Rethinking urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday: Perspectives from and of the global South

Abstract

In the global South, urban infrastructures and environments are marked by significant heterogeneity and the presence of multiple overlapping systems, configurations and actor networks that keep the city working – water flows, electricity is available, and waste is collected. This occurs in the face of what has been traditionally characterized as failed or incomplete infrastructures and the presence of governance practices that often deviate from formalized norms and policies. However, increasingly academics are arguing that such heterogeneity represents not failure but spaces of possibility and transition. This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings and conceptual ideas that frame urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday. We then outline how the contributions of this Special Issue (SI) reveal the contested, negotiated, and situated nature of everyday urban governance and the multiple ways that politics become spatialized and power shapes contemporary cities, urban environments, and infrastructures. The SI brings together an interdisciplinary and diverse range of contributions focusing on case studies in secondary and metropolitan cities in India, Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya and Guinea-Bissau, and Brazil. Read together, the papers in this issue contribute to four primary debates and discussions in urban studies and social science studies of the urban environment. These include responding to noted absences in studies of urban political ecologies, contributing to new understandings of the urban political, focusing on the practices that produce political subjectivity and render groups governable, and highlighting everyday spaces of possibility for a more equitable urban future.

Keywords

Urban infrastructure urban political ecology everyday governance everyday state urban environment

Introduction

The environment and infrastructures are the warp and weft of life in cities. They are deeply and often inequitably shaped by urban politics, situated histories, and social configurations. Furthermore, they serve to reflect the micro and macro power relations that shape urban lives. In the global South, though not just there, urban infrastructures and environments are marked by significant heterogeneity and the presence of multiple overlapping systems, configurations and actor networks that keep the city working – water flows, electricity is available, and waste is collected. This occurs in the face of what has been traditionally characterized as failed or incomplete infrastructures and the presence of governance practices that often deviate from formalized norms and policies. However, increasingly academics are arguing that such heterogeneity represents not failure but spaces of possibility and transition (Guma, 2020). By focusing on the everyday and examining the “networked entanglements” (Pieterse, 2006) that shape the regulation of urban infrastructures and environments we can begin to expose the wide array of practices, materials, and politics of regulation that profoundly shape urban life. The contributions to this special issue seek to reveal the contested, negotiated, and situated nature of everyday governance and the multiple ways that politics become spatialized and power shapes contemporary cities, urban environments, and infrastructures. To do so we draw together an interdisciplinary and diverse range of contributions focusing on case studies in secondary and metropolitan cities in India, Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya, Guinea-Bissau, and Brazil. Read together, they will contribute to building critical urban theory through a comparative gesture that thinks across shared features and repeated instances in order to build new understandings from different contexts (Robinson, 2016).

Our interest in the everyday is fundamentally an interest in the ways that power works and is mobilized in societies beyond the more conventionally theorized structural forms and practices of power. Directly or indirectly, many researchers who engage with the everyday draw on the ideas of de Certeau (1984) and Lefebvre (1984) to consider the ways that peoples’ actions and reactions construct society and are constructed by it (Furlong et al., 2019). For most scholars studying urban environments, the everyday is a sphere where power is diffuse and relational. For example, feminist political ecology (FPE) has drawn attention to the ways that engaging with the everyday serves to illuminate neglected spheres of environmental practices and engagements (Sundberg, 2016). In particular, FPE examines the often under-recognized gendered labor, care and affective relations that shape the circulation of critical urban resources and are key dimensions of social power relations. Extending this concern for often missed and under-theorized power relations to the practices of governance requires that we consider how governance as a social field and activity is defined. Here we understand governance to be activities that respond to particular social orders, conducts and/or spaces being constructed as problematic and in need of intervention (Blundo and Le Meur, 2009; Fuchs, 2005). Everyday governance approaches thus focus on the actors and processes which construct spheres as problematic and the practices of actors who attempt to intervene in these spheres (Cornea et al., 2017). What connects much of the scholarship on urban everyday governance, including the papers in this SI, is a focus on the “various combinations of state, associative individual, entrepreneurial and exogenous organizational forms” (Blundo and Le Meur, 2009: 13–14) and the hybrid arrangements that emerge between and across these different actors and the different materialities of infrastructures (Truelove, 2019a). While the papers focus on contingent and fluid everyday arrangements, Schramm and Ibrahim rightly point out a focus on the everyday need not be in contradiction to broader structural analysis (cf. Kihato, 2013). The papers in the SI do not conform to a single understanding or theorization of the everyday or everyday governance and our intent was not to make a homogenizing conceptual claim. Rather, we make an analytical claim: examining the everyday with regard to urban environments, as both a temporal field of action and a practice, exposes hereto unseen forms for agency and resistance, cooperation and conflict, inclusion, and exclusion (see also Pihljak et al., 2021; Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021; Truelove, 2011). Doing so has potential to open new ways of thinking through politics, practice, modalities of power and unequal lived experiences in contemporary cities. This has broader political potential because we agree that it is “within these contradictions and tensions that new societies might be envisioned and fought for” (Ekers and Loftus, 2008: 713).

