coe097_anand.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Welcome back, everyone, to the Coaches of Energy podcast, it's a special Thursday evening edition. It really is. It's been quite a week.

Speaker2: [00:00:30] I'm feeling special about this week.

Speaker1: [00:00:31] Yeah, do you want to do want to explain to our listeners some of the very special things that happen to us this week?

Speaker2: [00:00:37] Well, we had one of the great visitors, one of the great ones, one of the big boys. His name is Al Gore.

Speaker1: [00:00:45] Al Gore was here at Rice.

Speaker2: [00:00:47] I've always felt I never really could. Quite. I always felt bad for the man with a surname like that. But nonetheless, he's been really successful and he was here at Rice

Speaker1: [00:00:58] Makes us successful through the transit of property.

Speaker2: [00:01:00] Totally. Except I was out in the nosebleed seats and you were about to encounter him

Speaker1: [00:01:06] Front row and VIP

Speaker2: [00:01:07] Audio VIP. Yeah, because I was wearing my glasses, I could actually see you and him pretty well.

Speaker1: [00:01:16] And when I, you know, we had the meet and greet beforehand, he walked right up to me and said, This man needs no introduction or ever so much for what you're doing to help save the world from climate change.

Speaker2: [00:01:27] So the sad thing was, is that you could have met him. I mean, you were actually in a box with him, you were in the same room, but with like 20 other people, but you didn't actually get to chat with him.

Speaker1: [00:01:38] No, his flight was

Speaker2: [00:01:40] Late and you had to put on a suit. So I don't know suit. I don't know. I don't know who did better in this situation. I didn't have to wear a suit.

Speaker1: [00:01:48] I know on balance I would have probably rather been in the nosebleed seats, but the show itself was really good. It was really good. And I want to just say that it's

Speaker2: [00:01:54] Very much the it's the it's the PowerPoint show redux.

Speaker1: [00:01:58] I know, but I feel like it's it's been amped up on a few levels. He's raised his game and he's got a lot of tailored imagery having to do with the hurricanes of this year and

Speaker2: [00:02:09] Very up to date, and he did a lot of stuff on Texas for our benefit.

Speaker1: [00:02:12] But the most striking thing was that that helicopter footage of those glaciers exploding in Greenland, which actually really rattled me because I've never seen anything that was literally out of a Hollywood movie. Yeah, it was some kind of right.

Speaker2: [00:02:25] That's what he said. Dystopian CGI CGI.

Speaker1: [00:02:28] Yeah, yeah. So he's got some great stuff, and I

Speaker2: [00:02:31] Feel exploding is really the right verb there cause the collapsing, he said. Exploding. But they're collapsing. Yeah, but it was very disturbing because you can see how massive those pieces of ice are and how how quickly they're disassembling and the kind of eerie snowy smoke that that that they emit as they're falling apart.

Speaker1: [00:02:53] And the strange thing is, you know, with any veteran politician, somebody has been in public life and a professional politician for so many years, you immediately wonder just how sincere they can possibly be. And it's clear that this PowerPoint show is performative and it's an act. And he he does it just like he was, you know, in Hamilton or something every night. At the same time, I do think also from my very brief, you know, interaction with him beforehand. I feel as though he is sincerely committed to this issue. In other words, it's a wealthy man. There's no reason for him to be touring the country doing this. He's not he's not in it for the money at this point, and

Speaker2: [00:03:25] He's been doing it since he was like 20

Speaker1: [00:03:27] Years old. It's a passion.

Speaker2: [00:03:29] He's he's fully committed. I have no doubt about that. And and I think we did see some moments of, I don't know, a true emotive moments. It's not like he was crying on stage or anything, but he seemed, you know, genuinely, genuinely moved by some of the images and some of the facts that he was sharing. So I guess that this is largely the content of his new movie. Yes. And maybe it's stitched through with his biography like he did last time. I'm not sure, but even if it's just mostly this, it's worth it. Especially to take people, you know, take those people who don't already have this stuff under their belt, which most of our listeners probably do.

