Doctoral Dissertation Research: Evaluating the Impact of Rapid Population Growth on Urban Infrastructures

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

Rapid urban population growth creates enormous challenges for the management of civil infrastructure. As urban centers tend to be composed of individuals of highly varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, infrastructural management requires a system of engineering that can appropriately identify and adapt to these differences. This project, which trains a graduate student in conducting rigorous, empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, asks how organizational practices aimed at improving infrastructure management vary according to the socioeconomic contexts in which they are implemented. The results will be useful to engineers and public health officials tasked with the responsibility of building and managing these systems, and ensuring that people are motivated to comply with them. Jacqueline Cieslak, under the supervision of Ravindra Khare of the University of Virginia, explores the relationship between cultural ideas about cleanliness, the social relations that produce it, and sanitation development work. The research takes place in Delhi, India, which is an ideal site for exploring rapid urbanization under conditions of challenged sanitation infrastructure as it is a sprawling metropolis of some 22 million residents and has a crucial need for improved mechanisms for handling human waste. In development discourse this improvement is conceived as a linear trajectory from a caste-based manual scavenging model, in which cleanliness is understood in terms of purity and produced in the relationships between hierarchically-arranged communities and persons, to a mechanized waste management model, in which cleanliness is configured in terms of hygiene and practiced by disciplined, autonomous individuals as a civic responsibility. Despite the clarity of this trajectory in popular discourse, the researcher's preliminary data has found that organizations in Delhi orient themselves in radically different ways relative to the interrelated issues of social organization and cleanliness in these two models. By exploring how two sanitation NGOs draw on models of purity and/or hygiene to generate both their internal organizations and development programs, this comparative project will contribute an understanding of: a) how caste is made and unmade in relation to waste in urban contexts, and b) how orientations toward cleanliness and social relations constitute different ethical regimes that create the conditions under which development programs either reproduce or break established social forms. Methods include a baseline survey, and a range of conventional anthropological ethnographic research techniques including participation observation, interviews, and the analysis of census and legal documents. The project will contribute anthropological debates about the impact of socioeconomic inequalities (such as class and caste differences) on infrastructure development and government services delivery. It will also advance anthropological and broader social scientific theories about political economy and development, infrastructure, and socioeconomic disparities.