Read together the papers in this issue contribute to four primary debates and discussions in urban studies and social science studies of the urban environment. Firstly, the contributions in this SI address key lacunae in research aligned to urban political ecology (UPE) approaches that seek to understand urban environments and infrastructures as socio-natural, produced through material, social, economic, and political processes. By focusing on local histories and everyday practices, the papers in this SI address recent critiques of UPE as being overly focused on capital and class, at the expense of other modes of inquiry and explanation. These papers demonstrate the ways in which an analysis of the everyday can illuminate new understanding of the multiple, heterogenous material configurations of urban infrastructures, but also how complex, ever mutating governance configurations both shape and manage urban environments and infrastructures. As is well demonstrated in this SI, such a micro-level, everyday focus need not be in opposition to more structural analysis, but rather can productively be pursued in tandem to it to create a more nuanced analysis of the everyday politics of urban governance. Further, that in doing so one can address the surprisingly under-theorization of both the state and governance in UPE. The papers herein demonstrate that the reality is more one of overlapping and at times contradictory fields of power rather than clear divisions between state and non-state actors, spheres, and processes.

Urban environments and infrastructures are the material expression, means, and object of everyday politics, power relations, and the production of inequality. The second main contribution of this SI is demonstrating the ways that examining the everyday governance of environments and infrastructures serves as a window into the urban political. The papers in this issue demonstrate that an orientation towards relationships and everyday negotiations reveals not just mundane micro-politics, but more fundamentally the inauguration of new forms of politics. The discussions in the contributions to the SI serve to nuance our understanding of state space and everyday politics, further elucidating the overlapping, boundary blurring between state and non-state actors. Thirdly, the contributions to this issue contribute to calls to more clearly examine political subjectivities. By focusing on the practices that (re)produce political subjectivity and render groups governable, the contributions to this SI contribute to more nuanced understanding of the ways that power works in everyday governance. In doing so, a range of contributions have also contributed to analyses of the social production of territories of governance. Authors of the SI demonstrate the fluid and permeable nature of such territories and the ways that different actors’ governable territories overlap.

A final set of interventions made by this SI regards the need to shift from an analytical claim of the value of careful examination of the everyday, to one that has political potential. In important ways the SI’s papers highlight the everyday spaces of possibility for a more equitable urban future. If, as is common, we focus only on active resistance we miss what many of the papers in this issue highlight: the multitude of quiet movements, mundane practices, and small incremental changes that have the scope to shift power relations and experiences of inequality. The fractured and overlapping infrastructures in and beyond the network discussed in these papers have political and material repressive and emancipatory technologies. Whilst we can recognize and critique the ways such arrangements can shape and mark inequality, by identifying progress, even when there is a long way to go, we can also recognize progressive potential. This recognition is critical for incremental and ongoing change in urban environments that supports more equitable futures.

UPE and environmental and infrastructural governance

Our focus in this SI on everyday urban environmental and infrastructural governance is broadly informed by urban political ecology (UPE) approaches. While articles in the SI utilize a variety of theoretical approaches, this research is aligned with UPE’s framework that demonstrates how urban environments and infrastructures are simultaneously produced through socio-natural, cultural, political, economic, and material forces. Early and foundational scholarship within UPE centers on upsetting ontological understandings of cities as inherently separate from nature (hence the field focuses on the socio-natural as a hybrid) and the ways that urban environments and settlements are shaped through “flows of capital and more-than-human ecological processes” (Tzaninis et al., 2020: 1). UPE has also long demonstrated the links between the environment and infrastructure in cities, but has said much less on their everyday governance (a point we shall turn to shortly). For example, the environmental resources necessary for cities to form and function – from water to electricity production to concrete – are distributed and enabled through infrastructures that carry and transport them: water and sewerage pipes, power lines, and roads, which may be fragmented or more fully networked. Such infrastructures themselves are “socio-technical”: undergirded by social, political, and cultural logics and systems, which congruently shape both their functionality and reach as well as city-dwellers’ access to vital urban resources in cities and beyond. Some of UPE’s earliest studies, such as Swyngedouw’s (2004) landmark research on Guayaquil’s water supply, show how both the socio-natural and socio-technical are intimately intertwined. As water is transformed through capitalist urbanization (and vice versa), it becomes metabolized through the city’s material infrastructures of pipes, pumps, and tanker trucks. Swyngedouw shows how the urbanization of water both reveals and reproduces stark class inequalities that leave much of the city’s working-class dependent on the sporadic arrival of tanker trucks, while wealthier urbanites enjoy access to piped provisions.