Speaker1: [00:04:06] But yeah, it's

Speaker2: [00:04:08] Still some good factoids in

Speaker1: [00:04:09] There. Absolutely. I learned I legitimately learned quite a lot from the I didn't expect that part of it, but I did learn some things. And he does a very good job of making the science of climate change relatively coherent and intelligible to non-scientists. So anyway, kudos across the board. Al Gore. Thank you for coming. He is now a fellow at our Leadership Institute, The Door Leadership Institute at Rice, so we hope he will come back. And if he comes back, we will find a way to finagle to get him onto this podcast showing right? Let's try.

Speaker2: [00:04:38] Yeah, I think that that's a very good plan. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:04:41] Actually, yes. So we'll try that anyhow. What else happened this week? That was interesting. I'll tell you what, we went from being a wind powered family this morning to a solar powered family this afternoon. I, thanks to a local solar energy company called Local Sun. We are now no longer paying above market rate for our renewable energy. We are paying actually below the Texas average per kilowatt hour. I shifted our electricity over. I feel kind of proud about that.

Speaker2: [00:05:09] How'd you figure out how to do that?

Speaker1: [00:05:11] It was really easy. You just went on the website, and as long as you have your

Speaker2: [00:05:14] Electricity, you're like, I want to go solar.

Speaker1: [00:05:17] Yeah, I had a conversation and somebody who we know Joey Ramone. Who is at worked on a firm called Metal Lab that helped to produce our solar powered units, started this solar company on the side. And somebody reminded me that that was the case, and I went and checked it out and I said we should really support Joey and local son. So we

Speaker2: [00:05:36] Are Shia. And it's a huge savings, which is great.

Speaker1: [00:05:39] So five cents per kilowatt hour, I get to see two

Speaker2: [00:05:41] Jobs just as holy, if not more holy using. So are we going to do it? Tim Morton does and like, turn on every bright light that we have and like, go out and buy a bunch of hair dryers and stuff and just crank up the electricity. Since we have so much free, it's going to be the way we're going to have a disco.

Speaker1: [00:05:59] We're going to just start a great white city of our own right. We're just like beaming arc lights out into the sky. And yeah, I think that's that's what we should do.

Speaker2: [00:06:07] Spectacular lighting. That's what David Nye calls spectacular lighting.

Speaker1: [00:06:12] So I think we're like a club and then come to our house at night. Exactly and be disappointed, probably.

Speaker2: [00:06:17] But it's all solar powered.

Speaker1: [00:06:18] So anyway, this is a lot of talking around. We have a wonderful guest.

Speaker2: [00:06:21] Yeah, Nicole, and we have, and he is an anthropologist and he is at the University of Pennsylvania. And we talk about all things hydrological citizenship oriented and we talk about infrastructure and talk about water, and we talk about pressure and the political economic dynamics of how those pressures come to be borne and bear out in places like Mumbai.

Speaker1: [00:06:46] Yes, he has a great new book called Hydraulic City with Duke University Press, which everyone should read, and I will say that I love the conversation. Sonically, this event was a little challenged, not the greatest tape quality. I'm sorry I did what I could. I did. I used all of my wizardry, my accumulated wizardry over the past couple of years to try to make it sound as good as possible. But in the end, it's still a little echoey. So sorry. Sorry for

Speaker2: [00:07:10] That. Yeah, yeah. No, it was in a kind of a I think it must have been in a space that didn't have carpeting or something. I could tell it was a little tinny, but it could have been, I say, hydrological citizenship or did I say hydraulics?

Speaker1: [00:07:21] I think you want to set hydrological, but it's hydraulic.

Speaker2: [00:07:23] I know it's hydraulic. I just I like to add in more syllables whenever I can.

Speaker1: [00:07:27] What's the difference between hydrological and hydraulic? You might ask. It's pressure, yes.

