In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

I nfrastructure, in a technical sense, has a peculiar relation to culture and politics; the state realizes itself on the material plane through monumental and mundane projects. The more visible in the landscape and the more consistent with modernist (or “heritage”) engineering aesthetics, the greater the performance value: For example , hydroelectric dams epitomize pharaonic accomplishment, and sculptural and architectural monuments to nationhood hold symbolic centrality. Yet infrastructure that functions without added aesthetic investment , such as underground pipe networks for water, sewage, drainage , and electricity, also plays a crucial role in the state’s performance credibility. After all, the state has a primary responsibility to coordinate and ensure normal, everyday life or at least speedy recoveries from catastrophe with respect to infrastructural disruptions. Still, when systems suddenly fail, or even if they appear too untidy, the power of performance in both modes, monumental and mundane, can suggest state weakness.1 When the state chronically fails to distribute fairly and reliably services and resources, or when the risks and negative impacts of monumental projects fall unequally, questions of corruption mix with those of incompetence and injustice. Then too, the annoying disruptions of large engineering projects that try everyone’s patience, drain coffers, and endure beyond politicians’ terms in office and interests weigh heavily in the scale. When completed, infrastructure lies covered by asphalt and cement or, like port infrastructure or hinterland hydroelectric dams, exists outside the everyday public spaces and talk and is taken for granted shortly after the conclusion of opening ceremonies. Decision making and management fall to some combination of government and private industry. Neighborhood 4 Of Sewage, Sacrifice, and Sacred Springs 62 / Salvador da Bahia, Brazil people get involved only if and when something goes wrong (e.g., flooding , intolerable port expansion, and dam collapse).2 This suggests that neighborhood participation assumes democratic governance processes are ongoing in some form and that there is a compunction to avoid mass street confrontation. Infrastructure also has a peculiar relation to aquatic ecology. On the one hand, it parasitizes waterscapes and sources, capturing flows for treatment , distribution, and industrial use, and co-opts them for waste removal and land extension. On the other hand, as I begin to show in the analysis of Lagoa de Abaeté (see Chapter 2), the jurisdictions of government bureaucracies that manage water infrastructure and that monitor public and private uses and abuses operate in a fragmented manner that does not effectively apprehend, much less coordinate, the interactions of natures and cultures in cyborg cities (Swyngedouw 2004; Kaika 2005). This study of aquatic culture contributes to the work of scholars and activists in laying groundwork for a more holistic understanding of urban ecology or, in the phrasing of Gene Desfor and Roger Keil (2004: 71), calls for a “radical reframing” of urbanization in ecological terms. I analyze infrastructural forms as material dimensions of culture on the scale of, and dependent on, an internationally financed and functioning state.3 In the process, I strive to walk the lines between the pressures of need and critique, optimism and illusion, and popular memory and facts of life. In the name of “Order and Progress,” the words on Brazil’s national flag, urban development and hydraulic engineering destroy the old to make way for the new and destroy natural water sources and waterscapes to make way for the manufactured. These labors appear crucial to the wellbeing of urban populations. But the call for engineers to reconsider frameworks motivated by the desire to control the forces of nature compared with those motivated by the desire to interact dynamically with nature’s flows (Meyer et al. 2010) should give pause. Let me emphasize that I fully support the worthwhile goal of universal extension of water, sewage, and flood control services and structures as a means to lower mortality and disease rates, which democratically extends the public good and, more particularly, enriches the lives of girls and women to whom most often falls the task of water collection.4 I also have no doubt that sewage collection and treatment contribute to ecological sustainability in urbanized settings. I am simply pointing out that building infrastructure without consideration of the water sites and sources that it displaces may unnecessarily destroy precedents and alternatives. By focusing on marginalized aquatic ecologies at the neighborhood level, I hope to contribute to a thickening of our sense of what kinds of sites, sources, and cultural practices might enter into and reshape urban ecology. I delve again into intractable contradictions in the...

Share