However, this SI seeks to make several interventions in relation to some noted absences and/or relative silences within UPE, though not every author uses UPE as their primary lens for doing so. Taken together, the articles in this SI provide insights and conceptualizations that broaden and deepen particular aspects of UPE and provide new understandings of urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday. First, articles of the SI align with critiques of UPE’s focus on class relations and capital as the dominant mode of analysis, occluding other modes of inquiry and explanatory factors in shaping urban socio-natures, resource infrastructures and unequal urban environments. For example, recent UPE research has called for more situated (Cornea et al., 2016; Lawhon et al., 2014; Zimmer, 2015), embodied (Doshi, 2017; Truelove, 2019b) and feminist (Sultana, 2020; Truelove, 2011, 2019a) approaches that, each in differing ways, bring attention to the scales, domains, and practices of the everyday for producing new insights into the systems of power and inequality that permeate cities and urban environments. Starting with Lawhon et al.’s (2014) call for a more situated UPE that accounts for everyday place-based concepts, institutions, histories, and diverse power configurations, a number of scholars have come to approach urban environments through a more “provincialized” framework. This includes research that is attentive to local histories and everyday practices and processes that do not necessarily fit received concepts in urban studies, and often intersect with, supersede, or modify and situate processes of capitalist urbanization. Studies in this SI on urban electricity (Pilo', 2021), water (Kundu and Chatterjee, 2020; Alves, 2019; Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021; Truelove, 2021; Pihljak et al., 2021) and waste (Schindler et al., 2021) bring a situated approach to everyday urban governance, giving attention to local institutions, histories, diverse infrastructural configurations and multi-scalar power relations.

Efforts to embody and gender UPE are synergistic with a situated UPE, but rather focus more explicitly on feminist approaches (such as feminist political ecology) that center material embodiment and gender as critical to concerns regarding how environmental and infrastructural politics unequally shape spatial formations and lived experiences in cities (Doshi, 2017; Sultana, 2020; Truelove, 2019b). Here, urban environments are understood to be produced through multiple interconnections of social difference and power that are unevenly embodied in everyday life (Doshi, 2017). Kundu and Chatterjee’s (2020) article in the SI utilizes both a situated and feminist political ecology approach to the UPE of water in Baluipur, India. This study reveals how water governance in the everyday is inflected through intersectional gender and class relations that co-produce uneven outcomes and diverse infrastructural configurations for urbanites.

A second intervention the SI makes is to bring an analytical and conceptual focus to everyday urban governance and the everyday state, an area of UPE-aligned scholarship that has been surprisingly under-theorized, particularly given political ecology’s long history of engagement in these areas. Cornea et al. (2017), for example, point out the relative absence of work on governance within UPE, and particularly urge scholars to more robustly engage with “everyday” governance specifically, drawing from anthropological and ethnographic approaches. In particular, Cornea et al. call for analyses to include:

“the plurality of governance actors, their practices, rationales, normative orientations, interests and imaginaries as well as their relative and contextual power that shape local (urban) spaces and environments as well as access to (urban) resources, amenities, and services” (2017: 2).

Rather than top-down or dichotomous (state/non-state, formal/informal) approaches to understanding everyday urban governance, the authors of this SI draw from rich ethnographic data to elucidate the complex, overlapping, and often contradictory fields of power that inform a broader understanding of what analyses of governance in the everyday should potentially include.

