Govind Gopakumar

Experiments and Counter-Experiments in the Urban Laboratory of Water- Supply Partnerships in India

Karen Bakker has characterized the scattered islands of networked water supply that are common in the cities of the global South as ‘archipelagos’. Those living outside of archipelagos utilize a variety of interventions, collectively referred to here as tendrils, to access water by informal means. Neoliberal imperatives driving infrastructure transformation aim to alter the paradigm of water-supply provision to diminish its plural composition and effectively transform tendrils into archipelagos. In this article, developing a conceptual and methodological synthesis between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and political ecology, I study the emergence of public-private partnerships in India as laboratories in the marketization of water-supply provision. These partnerships, initiated at local scales, aim to enroll informal water users into standardized modes of water-supply provision and effectively expand the archipelagos of modernity. I draw upon empirical research of a water-supply partnership in the city of Bengaluru, describing some of the characteristics of the experimental processes, and argue that they simultaneously forward the marketization of water-supply services while inadvertently providing opportunities for residents, local associations and activists to form networks of counter-experimentation. The description of these political acts, this article concludes, provokes re-examination of the efficacy of an instrumental understanding of water partnerships, but requires closer policy engagement with ‘governance failures’ that are rife in water-supply provision.

Investigating Degenerated Peripheralization in Urban India: The Case of Water Supply Infrastructure and Urban Governance in Chennai

Globalization is compressing the sequential spatial experience of environmental burdens in developing country cities through a process of space—time telescoping. With the introduction of neoliberal reform policies, Indian cities have also begun experiencing the effects of telescoped environmental burdens. A compelling theoretical perspective in this tradition suggests that large Indian cities now display a “degenerated peripheralization” whereby the experience of environmental burdens is becoming increasingly uneven between the urban core and its peripheries as a result of policy neglect. However, reliance on this theory overlooks how place-specific historical, social, and technical processes in the urban context often support a dynamic of active appropriation of resources from the periphery and core. Drawing on the histories of urban politicalization and the institutionalization of water supply infrastructure, this article will contextualize the process of peripheralization in the Indian metropolitan city of Chennai as an appropriative and exploitative one rather than a degenerated one.

Who Will Decongest Bengaluru? Politics, Infrastructures & Scapes

ABSTRACT The main objective of this paper is to investigate deliberate instances of the unclogging of congested urban infrastructures through such measures as widening roads and constructing underpasses. Such decongestive actions have increasingly become routine in the burgeoning cities of the Global South. The city of Bengaluru, India’s hub for business process outsourcing and for new information technology innovation and entrepreneurship, provides an apt location to examine and excavate the political connotations of decongestive work. In doing so, this paper proposes infrastructure scape as an explanatory concept to describe three facets of decongestive efforts in Bengaluru – first, the organizing principle that assembles them, second, the technological sensibility that constitute these efforts, and finally the value commitments that each scape proposes.

INFRASTRUCTURE AND METROPOLITAN REORGANIZATION: AN EXPLORATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP IN AFRICA AND INDIA

ABSTRACT: Despite decades of effort, deficiencies in access and quality of infrastructure persist in cities of the developing world. One common response to the infrastructure problem is to reorganize the structure of metropolitan areas in the hopes that infrastructure provision, management, and quality will improve. What is not clear globally, however, is how the reorganization of metropolitan areas comes to be, and how infrastructure deficiencies function as a rationale for reform in conjunction with other dominant reasons or drivers of metropolitan reorganization. Building on the demand for increased cross-regional comparison in urban studies generally, this article explores and compares the relationship between infrastructure quality and political and social pressures in four cities—two in India and two in East Africa. The comparison is intended to be exploratory; it shows how city and national government efforts to improve infrastructure quality are shaped by political and social pressures. The results provide a foundation for future cross-regional comparison and theory building.