Speaker2: [00:07:32] Because the hydraulic is all about the pressure.

Speaker3: [00:07:34] Yeah, under pressure. Bom bom, bom bom.

Speaker2: [00:07:36] And then there was another there were some under observed news item that you wanted to share.

Speaker1: [00:07:42] I was so angry when I woke up this morning because last night I had seen this thing, and I think it's made the news a little bit that the firm that got the bid to rebuild Puerto Rico's grid is a company run by the neighbor of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke from Montana. Ok. First of all, it's his neighbor who got the bid, and this firm at the time that Hurricane Maria hit had two employees, and they're going to now rebuild this. So in other words, it's like a two

Speaker2: [00:08:16] People are going to go rebuild Puerto Rico.

Speaker1: [00:08:18] No, they hired more people. But the point is like, this is so obviously a kind of corrupt kleptocratic move, and it just just so pure. And you know that there's I guess what gets me tongue tied is I know that this is just the one we've heard about. There's, like five hundred others seems like this,

Speaker2: [00:08:35] Probably just a little one.

Speaker1: [00:08:37] In fact, this is a yeah, well, it's a whole, a whole

Speaker2: [00:08:40] Like military contracts, who

Speaker1: [00:08:42] Knows millions of people dependent upon these guys doing a good job. And obviously, unless those two employees were like super efficient and like super brainy, I don't think they're going to really be able to absorb maybe

Speaker2: [00:08:52] The cruel truth of it. They send two people to actually go rebuild the grid in Puerto Rico, and he'll take the next like twenty seven years.

Speaker1: [00:09:00] I mean, I never thought we would see like a fuck up on the scale of Katrina again. But this is at least that, if not much, much worse.

Speaker2: [00:09:09] But is there a possibility? I'm not diminishing the fact that people are really suffering in Puerto Rico and a lot of people don't have running water and it's very dangerous in terms of disease and no electricity, and they can't get out on air flights, et cetera. It's like a total. Well, what's that military term clusterfuck? That's a that's a term. It's like that. But at the same time, like, could they rebuild the island in a more renewable fashion like you be a way to go totally solar? Like just fuck the grid, like no more grid. Like we live in a hurricane zone. Let's get rid of all the high tension wires and find distributed solar ways to power at least maybe people's homes.

Speaker1: [00:09:48] Yeah. Remember, Vice President Gore showed us some pictures of mangled solar panels, so there is not a panacea for hurricanes.

Speaker2: [00:09:55] Well, but I'm remembering that slide now. But he was talking about Solar Farm. Yeah. And I mean, I don't know if distributed solar could be more protected, but maybe you could build. I don't know. I mean, it's hard. Well, OK, Category five hurricane like, it's hard to protect anything from that, but maybe it'd be easier or easier to rare repair rooftop solar individually rather than having to repair an entire grid?

Speaker1: [00:10:20] I don't know. Well, I would say I would take your point, and I think you're 100 percent correct that the fact that a already poorly functioning grid has been destroyed yes should not be taken as the opportunity to rebuild that poorly functioning last century grid, but rather to think in the creatively about how to supply a place like Puerto Rico with sustainable, secure renewable energy, the smart grid. But yeah, well, smart grid. But even tidal energy maybe could work wind energy. I mean, there are there are kinds of energy that might be a little more resilient. You know, because you can shut down a wind turbine and you know, it's less likely to be damaged in a hurricane. But anyhow, so anyway, that had me really worried

Speaker2: [00:11:00] Thought we should invent some foldable wind turbines. Wouldn't that be great if you could just like fold them up like a Swiss Army knife? Yeah. And then when? So when the hurricanes come in, you could just like, you know, Boughton them down on the ground and keep them protected. I like

Speaker1: [00:11:13] That idea.