Whilst many of the contributions to the SI focus primarily on non-state actors, the everyday is equally an analytically rich terrain in the study of the state and state space (see Neves Alves, 2021). In the last two decades, a rich body of research in the global South has examined the everyday state, often focusing on the governing practices of lower level bureaucrats and politicians, and the multiple normative logics that guide their behaviors (Anjaria, 2011; Corbridge et al., 2005; Fuller and Benei, 2000; Gupta, 2012; Palat Narayanan, 2019). This research has demonstrated that far from being a domain of regularized and consistent practice, informality occurs in this sphere, which is marked by disparity between governance models and actual practice (Corbridge et al., 2005; Roy, 2011; Tarlo, 2000). The state then is understood and recognized to be heterogenous and reproduced through power relations and deliberate performances (Fuller and Benei, 2000; Hansen and Stepputat, 2001). More recently researchers have begun to pay attention to actors who act in state-like ways, often employing mimicry as a tool for legitimacy (cf. Ghertner, 2017; Palat Narayanan, 2019; Ranganathan, 2014). Research from the global South not only complicates assumed dichotomies between the state as formal and society as informal spheres, it demonstrates the complexity of mechanisms actors use to establish themselves as legitimate governance actors. In doing so, this literature speaks to, but only rarely overlaps in citation practices with, research emerging from the global North on the prosaic nature of the state. This research agenda examines the “mundane practices through which something we label ‘the state’ becomes present in everyday life” (Painter, 2006: 753). As with the everyday state, this perspective clearly exposes the ways that viewing the state as a monolithic entity hides the informal arrangements and power relations that underpin it, (Menga and Swyngedouw, 2018) and complicates any binary logic of state/non-state (Painter, 2006).

Finally, the articles of the SI particularly deepen UPE approaches by bringing more centrally within analyses social science approaches to urban infrastructures, which provide an important analytical pathway for further conceptualizing and understanding urban governance in the everyday. Drawing from a rich “infrastructural turn” in social science literature, which views infrastructure as a complex assemblage of both the social and technical/material, this literature opens up new avenues for thinking through how infrastructures of key urban resources are produced and governed in the everyday (Amin, 2014; Anand et al., 2018; Coutard and Rutherford, 2015; Larkin, 2013). For example, recent social science studies of infrastructure in the global south reveal a wide variety of hetereogeneous infrastructural and governance configurations involved in circulating resources such as energy, water, and sewerage that profoundly shape city-dwellers’ unequal experiences of urban environments (Desai et al., 2015; Coutard and Rutherford, 2015; Lawhon et al., 2018; McFarlane and Silver, 2017). These configurations often go ‘beyond the network’ and thus require thinking through complex (and ever-mutating) assemblages of political actors, materials, and informal institutions that do not fit neatly into inherited concepts from urban studies in the global North (Truelove, 2019a). Dichotomous classifications of informal/formal, state/non-state, political/civil society often fail to capture circumstances on the ground, which instead are often more likely marked by hybridity, uncertainty, and ongoing adaptations (Ahlers et al., 2014; Kooy, 2014; Schwartz et al., 2015; Truelove, 2019a). As argued by Schindler et al. (2021: 340) in this SI:

“a significant amount of urban space and infrastructure is subject to multiple, overlapping governance regimes with competing visions and asynchronous rhythms (e.g. everyday vs. decades). This multiplicity of governance regimes not only shapes heterogeneous infrastructure configurations, but it also determines whether and how residents can switch from one system to another.”

The original research in this SI demonstrates that “actually existing” infrastructural governance involves complex assemblages of human (economics, politics, institutions, social relations) and non-human (biophysical processes, material decay, environmental factors) associations (see also McFarlane, 2008: 348). Thus, our understanding of how cities are governed in the everyday must increasingly account for actors, practices and processes at registers that have too often received little scholarly attention: the electricians who shape patterns of inequality within the network (Pilo', 2021), the informal strongman who regulates local wells in particular neighborhoods (Truelove, 2019), and water governance actors who act as both the state and its outside at different points in time (Kundu and Chatterjee, 2020; Pihljak et al., 2021).

Everyday governance as a window into the urban political

The majority of authors in this SI use infrastructure as an analytical anchoring point to consider differing modes of the urban political that emerge from, and shape, everyday urban life. Analyzing urban infrastructures and their governance is particularly useful for considering everyday politics, power relations and the production of urban inequality because such infrastructures are both the material expression, and often means of transforming and shaping, unequal access to space, rights, and resources in cities. Urban infrastructures are thus always political. In informal settlements of the global South, a focal point of many of the studies of this SI, infrastructures are both the symbol and manifestation of unequal citizenship (Anand, 2017; Lemanski, 2020; McFarlane and Silver, 2017). Denied, splintered, and fragmented infrastructures inaugurate an everyday politics of “making do” and piecing together infrastructural fragments into somewhat functioning systems (McFarlane, 2018) that are further shaped by intersecting class, gender, race, and ethno-religious relations (Kundu and Chatterjee, 2020; Sultana, 2020; Truelove, 2019a). Everyday strategies, articulations, and mobilizations for more equal access to the city become manifested through (and in relation to) the politics of breakdown, maintenance, and inadequacy of infrastructure access, and thus expose wider systems of urban inequality and citizenship.

