The Flaky Accretions of Infrastructure: Sociotechnical Systems, Citizenship, and the Water Supply

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The convergence of networked digital infrastructures and built environments have given rise to the “urban user”, a conflation of “the user” and “the resident” or “the citizen”. The urban user and the city infrastructures are mutually constituted phenomena formed through the interactions between them. In this research, we contribute an ethnographic study that focuses on the everyday interactions between the urban user and water infrastructures in Pune, India. Using Nikhil Anand’s concept of “hydraulic citizenship” to analyze our ethnographic data, we showcase the mutually constitutive process of infrastructuring and subjectivization of the “citizen”, bringing attention to the ad hoc, heterogeneously constituted water infrastructures in Pune that aspire to be “smart” even before becoming functional infrastructures. In doing so, we hope to expand possible research trajectories within smart city research agendas by decoupling it from Western assumptions and also by linking them to an interactional account of the everyday relationships among residents, infrastructures, and municipalities