6/28/17, 11)46 PM The Banality of Infrastructure | Items Page 1 of 5 http://items.ssrc.org/the-banality-of-infrastructure/ The Social Science Research Council Programs Fellowships & Prizes SSRC Digital Pr JUST ENVIRONMENTS The Banality of Infrastructure Nikhil Anand’s contribution to the “Just Environments” series examines the making of urban inequality, focusing on water infrastructure as a key site for banal yet fundamentally political decision-making that neglects or harms poor citizens. In both Flint and Mumbai, environmental injustice is generated through bureaucratic routines that rarely take into account the humans they a!ect. Challenging these injustices, Anand argues, requires engaging in the “boring” technopolitics of infrastructure. by Nikhil Anand ! Prin Three years ago, in April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, switched its water source from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River. This, in many ways, was an unremarkable decision, made in part to save monies while a new pipeline was being built. The move was expected to save the cash-strapped city of Flint $5 million a year. Between September 2014 and January 2015, residents of Flint began to notice something amiss with their water. It smelled and had a strange color. Others began to complain of skin rashes, of hair loss, and sickness. City officials waved away their concerns, while at the same time dousing the supply with larger quantities of chlorine, so as to disinfect it. By the time a pediatric study noted elevated levels of lead in Flint’s children in September 2015, residents had been exposed to contaminated supplies for over a year. Over six thousand children were documented as having elevated levels of lead in their blood. By the end of the year, the city of Flint declared a state of emergency. Civil and criminal lawsuits have since been filed against key government officials. Earlier this year, the EPA awarded Flint $100 million for infrastructure upgrades, and the state government settled a lawsuit, agreeing to pay an additional $97 million toward replacing Flint’s lead and galvanized iron water lines. Yet most experts now say the problem far exceeds the nearly $200 million that have been allocated for its repair. In my first book, Hydraulic City, I explore how water services are a key site for the making of urban inequality and inclusion in Mumbai. " In their everyday access to urban water supply, residents in Mumbai recognized important processes with which they were seen and treated as deserving (or undeserving) citizens of the city. They identified water services as a vital, materially instantiated form of the social contract between the state and the citizen, and questioned the morality of government absent a fundamental and basic effort to provision water. In different settlements of Mumbai, residents would frequently ask: what legitimacy does the state have, if it is not providing them with safe and dependable # $