The register of the everyday thus provides particular insights into the mundane practices and confluence of macro- and micro-politics that surround struggles to access and control water, waste disposal, electricity, and transport. Firstly, heterogeneous infrastructural configurations exist both within and often supersede larger structures of power and governance in the city, complicating our view of the multiple registers by which political practices shape the city. Several authors in the SI show that larger structural processes and everyday acts of improvisation and transformation are not incongruous, but rather reveal the importance of the everyday for understanding how macro structures of power are modified, circumvented, situated and/or unequally embodied. For example, Pihljak et al.’s (2021: 303) study of water pricing in Lilongwe directs attention to the everyday governance practices of water utility engineers and administrators in order to show how “structural processes may be reinforced or disrupted by routinised or improvised everyday operations of the water supply network that will determine who gets water, how much and for how long.” Without attention to the everyday micro-politics of engineers and administrators, we lose sight of “other relationships of power” that shape urban inclusion and exclusion, as well “the tactics of accommodation, transformation and contestation of structural processes” (Pihljak et al., 2021: 302). Similarly, Pilo' (2021: 266) analyzes electricity in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, urging scholars to “pay attention to both multi-level governance logics within institutionalized arenas and everyday governance practices between local actors on the ground.” Despite so-called universal electricity connections across the city, Pilo' reveals how networked inequalities emerge within the grid through a plurality of governance actors, and congruently shape the urban political environment. The everyday negotiations that surround the electricity network reveal differing rationalities at work that simultaneously inaugurate new kinds of politics. This type of analysis helps to further demonstrate McFarlane’s argument that infrastructural fragments and materials themselves:

“are animated and reanimated by all manner of political imperatives. In informal settlements, fragments are always already political, whether as markers of partial or denied citizenship, or because access to them often reflects dominant relations of class, gender, ethnicity, race and religion” (McFarlane, 2018: 1012).

Demonstrating the multi-scalar and intersectional gender and class dimensions of urban water politics in Baruipur, India, Kundu and Chatterjee (2020) build on feminist political ecology approaches to show how uneven water access for middle class and poor communities is productive of new gender politics and the class-based power configurations of “para” clubs. Such studies further point to the criticality of differing scales of analysis in revealing overlapping regimes of power with regard to urban environmental and infrastructural governance. For example, Kundu and Chatterjee (2020) demonstrate how intra-household and community politics shape middle class women’s claims on state political leaders to bypass the local government and provide tube wells in their areas illustrating the multiple scales at which the governance of water infrastructures are determined. The everyday, rather than itself being a scale of analysis, has the potential to collapse multiple scales by showing how the global, state and local urban scales of governance become situated and experienced in everyday practice.

Schramm and Ibrahim (2021) posit that ethnographic approaches to the everyday are not at odds with structural governance processes, but rather show how they are reflected in the everyday lives, politics, and practices of Nairobians. Rather than focusing on informal settlements of the urban poor, these authors’ study a middle-class housing complex called the Nyayo Highrise Estate. While estate residents’ public protest of erratic and insufficient piped water flows constitutes a politics of the conventional sphere and targets broader structures of inequality, this research also reveals the mundane micropolitics of the everyday, in which “urban actors try to access, negotiate and change the city’s water flows” (Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021: 354) that produces water inequality and differing degrees of social power inside the estate as well as in the city itself.

