Pipe Politics, Contested Waters

"Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is a brilliant ethnography of water and Lisa Björkman is one helluva fieldworker: indefatigable, resilient, determined, and resourceful. Determined as she was to get to the bottom of things, what she finds is that she can't. The more she tries to map the infrastructure or follow the water engineers and their workmen to the sites at which the 'system' needs to be fixed, the more the solutions, if there are any, seem out of reach. A pathbreaking book, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is destined to become a classic in the burgeoning literature on water and water sustainability." - Steven Caton, author of Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation

"Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is an important and original study of urbanization in the global South. Using the example of Mumbai's water supply, Lisa Björkman explicates the complex nexus of cultural and political developments affecting everyday life in the city while marking an important break in the historiography of urban infrastructure networks. Björkman tells an extremely complex story very effectively." - Matthew Gandy, author of The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination

"Pipe Politics, Contested Waters is a vividly detailed ethnography of Mumbai captured in its policy, institutions, infrastructure, and everyday sociopolitical practices associated with the capture, delivery, and distribution of water. . . . The subject of water is multidisciplinary in approach and is best viewed through the holistic lens of anthropology. This work is a rare addition to the literature." - Namika Raby, American Anthropologist

"Björkman shows how a slum gets produced through the regulation of its water infrastructure and how this production is central to the city’s redevelopment schemes....Mumbai has long been portrayed and understood as a city of extreme wealth and poverty, epitomized in the visual of a luxury high-rise surrounded by a moat of slums. The politics of water as illustrated in this book cracks open this image by showing just how connected they are." - Rashmi Sadana, American Ethnologist

“This is a book written with a sense of fondness for the poetics of water, as well as the mundane routines that shape its everyday movement through the city. Through water, it illuminates the contradictory and overlapping logics that shape the political economy of urban governance in Mumbai, offering insights that will resonate in many other fast developing mega-cities.”

“Björkman engages comprehensively with this gulf and covers a vast terrain, unfolding an intriguing plot of urban infrastructure politics. . . . The book is a brilliant piece of work.”

"This is a very impressive book, one that makes a significant contribution to the literatures on urban infrastructures, water politics and urbanization in the global South. Immersing the reader in the politics of water infrastructures is very effective in showing how the ‘big’ politics of global-city making ultimately and inevitably become bound up in context-specific politics." - Ross Beveridge, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

"[Pipe Politics, Contested Waters] overflows with novel insights on the significance of knowledge infrastructures within material networks; the workings of local politics; and the unforeseen consequences of economic reforms. It deserves to be widely read by infrastructure scholars, political anthropologists, and students of Indian political economy alike." - Elizabeth Chatterjee, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"Björkman’s account is remarkably innovative. . . . This book makes a pioneering contribution to the emerging fields of assemblage urbanism, infrastructure studies, and post-colonial urban theory." - Tanya Matthan, Contemporary South Asia