the distinct and changing spatial imaginaries and logics of sanitation in their broad relation to urbanization and nature. The paper conceptualises colonial discourses of a "contaminated city" and public health, and finds productive sites of intersection between these discourses and contemporary debates and practices in Bombay, including bourgeois environmentalism, discourses of the "world city", and logics of community-managed sanitation infrastructures. It highlights an important role for urban comparativism, in the context of different imaginaries and logics, in both cases. By connecting infrastructure, public health discourses and modes of urban government, the paper traces a specific historical geography of cyborg urbanization that is always already splintered, unequal and contested. For the urban poor in particular, much is at stake in how the sanitary city is constructed as a problem, how the solutions to it are mobilized, and how improvement is measured.3

Poo gurus? Researching the threats and opportunities presented by human waste

“…Consequently, efforts to reduce the threats and maximise the benefits associated with human waste must be willing to adapt to locally-specific cultural preferences as well as wider socio-economic, political and environmental conditions (Gandy, 2008;McFarlane, 2008a). This is important in both the global North and South, but especially so in the latter given the greater environmental, health and economic impacts of the sanitation crisis there.…”

“…Examples include research within medical geography on faecal transmission routes (Anderson, 1947;May, 1950;1952;Howe, 1963;1980;Haviland, 1982;Haggett, 1994;Rupke, 2000;Smallman-Raynor et al, 2001;2004a;2004b;Cliff et al, 2004;Abrahams, 2006), cultural and historical geographies of agriculture, organicism, sanitation and cholera (Bacon 1956;Smith 1975;Kearns 1984;1989;1991;Sheail 1993;Colten 1994;Goddard 1996: Matless, 2001Gandy, 2005Krantz, 2006: McFarlane, 2008a) and wider theoretical conceptualisations of dirt (Krantz 2006;Sibley 1995;Cresswell 1996;1997;Campkin and Cox 2007;Cox 2007;Holloway et al 2007). Research that deals more directly with human waste is even less widespread although empirical work on 'watsan' (water and sanitation) issues in the global South (Andersson, 2001;Desai, 1995aDesai, , 1995bGandy, 2008;Giles & Brown, 1997;McFarlane, 2008aMcFarlane, , 2008bO'Hara, Hannan, & Genina, 2007;Jewitt and Labhsetwar, 2009;…”

“…1 Although geographers have carried out some fascinating work on animal manure as a pollutant (Lowe et al, 1997;Seymour and Clark, 1991;Ivey et al, 2006) and a fertilizer (Chisholm, 1961;Baker, 1973;Widgren, 1979;Adams and Mortimore, 1997;Harris, 1999;Harris and Yusuf, 2001;Matless, 2001;Robbins, 2004;Jewitt and Baker, 2006;Baker and Jewitt, 2007;Grantham, 2007;Ingram, 2008;Williams, 2008), only a small number of geographers have been actively engaged in research that deals with human waste; and most of this work deals with it in somewhat tangential (though nonetheless important) ways. Examples include research within medical geography on faecal transmission routes (Anderson, 1947;May, 1950;1952;Howe, 1963;1980;Haviland, 1982;Haggett, 1994;Rupke, 2000;Smallman-Raynor et al, 2001;2004a;2004b;Cliff et al, 2004;Abrahams, 2006), cultural and historical geographies of agriculture, organicism, sanitation and cholera (Bacon 1956;Smith 1975;Kearns 1984;1989;1991;Sheail 1993;Colten 1994;Goddard 1996: Matless, 2001Gandy, 2005Krantz, 2006: McFarlane, 2008a) and wider theoretical conceptualisations of dirt (Krantz 2006;…”

Actually Existing Comparative Urbanism: Imitation and Cosmopolitanism in North-south Interurban Partnerships

“…But this activity has been heightened since at least the nineteenth century when European colonialism placed cities as sites of encounter between different planning cultures or sites of production for new planning 5 knowledge and techniques (King 2004, McFarlane 2008. It has been heightened again since the late nineteenth century and the birth of relatively organised and formalised municipal internationalism (Ewen and Hebbert 2007, Rodgers 1998, Saunier 2001 (Saunier 2002).…”

Water marginalization at the urban fringe: environmental justice and urban political ecology across the North–South divide

“…We define UPE as scholarship that, while rooted in a Northern Marxist geographic tradition, draws from post-structural strands to theorize how hybrid urban "socionatures" are shot through with uneven power relations (e.g., Gandy, 2002;Heynen, Kaika, & Swyngedouw, 2006;Swyngedouw, 1996). A second generation of UPE, moreover, not only pushes back on Marxist assumptions (see reviews by Gabriel, 2014;Lawhon et al, 2014), but also increasingly (re)theorizes "from" the Global South through a post-colonial sensibility (e.g., Gandy, 2008;Kooy & Bakker, 2008;Lawhon et al, 2014;McFarlane, 2008;Ranganathan, 2014b). While some have argued that the liberal political philosophy underpinning EJ is at odds with the Marxist roots of UPE (Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2003), we find this to be a narrow conception of both literatures, and one that is perhaps more true about their origins than their emerging trends.…”