Secondly, studies within the SI productively highlight tensions, contradictions, and overlapping governance regimes between state and non-state actors to bring greater complexity and nuance to both state space and the everyday politics that shape “actually-existing” governance regimes on the ground. Specifically, authors demonstrate how analyzing everyday governance brings out the complexities between constructions of the state and its outside. This includes giving greater analytical attention to what constitutes state space, querying how to theorize not only the everyday state but mundane and ordinary political practices that further complicate the state/non-state boundary. Here our authors take a number of divergent approaches. Schindler et al. (2021), for example, see limits to state space and power in particular neighborhoods of Bagamoyo, Tanzania where the state lacks totalizing control over material flows over water and waste. At the same time, locally situated power brokers “struggle to extend their control over larger territories or exert significant influence beyond the locale” (Schindler et al., 2021: 340). According to the authors, the tension between these governance regimes, and their differing levels of reach and presence (Allen and Cochrane, 2010), requires what they call a “meso-level engagement” and politics of urban residents to produce more just outcomes. In contrast, Neves Alves (2021) reveals how the state’s reach and presence remains even in urban spaces presumed to be abandoned by state agencies. Utilizing anthropological approaches to the everyday state in the secondary city of Bafata, Guinea-Bassau, Neves Alves reveals the complex ways that formal state presence takes root through the activities and practices of non-state organizations. According to Neves Alves (2021: 251), the influence of non-state actors on the state should not be understood “as deviations from what a supposed state is but as the lived geographies of states, that is as part of the ways in which all states shape everyday lives and ideas of the state are constructed.” Here, non-state actors shape the state’s informal decision-making practices when it comes to water infrastructure, but also continue to exert power over water provisioning on the ground, revealing their influence on not only the state but also localized forms of everyday water politics. Thus, this nuanced analysis shows how non-state actors shape governance and politics in the everyday in ways that suggest they go beyond being simply intermediaries of the state (see also Cornea, 2020), doing complex work with the potential to both extend and curtail state space.

Further complicating a neat bifurcation of state and non-state space, Truelove’s (2021) research in Delhi’s informal settlements shows how residents themselves come to understand local governance actors’ “infrastructural power” over critical urban resources beyond a clear state/non-state divide. Here, tracking the webs of power that local governance actors exert over water infrastructures is more critical to residents than marking their state/non-state identities. Truelove’s work shows how residents utilize a “politics of anticipation” (Simone, 2010) to negotiate with both state and non-state actors, while these same governance actors strategically pivot between state and non-state identities to gain further power in controlling local water infrastructures. Taken together, these interventions point to the critical need of scholarship on urban governance to produce more nuanced understandings of the power relations and politics that emerge from infrastructural and environmental governance in the everyday and to develop new vocabularies that upset and nuance any neat divisions between formal/informal, state/non-state, legal/illegal.

Governable publics in disciplinable spaces

What is apparent in studies of the everyday, and captured in contributions to this SI, are the ways that everyday environmental and infrastructural governance practices both create and are dependent on the construction of governable publics and disciplinable spaces. This research has quite clearly demonstrated the complex, often subtle and mundane ways in which people are made governable (Cornea, 2020; Kuss, 2019; Palat Narayanan, 2019). Both state and non-state actors need to engage in a range of everyday practices that reproduce their role as legitimate governance actors and ensure that ascription of public(s) to these systems. If we accept that governance regimes overlap and coexist, examining everyday practices helps to make visible the specificities of political subjectivities (Kuss, 2019). Research on everyday environmental and infrastructural governance has demonstrated that political subjectivities are often (re)produced through entangled and repeating processes and relationships between a multitude of actors. For example, in his research in Delhi, Palat Narayanan (2019) examines the processes through which the Pradhan (a local leader) and an informal Residents Welfare Association establishes legitimacy to govern in part by conforming to electoral practices that mimic the state. This legitimacy is then used in the Pradhan’s negotiations with the state water authority to manage the community’s daily water supply. In turn this is used to demand the community’s allegiance. It also allows the Pradhan to construct other actors (such as ‘outside’ NGOs) as illegitimate. These complex and entangled relationships that Palat Narayanan (2019: 93) understands as “citizenship claims (both collective and individual) made with and without regard to the state” demonstrates the complexities and entangled processes through which political subjectivities are created and maintained.

Contributions to the SI further elucidate the particularities of political subjectivities at the margins in cities in the global South. Schramm and Ibrahim (2021: 364) highlight the ways in which Water Action Groups (WAGs) in Nairobi create a “space for the cultivation of good, compliant, submissive citizens.” Privatization alone does not make people governable under this new regime. It does not turn them from citizens who receive water as a matter of right into customers, other mechanisms are needed. Whilst the WAGs help to render residents of the Nyayo Highrise Estate governable by the water company, they are also subject to other forms of authority, including the state as represented by the Members of County Assembly (representatives of the city). Negotiations and activism over water infrastructure are equally as important in this sphere. Here as elsewhere (see Pilo', 2021) infrastructural negotiation becomes a tool through which governable publics are reproduced. Infrastructural gains or losses may act as a material indicator of communities’ enmeshment with systems of control, so that the ability to access or obtain such infrastructures or the loss thereof is indicative of both the citizenship claims of the public (see also Anand, 2017; Lemanski, 2020), but also the obligations of those who govern. Everyday practices around such infrastructures may reproduce these systems of control and political subjectivities.

