Nikhil Anand
Biographic Data
| ID | 84055 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nikhil Anand |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nikhil |
| FAMILY NAME | Anand |
| SIGNATURE | ANAND N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9249-3655 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 863 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
After Coasts: Cartography, Desiccation, and Dwelling in Amphibious Worlds
As cities and nation-states design massive coastal development projects, I show in this review how these projects require and produce emptied and flattened surfaces necessary for the workings of coloniality, racial capitalism, and enslavement, dispossessing amphibious modes of life and livelihood in their wake. Nevertheless, despite their accreted force (and also perhaps because of it), colonial and postcolonial projects to stabilize and concreti…
Eviscerating the Sea
Contemporary infrastructure projects in the sea reterritorialize port environments, continuously discarding historic occupants and coastal occupations in their wake. In this article the authors dwell on the ongoing histories through which fish and fishers are eviscerated in Mumbai's seas via the proliferation of massive infrastructural operations currently being staged by the Indian state. In so doing, they make two arguments. First, they show ho…
Anthroposea: Planning future ecologies in Mumbai's wetscapes
In this article, I describe Mumbai's sea as an "anthroposea" - a sea made with ongoing anthropogenic processes across landwaters - to draw attention to the ways in which it troubles both urban planning and the making of environmental futures. I focus on three moments in which Mumbai's more-than-human life now emerges in the anthroposea. First, I describe the surprising proliferations of lobsters, gulls, and fishers in a sewage outfall. Second, I …
Cities after planning
South Asian Urban Climates: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons
This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. The authors analyze the terms 'mahaul,' 'mausam,' and 'aab-o-hawa' as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historical, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory, and embodied registers. The stories connect concerns about broader structural conditions ('mahaul'); local and lived experiences in different temporal registe…
Toxicity 1: On Ambiguity and Sewage in Mumbai's Urban Sea
In this essay, I focus on the remarkable process through which Mumbai's urban administration has continued to release its sewage, largely untreated, into the Arabian Sea. I show how it does this by rendering sewage both legally and materially ambiguous. I urge an attention to the processes of legal and material ambiguation, through which 'slow violence' is unevenly administered in Mumbai. Building on the work of Jacqueline Best, I argue that ambi…
Enduring Harm: Unlikely Comparisons, Slow Violence and the Administration of Urban Injustice
In this comparative and collaborative collection of essays we work through contemporary and historical practices of governing urban waters in Philadelphia and Mumbai. Taken together, the essays in this collection argue that events of enduring harm visited upon racialized, marginalized citizens are produced through slow bureaucratic processes of aversion, ambiguation and ambivalence, perpetuated in and through regulatory regimes, water quality sta…
Consuming Citizenship: Prepaid Meters and the Politics of Technology in Mumbai
In November 2007, the Additional Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai announced Sujal Mumbai-a new program to upgrade the city's water infrastructure. Amongst several initiatives was a proposal to connect new settlements to water lines regulated by prepaid meters. In this paper I focus on the surprising and unexpected appearance of the prepaid water meter in Mumbai to make two arguments. First, I argue that based on the particular technopolitical his…
The Promise of Infrastructure
Infrastructural time / Hannah Appel -- The future in ruins : thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure / Akhil Gupta -- Infrastructures in and out of time : the promise of roads in contemporary Peru / Penny Harvey -- The current never stops : intimacies of energy infrastructure in Vietnam / Christina Schwenkel -- Infrastructure, apartheid technopolitics, and temporalities of "transition" / Antina von Schnitzler -- A public matter : water, hyd…
Promise of Infrastructure
Hydraulic City
Ac know ledg mentsThis research on Mumbai's water took me home to a world I did not know.Like many in Mumbai, I had for a long time lived in the city without needing to be conscious of the tremendous work of its social and material infrastructures.Through fieldwork, I learned of the extraordinary quotidian labor of employees of the city's hydraulic engineering department and those that live in the city's auto-constructed settlements, just to make…
Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai
Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai
In Hydraulic City Nikhil Anand explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai's settlements, Anand found that Mumbai's water flows, not through a static collection of pipes and valves, but through a dynamic infrastructure built on the relations between residents, plumbe…
Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai
