Liquid borders: reflections from fragmented water infrastructure in Guwahati, Northeast India

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I explore the fluid nature of formal/informal access to water infrastructure in a micro-urban site in the city of Guwahati, in Northeast India. Guwahati being a rapidly urbanizing city in a frontier region, contains intersection of multiple bordering processes including India’s partition and consequent immigration debate in Assam, which often become manifest in fractured urban infrastructure. The fluid categories of “formal” and “informal” in urban infrastructural networks that are used to reinforce power relations and inequalities in cities, echo the arbitrary drawing of boundaries between nation states and communities to create the “other”. Proposing a dialogue between Urban Political Ecology (UPE) scholarship and critical border studies literature I use the analytic of “liquid borders” to examine the fluid, multi-scalar urban borders that shape uneven access to water infrastructure in Guwahati.