Rethinking Urban Governance in the Everyday: Pluralizing the Modes, Regimes and Multiplicities of Environmental and Infrastructural Governance  

 

Organizers

Yaffa Truelove (Yale-NUS College) and Natasha Cornea (University College of London)

 

Call for Papers

AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-9)

 

Recent work on cities of the global South has focused on what Schindler (2014) calls “multiplicities of governance regimes,” or the coexistence of plural modalities, rationalities, and practices of everyday governance that involve a diverse range of state and non-state actors and institutions (Shwartz et al., 2015; Gabriel, 2014; Cornea et al., 2016; Finewood and Holifield, 2015; Hausermann, 2012; Lindell, 2008).   This scholarship has focused most distinctly on pluralizing the logics, spaces, and practices of environmental and infrastructural governance across a range of cities. In relation to water governance and service provisioning, Schwartz et al. (2015: 31), for example, examine the “meshwork” in which the actors of water provisioning embody both state and non-state identities and use such identities in various sites of governance to develop everyday institutions of regulation in Greater Maputo. Jaglin’s work  utilizes the concept “delivery configurations” to reveal the complex assemblages of key actors, officials, authorities with the materiality of the built environment that shape the heterogeneity of actually existing configurations of governance and infrastructure on the ground. Ranganathan (2014) examines the seam of the state by which informal and formal public authorities converge in the provisioning of water by the so-called “water mafia” in Bangalore, alongside and interwoven with other governance regimes. These studies demonstrate the plural logics, contradictions, and tensions present in everyday environmental and infrastructural governance, examining services and infrastructures “beyond the networked city” (Coutard and Rutherford, 2016) to include a wider array of practices, materials and strategies of regulation.

This session aims to contribute to this body of work by rethinking and pluralizing diverse everyday governance configurations through a variety of geographic and interdisciplinary lenses, including urban political ecology, assemblage thinking, and anthropologies of the state (among others). We encourage paper submissions that provide critical empirical and theoretical insights into building a more diverse, robust, and nuanced analysis of urban everyday governance. Whilst the indicative references have predominately focused on cities in the South, we equally welcome cases from the North. Potential areas of inquiry include but are not limited to:

• Critical examinations of the power and politics of diverse everyday governance modalities in shaping uneven urban geographies, differing spaces of the city, and/or uneven consequences and lived experiences for diverse social groups
  
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• Investigations of meshworks and diverse delivery configurations of services and infrastructures, and their implications on thinking through everyday governance
  
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• Evaluations of differing conceptual models for theorizing state and non-state actors and institutions in shaping everyday urban governance
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•  The policy implications for thinking through differing multiplicities of governance regimes in cities
  
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•  The potential analytical purchase of combining differing theoretical frameworks for examining everyday governance 
  

 

Please submit paper abstracts to Yaffa Truelove ([log in to unmask]sg) and Natasha Cornea ([log in to unmask]) by October 10^th.  Authors will be notified by October 15^th.  

 

 

Indicative References

 

 Berenschot, W. (2010). Everyday Mediation: The Politics of Public Service Delivery in Gujarat, India. Development and Change 41(5) 883-905

Bierschenk, T., and Olivier de Sardan J-P editors (2014) States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies. Leiden & Boston: Brill.

Coutard, O., and Jonathan Rutherford, editors (2016). Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure reconfigurations and urban change in the North and South. Routledge.

 

Cornea, N., Zimmer, A., and Véron, R. (2016). Ponds, Power and Institutions: The Everyday Governance of Accessing Urban Water Bodies in a Small Bengali Town. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12377

 

Finewood, M. H., & Holifield, R. (2015). Critical approaches to urban water governance: from critique to justice, democracy, and transdisciplinary collaboration. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, 2(2), 85-96.

 

Gabriel, N. (2014). Urban political ecology: Environmental imaginary, governance, and the non-human. Geography Compass, 8(1), 38-48.

 Hausermann, H. (2012) From polygons to politics: Everyday practice and environmental governance in Veracruz, Mexico. Geoforum 43(5) 1002-1013

 Jaglin, S. (2014). “Rethinking urban heterogeneity” in The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, 434. (Eds.) Sue Parnell and Sophie Oldfield. New York: Routledge.

 

Lindell, I. (2008). The Multiple Sites of Urban Governance: Insights from an African City. Urban Studies 45(9) 1879-1901

 Ranganathan, M. (2014). 'Mafias' in the waterscape: Urban informality and everyday public authority in Bangalore. Water Alternatives, 7(1).

 

Schindler, S. (2014). A New Delhi every day: multiplicities of governance regimes in a transforming metropolis. Urban Geography, 35(3), 402-419.

 

Schwartz, K., Tutusaus Luque, M., Rusca, M., & Ahlers, R. (2015). (In) formality: the meshwork of water service provisioning. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, 2(1), 31-36.