The creation of a public who will be governed and who conforms to or consents to a system of control may rely on practices that tap into multiple normative registers and moral relations. In examining the fabrication of consent for pricing decisions by the Water User Associations (WUA) in Lilongwe, Pihljak et al. (2021) details the ways that democratic and participatory normative registers and traditional/cultural loyalties are employed in complex ways. The WUA meetings employ a nominally democratic and participatory normative register to fabricate consent for decisions that have already been made. These decisions are communicated to the broader community via traditional authorities (town chiefs). In post-colonial Malawi the boundaries between ‘subject’ and ‘citizen’ are porous, and town chiefs are important urban actors to whom loyalty is owed and who may act as gate keepers with the state (Eggen, 2011). Only by carefully examining everyday processes can one begin to see the situated and complex nature of political subjectivities and understand how these subject positions are produced.

The production of governable publics is often deeply entwined with the contested social production of territories of governance (Amin, 2002). Previous research has demonstrated the ways in which spaces of governance may overlap, as people navigate multiple boundaries and territorialized authorities that may or may not recognize the authority and influences of the other actors or the processes through which they establish territory (Cornea, 2020; Cornea et al., 2016). Everyday practices that appropriate and territorialize the city (Fenster, 2005) create places where the influence of actors may wax and wane temporally or situationally (Palat Narayanan, 2019; Schindler, 2014; Truelove, 2021). Pilo' (2021) demonstrates quite clearly the ways in which materiality of infrastructures and their performance represent complex arrangements and negotiations of socio-spatial norms and the “negotiated order” of the city. In Rio de Janerio’s favelas, territorialized control by gangs and militias was in part reproduced and asserted by preventing the electric company from entering the favelas to cut off illegal or non-paying connections. In other periods, the electric company, through smart meters installed during periods of military and police pacification of the favelas, allowed the creation of speculative disciplinary space inside of otherwise unruly and unsettled space not amiable to their control. Pilo’s research extends our understanding of territories of governance to demonstrate that not only do multiple territorialized systems of control overlay each other, but that some of these may be perforated and permeable rather than coherent and cohesive in the conventional way that we think about territory. Such insights help us to develop new understandings of the ways that cities are territorialized and the manners in which actors seek to exercise and assert control in the everyday.

Everyday spaces of possibility

Finally, authors in the SI use their research on a diversity of cities across the global South to speak to everyday spaces of possibility, transformation, and more socially and environmentally just urban futures. This SI thus builds on long-standing debates within southern urbanism scholarship concerning the practices, registers, and scales by which progressive transformation occurs in cities. By focusing on the register of the everyday, the SI builds on previous work attentive to both the need for large-scale structural transformations (be it more inclusive access to, and planning for, affordable and secure housing, living wages, safe and equitable urban environments, and reliable and accessible infrastructures) and the everyday reality that (slow) social and material change can often occur through mundane practices and small and fragmented increments, or what Bayat (2013) terms “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary.” Such everyday micro-politics, practices and registers can often be overlooked in studies that tend to focus on more highly visible active resistance (such as protests and social movements) against structural inequalities. Moreover, attention to the actors, practices, institutions, and mechanisms of everyday governance helps to reveal pivotal moments, spaces, “webs of power”, and interventions (however big or small) that can shift power relations and residents’ uneven experience of urban environments in a more just and equitable direction. Authors of the SI thus productively reveal that environmental and infrastructural governance can often produce both emancipatory and repressive outcomes at the same time, requiring scholars, practitioners, and policy makers to carefully parse through outcomes on the ground to understand both the potential and limitations of diverse governance configurations for more just urban futures.

