Shelters Without Water: Everyday Articulations of the Right to the City Against Infrastructural Violence and Water Insecurity in Resettlement Sites

Abstract

In the resettlement site, a claim to water is a claim to citizenship. This paper traces how waterless resettlement sites are produced by neoliberal urbanism and the process of abjection (Ferguson, 1999; Kristeva, 1982). I find that the cost-saving premium in the NHA produces poorly-managed water monopolies without scale. Local governments are largely sidestepped in planning, yet a relatively unexplored form of the “spatial fix” (Harvey, 2001) manifests in an attempt at resettlement-induced development, where local governments accept displaced communities to pump-prime their economies with population growth. The costs trickle down to resettled communities as a gradual and hidden form of violence which fluctuates across time and space; borne corporeally, viscerally, and emotionally, especially by women, whose bodies are sacrificed to compensate for “infrastructural violence” (Rodgers & O’Neill, 2012). I foreground citizenship by developing a concept of resettlement as abjection, a reaction to an ambiguous disruption of symbolic order, caused by policy signals that contradictorily regard the informal settler as both a rights-bearer and a violation of the right to private property, human decency, and a healthful ecology. Though the informal settlement is “blackened” (Yiftachel, 2009) by expulsion, the resettlement site remains gray through exclusion, neither eliminated nor truly integrated. Nevertheless, I reflexively interrogate abjection by illustrating the subaltern urbanism (Roy, 2011) of the resettlement site, consisting of innovative claims to citizenship. The Homeowners Organization turns the gray space into a space for societal transformation, accumulating legitimate power through a “politics of patience” (Appadurai, 2001), while also being exposed to fragmentation and responsibilization due to formalization. The concept of quiet commoning is developed to describe the installation of community-level informal water networks and manual water pumps, claims to the city’s groundwater that negotiate the boundaries of legal water rights by “precedent-setting” (Appadurai, 2001; Bayat, 2000), disproving claims that there are no alternatives. These stories of subjectivation, emergent solidarity economies, and an insurgent market logic are presented as entry points for deeper analysis of disruptive movements and everyday non-movements that claim citizenship from within the resettlement site.