Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay COLIN McFARLANE Abstract This article examines specific ways in which sanitation infrastructure matters politically, both as a set of materials and as a discursive object in colonial and post-colonial Bombay. It reflects on a history of sanitation as a set of concepts which can both historicize seemingly ‘new’ practices and shed light on the contemporary city. It considers two moments in Bombay’s ‘sanitary history’ — the mid-nineteenth century and the present day — and elucidates the distinct and changing spatial imaginaries and logics of sanitation in their broad relation to urbanization and nature. It conceptualizes colonial discourses of a ‘contaminated city’ and public health, and finds productive sites of intersection between these discourses and contemporary debates and practices in Bombay, including bourgeois environmentalism, discourses of the ‘world city’, and logics of community-managed sanitation infrastructures. It also highlights an important role for urban comparativism, in the context of different imaginaries and logics, in both cases. By connecting infrastructure, public health discourses and modes of urban government, the article traces a specific historical geography of cyborg urbanization that is always already splintered, unequal and contested. For the urban poor in particular, much is at stake in how the sanitary city is constructed as a problem, how the solutions to it are mobilized, and how improvement is measured. Introduction This article theorizes the changing role of infrastructure in the conception and governing of sanitation in colonial and post-colonial Bombay. It focuses on sanitation infrastructure as a set of materials and as a discursive object in urban government. It conceptualizes colonial discourses of a ‘contaminated city’ and public health, and finds productive sites of intersection between these discourses and contemporary debates and practices in Bombay, from bourgeois environmentalism and discourses of the ‘world city’, to logics of community-managed sanitation infrastructures. By focusing on two distinct periods — both important moments in the history of Bombay’s urban restructuring — it seeks to historicize seemingly ‘new’ practices and shed light on the contemporary city. Following a brief discussion on how it contributes to theoretical debates on infrastructure and urban politics, the article critically engages two reports produced by key public health officials in mid-nineteenth century Bombay, Henry Conybeare and Andrew Leith. Conybeare was For their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, I am grateful to Jonathan Anjaria, Amita Baviskar, Matthew Gandy, Steve Graham and Jonathan Rutherford. I am also grateful to members of the School of Geography, University of Nottingham for useful feedback during a seminar, and to two anonymous referees. Volume 32.2 June 2008 415–35 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00793.x © 2008 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2008 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA