By Lisa Bjorkman, Duke University Press, August 2016
Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. The author, Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville, moves from slums to elite enclaves in analyzing the processes of mapping and politics in the city’s watery infrastructures.
Exploring the workings of secondary markets, water brokers, and planning offices she reveals how power, knowledge and authority over how when and why water flows are being reconfigured as Mumbai makes itself a “world class” city.
Winner of the 2014 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences the book is both profoundly intimate in its ethnographic depth and wonderfully ambitious with its theoretical reach.
