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.