Ac know ledg mentsThis research on Mumbai's water took me home to a world I did not know.Like many in Mumbai, I had for a long time lived in the city without needing to be conscious of the tremendous work of its social and material infrastructures.Through fieldwork, I learned of the extraordinary quotidian labor of employees of the city's hydraulic engineering department and those that live in the city's auto-constructed settlements, just to make…
The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity and the Urban Imagination
Matthew Gandy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014. x and 368 pp., notes, bibliography, index. $30.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-2620-2825-7); $21.00 electronic (ISBN 9780-2623-2175-4)
Leaky States: Water Audits, Ignorance, and the Politics of Infrastructure
In this article I explore the political and technical controversies of measuring water leakages in Mumbai to demonstrate how the dense historical accretions of technology, material, and social life that form hydraulic infrastructures in Mumbai trouble the audit cultures of neoliberal government. While scholars have recently drawn attention to the generativity of ignorance in the making of the state, in this article I argue that ignorance is not o…
The politics of sanitation in India: Cities, services and the state
Municipal disconnect: On abject water and its urban infrastructures
Infrastructural practices, made by the manipulations of pumps, pipes and hydraulic expertise, play a critical role in managing urban populations. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Mumbai, in this article I show how Muslim settlers in a northern suburb, are being rendered abject residents of the city. Abjection isn't not a lack of social and political entitlements, but a denial of them. As Muslim settlers are being pushed down to cl…
Housing in the Urban Age: Inequality and Aspiration in Mumbai
In scholarly and popular texts, Mumbai is invoked as an iconic example of the problem of urban informal settlements in the twenty-first century. While such representations oscillate between tropes of accommodation and marginalization, they often obfuscate the compromised and historical successes of settler politics in the city. In this paper, the authors use an international urbanization conference as a starting point for exploring Mumbai settler…
Pressure: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai
In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the city's upper-class residents, the city's settlers have to consistently demand that their water come on "time" and with "pressure." Taking pressure seriously as both a social and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the pressures of polit…
The Anthropology of Global Productions: Producing and Critiquing the Global
New Work on Environmental Science Friction
Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai
Ac know ledg mentsThis research on Mumbai's water took me home to a world I did not know.Like many in Mumbai, I had for a long time lived in the city without needing to be conscious of the tremendous work of its social and material infrastructures.Through fieldwork, I learned of the extraordinary quotidian labor of employees of the city's hydraulic engineering department and those that live in the city's auto-constructed settlements, just to make…
Pressure: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai
In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the city's upper-class residents, the city's settlers have to consistently demand that their water come on "time" and with "pressure." Taking pressure seriously as both a social and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the pressures of polit…
Municipal disconnect: On abject water and its urban infrastructures
Infrastructural practices, made by the manipulations of pumps, pipes and hydraulic expertise, play a critical role in managing urban populations. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Mumbai, in this article I show how Muslim settlers in a northern suburb, are being rendered abject residents of the city. Abjection isn't not a lack of social and political entitlements, but a denial of them. As Muslim settlers are being pushed down to cl…
Leaky States: Water Audits, Ignorance, and the Politics of Infrastructure
In this article I explore the political and technical controversies of measuring water leakages in Mumbai to demonstrate how the dense historical accretions of technology, material, and social life that form hydraulic infrastructures in Mumbai trouble the audit cultures of neoliberal government. While scholars have recently drawn attention to the generativity of ignorance in the making of the state, in this article I argue that ignorance is not o…
Housing in the Urban Age: Inequality and Aspiration in Mumbai
In scholarly and popular texts, Mumbai is invoked as an iconic example of the problem of urban informal settlements in the twenty-first century. While such representations oscillate between tropes of accommodation and marginalization, they often obfuscate the compromised and historical successes of settler politics in the city. In this paper, the authors use an international urbanization conference as a starting point for exploring Mumbai settler…
Consuming Citizenship: Prepaid Meters and the Politics of Technology in Mumbai
