Hydraulic city: water and the infrastructures of citizenship in Mumbai
In Hydraulic City Nikhil Anand provides an account of how people living in settlements in Mumbai use water to assert their rights to the city and to citizenship. Anand considers the specific social meanings attached to piped water in a city surrounded by water, with water flowing through it in myriad ways. Against claims of shortage and crisis, he argues that there is enough water for all of Mumbai's residents. Further, his book argues for a reconsideration of the city's diverse settlements--often lumped together as "slums"--as places with connections to the city that are often more formal, and more permanent, than the term "slum" might imply. Anand's rich ethnography of these settlements shows how water's periodic appearance and disappearance establishes precarity as part of ordinary life