A focus on heterogeneous and fragmented infrastructural configurations provides one important lens for both deepening and broadening analyses of urban environments and everyday spaces of possibility for more just urban futures. Urban infrastructures become the material expression of unequal access to space and resources, as many urban residents struggle to access basic services like waste removal and electricity. Such infrastructures also become a means of expressing differing ways of framing urban problems, articulating competing visions of urban rights, and resisting systems of urban exclusion. Taking an infrastructural lens to the everyday is particularly critical in the global South, given that around 40–70 per cent of urban dwellers live in some form of settlement that lacks networked access to key services like water and sewerage (Ahlers et al., 2014). Authors in the SI show how fractured and multiple overlapping infrastructures often have both emancipatory and repressive possibilities built into both their materiality (which may fail, bypass, or be intermittent for local residents) and everyday politics (the governance, discourses, and practices of actors that seek control and access). In the words of Schramm and Ibrahim (2021: 354), “technology and infrastructure are spaces of possibility that may work towards emancipation and repression at the same time.” Often, analytically tracking the politics and poetics (Larkin, 2013) of infrastructures helps reveal infrastructure’s situated violences (see Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012; Truelove and O’Reilly, 2020), effects and emancipatory potential that co-exist at the same time, and sometimes in the same space. For example, Schramm and Ibrahim (2021), Kundu and Chatterjee (2020) and Pilo' (2021) all reveal the complex power relations and politics that emerge from neighborhood struggles over water and electricity networks respectively. In each study, these authors show how negotiating access in particular urban spaces has diverse and situated effects on differing residents and state and non-state actors, deepening marginality for some, while empowering others with increased access, control, or decision-making power (see also Cornea et al., 2016). Similarly, Truelove (2021) shows how the multiple configurations of governance over water in Delhi’s informal settlements do not ultimately uniformly include or exclude residents of informal settlements from rights and resources, even when an official right to centralized water is granted to one settlement. Rather, these everyday governance regimes “have complex and uncertain outcomes, sometimes increasing and at other times diminishing access to resources, urban inclusion, and in-roads to the city” (Truelove, 2021: 297).

Studies from the SI also illuminate how liminal space and life at the margins is claimed and made livable, often through slow and incremental progress to transform urban environments, which eventually produces more just urban futures even if there is a long way yet to go. The register of the everyday becomes the key analytical entry point for bringing visibility to these mundane and incremental practices that, though difficult to capture, account for slow urban transformations and claims-making. What Lancione and McFarlane (2016) call “infra-making,” and Silver (2014) refers to as “incremental infrastructures” brings attention to the practices of urban-dwellers who must intervene on their own behalf to procure, make and re-make critical infrastructures of urban living in settlements that lack basic amenities. As indicated by Silver (2014: 788), the “constant adjustment and intervention” and “ceaseless reconfiguration of urban networks” presents “multiple conditions of possibility,” often revealing how urban in-roads are made through progressive socio-material practices and politics that eventually accrue improved rights, spaces, and even citizenship for residents who live in the city’s liminal spaces (Anand, 2017; Lemanski, 2020; Amin, 2014). In the SI, Kundu and Chatterjee (2020) show that informal settlements, as compared to more economically privileged middle class communities, in the small city of Baruipur sometimes experience greater gains with regard to water security and access over time due to the long-standing mutual cultivation of incremental infrastructures and local political arrangements.

Taken together, the articles of this SI reveal that emancipatory and progressive possibilities can be found in forging new forms of urban legitimacy and citizenship claims through infrastructural and environmental transformations (see Anand, 2017; Lemanski, 2020; Palat Narayanan, 2019). This includes the ways that rights to and in the city are claimed not only through formal spheres and engagement with state actors and agencies, but through additional everyday tactics and practices that blur and operate outside of state space. Giving analytical attention to everyday practices and politics illuminates the ways NGO actors, informal authorities, and a variety of other intermediaries take on state-like roles and or characteristics, profoundly shaping not only governance of key urban resources but how residents legitimize long-term claims and rights in the city outside direct interactions with state agencies. Thus, this SI call for increased analyses of the multiple “everyday” modalities of power that operate to shape urban space and rights, revealing both oppressive and emancipatory possibilities for more just cities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the participants of the 2017 American Association of Geographers session “Rethinking Urban Environmental and Infrastructural Governance in the Everyday,” which was the catalyst for later organizing this Special Issue (SI). We also thank Eugene McCann for his ongoing support and feedback of the papers in this SI, without which the project would not have been possible. Finally, we wish to thank Katie Nudd for her assistance and support of with each paper and the SI overall.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Yaffa Truelove

Natasha Cornea

Yaffa Truelove is an assistant professor of Geography and International Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research analyzes urban and feminist political ecologies of water, Southern urbanism, and the everyday infrastructures and governance of Indian cities.

Natasha Cornea is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham. Her research examines urban political ecologies of solid waste and water, Southern urbanism, and practices of everyday governance in the global South.

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