Speaker2: [00:11:14] And what if you know, OK, you know, the hurricane's coming. What if you, I don't know, have some service or you yourself can go up onto your roof and bring down your solar panels and, you know, stick them? Well, in this case, it didn't really matter because people's houses got totally torn apart. Yeah, all

Speaker1: [00:11:30] The way through the interior. There's other other challenges Puerto Rico is facing that, you know, renewable energy is not going to solve, obviously, but it could be a part of the solution. And remember Elon Musk that is wanted to go out there?

Speaker2: [00:11:41] One billion?

Speaker1: [00:11:42] Yeah, there probably is only one, Elon. So it's curious now. I don't know. Anyhow, shall we move on to somebody who has a beautiful name that I'm not saying? He's a dime a dozen, but there may be more than one to kill in the world.

Speaker2: [00:11:53] Yes, let's let's do that. Let's say gonna

Speaker1: [00:11:56] Kill. Don't kill going to kill. Go nuts, kill. Go to kill as

Speaker2: [00:12:01] He bungles your.

Speaker1: [00:12:02] I'm just going to cut the one that he's got all the other ones, except the one that works.

Speaker2: [00:12:25] Welcome back, cultures of energy, listeners, we are here with the fabulous Nicole Anons Hi, Nicole, good to have you here.

Speaker3: [00:12:33] Hi, thanks for having me on to it.

Speaker2: [00:12:35] Yeah, same same. Absolutely. So our lovely co-host, Dominic Boyer is going to start us off.

Speaker1: [00:12:40] I've been getting the education dominate, which, you know, actually, that's really been a confidence booster for me. And I feel as though, yeah, this is I feel as though my life has taken a positive turn of late. So thank you, Nicole. Your work touches on so many issues of interest to the conversations we have here on the podcast, but I thought maybe we could take a moment to recognise the common alluvial experience, the common experience of flooding that has connected Houston and Puerto Rico. But of course, also Mumbai of late. Do you have any reflections on the flooding in Mumbai as refracted through your work that you'd want to share?

Speaker3: [00:13:16] Sure. Yeah. So the flooding in Mumbai is something that you know, Mumbai has been known to flood, I think quite often and quite frequently through its history. But what we're actually seeing in the last decade of floods of an extent following rains of intensity that had not been experienced thus far in the way that they have, which is striking to me because where rains and infrastructure breakdowns used to be a common fact of life, people are now responding to them and some amount of uncertainty and panic when it does rain intensely that this past month in Mumbai or a few years before. And that seems to be really new and quite puzzling and interesting at the same time.

Speaker1: [00:14:04] I notice that a lot of people were commenting as I was posting things about Houston, the articles about Houston's overdevelopment and how that was contributing. At least one person on my Facebook feed suggests, Oh, you could say the same thing about Mumbai. And then people showed images of the kind of development of the city, I guess, over the past 10 or 15 years that that show also in this case, how you have a a flood prone city in which there seems to be somewhat unplanned but also unchecked pigmentation of the city and creation of increasing amounts of impermeable surface area that tend to concentrate flood waters and bring floods into new areas.

Speaker3: [00:14:43] Yeah, yeah. In that sense, you know, the floods are an accomplishment. It takes a while.

Speaker1: [00:14:48] Yeah, they're a product. They're not just a natural event. Yes.

Speaker3: [00:14:51] Yeah, yeah. It's takes a lot of work to actually make the flood. And and over the last few decades, the city have been not only, you know, creating what used to be wetlands, also paving what is to many river banks that were flood plains in a way that actually have choked off many of the drainage networks and rivers and streams that used to take take floodwaters away. So now, when it rains in Mumbai, the waters have have nowhere to go. Drains are both incomplete, but also fully blocked up with other human deposits like plastics and other kinds of objects.

Speaker2: [00:15:29] Mm hmm. All that, all that fun human detritus that seems to be piling up everywhere.

Speaker3: [00:15:33] Yeah. Oh, it was actually striking. I'm thinking about it with Houston as well is, you know, in the aftermath of the hurricane. What was interesting was the problem was as much to do with all the anthropogenic waters and chemicals as a risk and danger as they were after after rainwater or floodwater. Right. And a similar kind of story in the bay comes with the kind of toxics that have nowhere to go after after the city floods.