In November 2007, the Additional Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai announced Sujal Mumbai-a new program to upgrade the city's water infrastructure. Amongst several initiatives was a proposal to connect new settlements to water lines regulated by prepaid meters. In this paper I focus on the surprising and unexpected appearance of the prepaid water meter in Mumbai to make two arguments. First, I argue that based on the particular technopolitical his…
Anthroposea: Planning future ecologies in Mumbai's wetscapes
In this article, I describe Mumbai's sea as an "anthroposea" - a sea made with ongoing anthropogenic processes across landwaters - to draw attention to the ways in which it troubles both urban planning and the making of environmental futures. I focus on three moments in which Mumbai's more-than-human life now emerges in the anthroposea. First, I describe the surprising proliferations of lobsters, gulls, and fishers in a sewage outfall. Second, I …
Toxicity 1: On Ambiguity and Sewage in Mumbai's Urban Sea
In this essay, I focus on the remarkable process through which Mumbai's urban administration has continued to release its sewage, largely untreated, into the Arabian Sea. I show how it does this by rendering sewage both legally and materially ambiguous. I urge an attention to the processes of legal and material ambiguation, through which 'slow violence' is unevenly administered in Mumbai. Building on the work of Jacqueline Best, I argue that ambi…
Cities after planning
Enduring Harm: Unlikely Comparisons, Slow Violence and the Administration of Urban Injustice
In this comparative and collaborative collection of essays we work through contemporary and historical practices of governing urban waters in Philadelphia and Mumbai. Taken together, the essays in this collection argue that events of enduring harm visited upon racialized, marginalized citizens are produced through slow bureaucratic processes of aversion, ambiguation and ambivalence, perpetuated in and through regulatory regimes, water quality sta…
South Asian Urban Climates: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons
This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. The authors analyze the terms 'mahaul,' 'mausam,' and 'aab-o-hawa' as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historical, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory, and embodied registers. The stories connect concerns about broader structural conditions ('mahaul'); local and lived experiences in different temporal registe…
Eviscerating the Sea
Contemporary infrastructure projects in the sea reterritorialize port environments, continuously discarding historic occupants and coastal occupations in their wake. In this article the authors dwell on the ongoing histories through which fish and fishers are eviscerated in Mumbai's seas via the proliferation of massive infrastructural operations currently being staged by the Indian state. In so doing, they make two arguments. First, they show ho…
The politics of sanitation in India: Cities, services and the state
The Anthropology of Global Productions: Producing and Critiquing the Global
New Work on Environmental Science Friction
Housing in the Urban Age: Inequality and Aspiration in Mumbai
In scholarly and popular texts, Mumbai is invoked as an iconic example of the problem of urban informal settlements in the twenty-first century. While such representations oscillate between tropes of accommodation and marginalization, they often obfuscate the compromised and historical successes of settler politics in the city. In this paper, the authors use an international urbanization conference as a starting point for exploring Mumbai settler…
Pressure: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai
In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the city's upper-class residents, the city's settlers have to consistently demand that their water come on "time" and with "pressure." Taking pressure seriously as both a social and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the pressures of polit…
The politics of sanitation in India: Cities, services and the state
Municipal disconnect: On abject water and its urban infrastructures
Infrastructural practices, made by the manipulations of pumps, pipes and hydraulic expertise, play a critical role in managing urban populations. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Mumbai, in this article I show how Muslim settlers in a northern suburb, are being rendered abject residents of the city. Abjection isn't not a lack of social and political entitlements, but a denial of them. As Muslim settlers are being pushed down to cl…
Leaky States: Water Audits, Ignorance, and the Politics of Infrastructure
In this article I explore the political and technical controversies of measuring water leakages in Mumbai to demonstrate how the dense historical accretions of technology, material, and social life that form hydraulic infrastructures in Mumbai trouble the audit cultures of neoliberal government. While scholars have recently drawn attention to the generativity of ignorance in the making of the state, in this article I argue that ignorance is not o…
The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity and the Urban Imagination
Matthew Gandy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014. x and 368 pp., notes, bibliography, index. $30.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-2620-2825-7); $21.00 electronic (ISBN 9780-2623-2175-4)
Hydraulic City
Ac know ledg mentsThis research on Mumbai's water took me home to a world I did not know.Like many in Mumbai, I had for a long time lived in the city without needing to be conscious of the tremendous work of its social and material infrastructures.Through fieldwork, I learned of the extraordinary quotidian labor of employees of the city's hydraulic engineering department and those that live in the city's auto-constructed settlements, just to make…
Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai
Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai
In Hydraulic City Nikhil Anand explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai's settlements, Anand found that Mumbai's water flows, not through a static collection of pipes and valves, but through a dynamic infrastructure built on the relations between residents, plumbe…
Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai
Ac know ledg mentsThis research on Mumbai's water took me home to a world I did not know.Like many in Mumbai, I had for a long time lived in the city without needing to be conscious of the tremendous work of its social and material infrastructures.Through fieldwork, I learned of the extraordinary quotidian labor of employees of the city's hydraulic engineering department and those that live in the city's auto-constructed settlements, just to make…
The Promise of Infrastructure
Infrastructural time / Hannah Appel -- The future in ruins : thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure / Akhil Gupta -- Infrastructures in and out of time : the promise of roads in contemporary Peru / Penny Harvey -- The current never stops : intimacies of energy infrastructure in Vietnam / Christina Schwenkel -- Infrastructure, apartheid technopolitics, and temporalities of "transition" / Antina von Schnitzler -- A public matter : water, hyd…
Promise of Infrastructure
Consuming Citizenship: Prepaid Meters and the Politics of Technology in Mumbai
In November 2007, the Additional Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai announced Sujal Mumbai-a new program to upgrade the city's water infrastructure. Amongst several initiatives was a proposal to connect new settlements to water lines regulated by prepaid meters. In this paper I focus on the surprising and unexpected appearance of the prepaid water meter in Mumbai to make two arguments. First, I argue that based on the particular technopolitical his…
Toxicity 1: On Ambiguity and Sewage in Mumbai's Urban Sea
In this essay, I focus on the remarkable process through which Mumbai's urban administration has continued to release its sewage, largely untreated, into the Arabian Sea. I show how it does this by rendering sewage both legally and materially ambiguous. I urge an attention to the processes of legal and material ambiguation, through which 'slow violence' is unevenly administered in Mumbai. Building on the work of Jacqueline Best, I argue that ambi…
Enduring Harm: Unlikely Comparisons, Slow Violence and the Administration of Urban Injustice
In this comparative and collaborative collection of essays we work through contemporary and historical practices of governing urban waters in Philadelphia and Mumbai. Taken together, the essays in this collection argue that events of enduring harm visited upon racialized, marginalized citizens are produced through slow bureaucratic processes of aversion, ambiguation and ambivalence, perpetuated in and through regulatory regimes, water quality sta…
Anthroposea: Planning future ecologies in Mumbai's wetscapes
In this article, I describe Mumbai's sea as an "anthroposea" - a sea made with ongoing anthropogenic processes across landwaters - to draw attention to the ways in which it troubles both urban planning and the making of environmental futures. I focus on three moments in which Mumbai's more-than-human life now emerges in the anthroposea. First, I describe the surprising proliferations of lobsters, gulls, and fishers in a sewage outfall. Second, I …
Cities after planning
South Asian Urban Climates: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons
This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. The authors analyze the terms 'mahaul,' 'mausam,' and 'aab-o-hawa' as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historical, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory, and embodied registers. The stories connect concerns about broader structural conditions ('mahaul'); local and lived experiences in different temporal registe…
Eviscerating the Sea
Contemporary infrastructure projects in the sea reterritorialize port environments, continuously discarding historic occupants and coastal occupations in their wake. In this article the authors dwell on the ongoing histories through which fish and fishers are eviscerated in Mumbai's seas via the proliferation of massive infrastructural operations currently being staged by the Indian state. In so doing, they make two arguments. First, they show ho…
After Coasts: Cartography, Desiccation, and Dwelling in Amphibious Worlds
As cities and nation-states design massive coastal development projects, I show in this review how these projects require and produce emptied and flattened surfaces necessary for the workings of coloniality, racial capitalism, and enslavement, dispossessing amphibious modes of life and livelihood in their wake. Nevertheless, despite their accreted force (and also perhaps because of it), colonial and postcolonial projects to stabilize and concreti…
Water Governance and Infrastructure (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Geography (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Engineering (6 works) · Water Systems and Optimization (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Environmental ethics (5 works)