Sustainability and the indispensability of politics: a study of sanitation partnerships in urban India

The chronic absence of hygienic sanitation for many urban Indians and the resultant contamination of surface water sources are a major cause for the poor environmental condition in most cities in India. In the past decade, public?private partnerships have been presented as an innovative strategy to rectify this pervasive problem. Numerous partnerships to improve sanitation have been launched in India as experiments. But while some of these partnerships have become sustainable, others have collapsed. This paper uses purposive transition analysis to inquire into the selective success of some notable partnerships. Making the connection that strategy and politics are indispensable to the endurance of partnerships, this paper concludes that sustainability in India is inherently a political enterprise that cannot be reduced to technical definitions.

Intrusiveness of urban renewal in India: JNNURM as a development fix

Abstract Multilateral and other donor agencies have sought for some time to intervene within systems of governance in different developing countries, as is evident through procedures that critical scholarship has termed invasive. This paper investigates an effort to reform governance of infrastructures through the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) in India. Gathering data about the mission using government reports, brochures and other secondary material, this paper examines the Missions managerial orientation and architectural novelty to highlight the intrusive depth and scope of renewal of the countrys urban landscape.

Teaching global engineering in Canada, learning informality of the Global South

Globalisation has inspired a wide assortment of curricular initiatives within engineering education in the USA and Europe. This interest could be categorised in multiple directions – international exposure, service learning, or critical understanding and praxis. In Canada, however, there has been far less consideration for integrating globalisation within the engineering curriculum. The recent episode of reform initiated by the Canadian Board of Engineering Accreditation could usher in changes on this front. Situating the development of a course titled Development and Global Engineering within these broader conceptual and organisational impulses, this paper will illuminate a pathway towards understanding globalisation, especially within the Global South, through a comprehension of complexity and informality.

Navigating a Constitutional Moment: Reflections on Implementing Graduate Attributes in Canadian Engineering Education

This piece is a self-reflexive essay examining our experiences during an important transitional moment, what we will identify as a ‘constitutional moment’, in engineering education in Canada. We are a collection of scholars who specialize in the study of the interface between technology and the humanities and social sciences (most of us identify as Science and Technology Studies scholars). Housed within the Center for Engineering in Society, itself housed within a faculty of engineering, we find ourselves presented with dual challenges of introducing insights from the critical studies of the relationship between science, technology, and society into the engineering curriculum, while also maintaining legitimacy among the engineering faculty that we find ourselves a part of. This paper is a result of our attempts to understand the challenges in engineering education that are unique to our Canadian context and to systematize our responses to these challenges. The aim of this paper is to share our experiences navigating the relationship between the construction of our centers identity as an Engineering Studies hub and our critical participation in engineering education practice.

Reviewing a decade of research on Engineering Leadership

Academics, industry professionals, and policy makers across North America have shown increasing interest in the topic of engineering leadership. The demand from industries for engineers with diversified skills in a hypercompetitive market as well as the need to produce engineers attuned to the challenges of globalization are pushing universities to invest in engineering leadership education programs. In this context, this article engages with the following two questions: How have scholars addressed the concept of engineering leadership over the past decade? And how could the field of engineering leadership be constructively pursued in the future? The goal of this article is to map the structure of this nascent field by analyzing its scope, geography of application, methodology, relations, contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies in the literature. By doing so, we explore reasons for the field’s structural particularities while also considering new avenues for future studies. We offer some tentative conclusions: articles predominantly presented the results of a pilot program or the outcomes of integration of leadership topics into current courses but in the process the concept of engineering leadership is seldom understood in a situated manner within wider shifts in economy and society. This points to a potential avenue for further research that incorporates a macro level of analysis that adopts a multi-dimensional view of leadership

Leveraging networks : online network based learning for 21st century engineering education and practice

How can engineering students be prepared for their career in the 21st century? For over 10 years, Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) has advanced the concept of the ‘global engineer’ as one approach to this challenge. The global engineer is a technically competent engineer with excellent communication and leadership skills, as well as a developed awareness of globalization and sustainability. The current engineering curriculum offers many tools and resources to prepare students for the unique challenges and opportunities that the 21st century will present. However, there is a great opportunity to leverage recent advances in online learning and network/community based learning to enable students to further connect to these 21st century concepts. This paper outlines the architecture of an online platform as well as its approach to pedagogy and developing a Canadian learning network for global engineering. 1 GLOBAL ENGINEERING: LESSONS FROM THE CLASSROOM