Speaker2: [00:16:03] Yeah, I saw this report on the local news actually this morning while I was in waiting for an appointment. And apparently there's a group of researchers here in Houston that are looking at levels of toxicity that residents are being exposed to as they're cleaning up their homes and yards and and all of the floodwater exposure. And they have this technique that I've never seen before, but which was kind of fascinating where people, as they're going about their their daily work and doing the cleanup and clearing out their houses, they wear these these those wristbands like those sort of those rubber solidarity wristbands that we first saw with what's his name? Luke Armstrong, right?

Speaker1: [00:16:46] You mean Lance Armstrong?

Speaker2: [00:16:48] Yeah, Lance Armstrong. It's like, it's like Luke Skywalker meets Lando.

Speaker1: [00:16:55] I can see why you'd make that.

Speaker2: [00:16:56] Well, right? Ok, so we won't even

Speaker1: [00:16:58] Want an ethically challenged.

Speaker2: [00:17:00] He's not nearly as lovely as you, but you know

Speaker1: [00:17:03] These are not threatened by that. They want everyone to know I'm not

Speaker2: [00:17:06] These, these sort of colored bands or like the breast cancer ones, are pink. So anyway, so these people are wearing these different colored bands, and then the researchers are going to collect the bands at the end of the week and they're going to test these bands for toxicity. Yeah, interesting. So instead of. Has seen the humans there testing their bracelets, basically, but I guess the bracelets are getting exposed to all the all the cooties that the humans are.

Speaker1: [00:17:30] And so what I wanted to ask Nicole just following up on this because I very shamelessly stolen your concept of hydraulic citizenship for an NSF grant report I was working on last week as a way of posing the question in the wake of these floodwaters, is it possible to begin to think of not a kind of alluvial citizenship? Because I think that might be too much, but at least a kind of alluvial awareness or maybe alluvial publicity? That's in a sense, is trying to ask the same questions you're asking about the infra political potentialities of water to create new kinds of political identification and action. So I'm hoping we could use that as a jumping point back into the meat of your work again.

Speaker2: [00:18:10] Well, maybe maybe a way to sort of come around to that question, too, is to have you talk a little bit about hydraulic citizenship and what it is and how you came to it through your ethnographic work.

Speaker3: [00:18:22] Yeah. And yeah, I think both would be facing, right? So I think citizenship, I came to it by finding myself pushed to sort of engage with the specific Latino history that would connection and recognition that would permit and in some ways accommodate in Mumbai, when residents are trying to access some kind of water to live in the city right where I want it to pay attention both to the materiality, but also to the social processes through which residents were able to connect and become hydraulic citizens of the city. So in that sense, it's a very dynamic, iterative and partial process that might go with or sometimes deviate from other forms of recognition and belonging in the city. So when nobody asks or think about another kind of membership that is possible with a different kind of water, it's alluvial. I like that. You know what to think about the ways in which different matters of the city permit and restrict the formation of political communities and different kinds of ways? How do we think about them together if it's part of what this project is sort of involved with?

Speaker1: [00:19:37] All right. So do you want to talk a little bit more about how the character of these entitlements are? As you put it, they tend to be temporary and precarious. So to to talk us through a little bit of what makes these kinds of citizenship seemingly more more fragile, perhaps if that's if that's a fair word, then other other forms of citizenship that we might recognize in our typical liberal democratic ways.

Speaker3: [00:20:00] Yeah. So what was really interesting about becoming a hydraulic citizen was that you, I mean, residents were able to connect to the water system and be recognized and deserving of of the state's different water services. But these accomplishments were both significant, but also temporary and rather fickle, which is to say that once they became hydraulic citizens, it was no guarantee that they would remain iconic citizens rights. And we would take a lot of work to continue to mobilize different social and material relations to keep and maintain that water pressure that permitted it to remain iconic citizen. There is a lot more, a lot more demands on the city's engineers and that they're able to manage and maintain and the ways in which they do that is by moving water from one area where moving water to areas where they feel have political and social pressure from areas where they're not, you know, the water infrastructure. The very dynamic a dynamic process which is almost keeping both engineers and as a result of their subjects on their toes all the time. So what was really interesting about the kind of iterative relationships that were made for me and called for by residents have to both claim and and remain residents of the city.

Speaker3: [00:21:25] The other contribution to clear regulations of liberal citizenship I wanted to think about was it was not that that liberal citizenship that you want. And here I am, drawing on the work of the third in particular to think the different relationships that make subjects citizens right and attending to the way in which residents for extended or not extended different kinds of services through political operations of the state. You would I would notice that they would have access to water about electricity or they have access to electricity, but not health, right? So the the liberal subject is not so much an individual, but in her terms of individual by the different modes of recognition or not of being and belonging to the city. Right. So you only want to think about hegemonic citizenship as just a very partial process of recognition, which might go with, but sometimes separate from other projects of of liberalism in the city.

Speaker2: [00:22:22] Well, since you brought up Marilyn Strother and I was going to actually just ask you the question that I believe you just answered and that was, is there a way in which hydraulic citizenship can be partial or is it is it sort of temporally partial? In other words, you know, when one is a hydraulic citizen, one is fully inhabiting that that subject citizenship. But when the water pressure is and the water and the water pressure is literally taken away, it becomes more partial. Is that an accurate way to think of it?

Speaker3: [00:22:52] Yes, that's that's and that's exactly right. So in the beginning of a partial, Philippine residents need to continuously do work to become hydraulic citizens again, and that works could be infrastructure work of the material, kind buying fights, hiring plumbers to clean lines and so on. What could be of the more social kind of visiting the counselor's office? I'm simplifying, you know, the material, the social level up here. But but to think about the different ways in which people had to work to remain iconic citizens. It's something that was very interested in. Mm-hmm.

Speaker2: [00:23:27] I think one of the other things that I really love about this work that you've been doing is the kind of paradox of pressure. And we wanted to ask you about pressure as an analytic, but also to just to think about the mechanics of it, the political and physical mechanics of it. So essentially, where political pressure is being applied is where the water flows and where that that pressure is being let loose or is not being applied as heavily. You see people losing their water pressure. So there's this kind of inverse relationship, right, between having water and pressurized water that will flow through taps versus creating political and social pressure to ensure that that continues.

Speaker3: [00:24:09] Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so what was striking was that that pressure could be mobilized either by by political pressure, right? Going to the Council of Everything and making sure that residents were seen of continued to be seen as deserving of good water service for the city, even if they do not go to the office to apply pressure directly. But it could also be applied by by different kinds of technologies pumps, booster pumps as one example right of generating water pressure despite or beyond the controls of city water engineers, right? So despite the pumps being illegal in the city, lots of residents on either end of the income or the class structures of the city youth moved to balance all the time as a way of generating water pressure beyond the controls of the city water engineers. So it was interesting to think about the ways in which engineers were only partly in control of this water network, which oftentimes exceeded both their knowledge, but also their in their material and social technologies.

Speaker2: [00:25:14] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And there are so many resonances to between the kind of pipe system and the work of hydraulic infrastructure and that of electric electric grids and electric infrastructure. And this is something I constantly am struck with. And looking at your work and then reading other works about electric electric connectivity, right? And the the challenges of getting connected to the grid in the first place in certain parts of the world. And I'm thinking of Tanya Winter's work in Zanzibar, the difficulty and cost of getting connected and the kinds of pressures that had to be applied and then ensuring that that electric flow continues unabated. But, you know, I think one of the important differences, at least from my point of view, is that electricity may be this sort of semiotics and actual way to to funnel modernity and all of its appliances and apparatuses. But it seems to me that the hydraulic is so much more fundamental because it's absolutely essential for human functioning and life in so many ways.

Speaker3: [00:26:20] Yeah, yeah. I think I think it was a matter. Gandhi, who in some in an earlier book, described the history of cities as the history of water, right? In some ways, the hydraulic arrangements are and have been constituted of cities and modern or liberal government only in India, but in many other parts of the world and and in the similar way. You know, I think electricity is itself now, but with all the ways in which we relate in social life and live, it make meaning there's no less fundamental. I mean, both are in some ways, instantiation the materialization of grid life and to think about the ways in which they are both or have been constituted as central technologies of state formation, on one hand, but on the other are also these tremendously wasteful systems where so much water and so much electric or energy gets lost before or get leaks before even reaching the. Discerning consumer, right? Right, so there are parallels there that I find very generous to think with.

Speaker1: [00:27:27] I wanted to just to maybe probe the hydraulic citizenship concept from maybe a slightly different angle to I mean, I speaking of electricity provision and this, you know, reminds me of the way in which so many, especially middle class Indian families, also provide for their own electricity, don't rely entirely on the state, often in the form of diesel gen sets and so forth. And I think about this concept of hydraulic citizenship and the types of electric citizenship you might see then in India, as well as actually being quite hopeful in the sense that in a place like, let's say, Philadelphia or Houston, we are every bit, you know, hydraulic and electric citizens in the same sense, but our relationship tends to be much more passive. These are the kind of infrastructures that are allowed to enable things techno political run by experts, you know, when they break down, we don't know what to do because we don't, in a sense, have those capacities and techniques available. And yet precisely what the Anthropocene seems to be calling upon us to do is to engage infrastructures in new ways, to actually become innovative epistemic partners in the making and improvement of infrastructures. In other words, we have to kind of come back to infrastructure again, which is part of why I think anthropology these days has such a lively interest in infrastructures. So I'm wondering whether you see hydraulic citizenship in that sense also has, in a way, something to which we might all aspire to be in, whether we're in South Asia or whether we're in North America.

Speaker3: [00:28:58] Yeah, that's great. And I feel like that world of comparison, both between and across infrastructure across Philadelphia and Mumbai and Mexico also to be generative, right? Because in some senses, yes, I think like like go to think about the ways in which people connect to water infrastructures in Indian cities, but also energy infrastructures. Infrastructure is only one of many means of connection and hydration, the energy and the like. And it's actually been very generative for me in doing this research to actually begin to notice other waters and other ways of being and becoming in the city. And in that sense, it's true, I think, for a large number of of people in Philadelphia or Houston or other places that might now also begin to notice the other ways of being connected right with either polity, but also through these different sorts of infrastructure that can access and the like. It's striking to me about how the use of generators, or at least the number of households that have generators in the East Coast have proliferated since Hurricane Sandy, right? And people talk when they will need the generator, when the power goes out and not if.

Speaker3: [00:30:17] In cities like Washington, DC or Philly or or New York. But it's also like doing this book has also like drawn attention, drawing my attention to the fact that there are so many. I think in the order of tens of thousands of residents in Philadelphia that are and have been shut off from the water system and use other kinds of ways that aren't too strange from from a bait to connect to the water system. Right. And just having a conversation yesterday and with a class of talking and where I've been talking about the water keys that people use to bypass the shuttle, for example, in Northeast and Northeast Philly, you know, so right, right? Yeah. So totally bringing attention to the ways in which those practices are already here and already. Yeah, around us and doing this book has drawn my attention to the fact that American cities too have communities that are connecting and provisioning in ways that do not necessarily depend on the recognition of the of the municipal municipal government.

Speaker1: [00:31:23] Right. And these are places like Philadelphia and Houston that are generally seen to be functional, not even to mention cases like Detroit or Flint, or places where you have massive infrastructural failures and seemingly no concerted state action on the horizon, right?

Speaker3: [00:31:38] Exactly, exactly. That's what's really interesting, right? I think that this might be the norm and not not the outlier. What's there, but also, yeah.

Speaker1: [00:31:47] So to what extent do you think that hydraulic citizenship focuses on failure or rupture or scarcity? And again, this brings me back to thinking about flooding as an interesting counterpoint where part of the problem is you have way too much water all around you. Yeah, but it seems to be in the in the ethnography that you describe. Oftentimes, it's again about a kind of scarce water resource and the politics of provisioning, right? And again, there pressure is such a wonderfully apt metaphor for that crosses between the material hydraulic issues of filling a pipe with water to a sufficient pressure to get it, say up a hill. If the kinds of political pressure that we think of, so it's wonderful, a wonderful lens, I think, but I mean, is it is it really a politics of scarcity in most cases or in India as well? Do you have issues where there might be a different aspect of hydraulic citizenship that might have to do with abundance, over abundance, saturation and so forth?

Speaker3: [00:32:39] Yeah. Well, that's a great question. You know, I I grew up in Mumbai learning that that water was scarce and grew up learning that this was the primary reason that migrants posed the problem to the city. Like this is a common sense knowledge in Mumbai. And it was more surprising and not surprising in the course of doing this fieldwork to learn that there was more than enough water entering Mumbai for most everyone, everyone who lives there to have as much water as the residents would have in London or New York or Paris or Singapore. So, so so what was actually striking was the way like. But but the narrative, the scarcity and to a certain extent, the expectations of scarcity are carefully managed and made in everyday life. And and part of what I'm trying to do in a chapter in the book if to show the book the social processes through newspapers in the light, but also the infrastructural and the physical processes of centralization and distribution are actually generative of that scarcity, right? So for the similar way, just as it takes a lot of work to make a flood, it takes a lot of work to make water scarce. So I have to give the government a means of both distributing it and legitimizing its authority in one hand, but also so as to generate a very xenophobic politics on the other, right? And so we can think of the ways in which scarcely talk not just in water, but in other worlds as well is generative. It's on one hand a common talk across left and right of the political spectrum. But it's also generative of a very conservative politics, a place that I think I'm trying to push against in this book.

Speaker2: [00:34:21] Yeah, I wanted to think to a little bit more about the use of hydraulic actually and how it operates, both in a material sense and also in a in a metaphoric sense, I think as well. You know, when I think of your work, I mean, so much of it has to do with how how citizenship gets created, how subjects get created around access to water. So on one hand, it's it's sort of like a hydro citizenship, right? The ability to access water. But but what you've written about is very specifically hydraulic. And the hydraulics, of course, is the capacity to move some some sort of liquid form, not necessarily water, although it often is moving moving liquids through some sort of pressured space that's enclosed. And so when we begin to think about the hydraulics, we think of the science of it. But we also then begin to think beyond the water. We begin to think about pipes and their capacity, their size, their thickness, what they're composed of. We begin to think of the the engines and motors that are creating these pressurized systems and of course, the experts who run them. So I wonder if you can think out loud a little bit or share some anecdotes or reflections from your fieldwork that really focused attention on these kinds of pressurized spaces, maybe somewhere between the experts and the hydraulic citizen or the pipes that that interconnect and shape each of these capacities?

Speaker3: [00:35:52] Yeah, thank you. So, yeah, it was. I've had a little too much fun with this project, but one of the ways one of the ways I was sort of like thinking about hydraulics, one of the engagements, whether these men were the hydraulic heads with the workers of Whitfield, all right, who talked about hydraulic despotism and the centralization of authority in India and China have at a different moment of time. And and you think that the language of hydraulics to talk about the centralization of power through the machine? Right. The mechanics functioning of these different irrigation infrastructures? And I want to play with that and complicate that a little bit. Right. So so I think are I think it is. I think as you point out, so well, it is not just about the water, but also about the pipes, because it is the pipes that are the the sites and the processes through which this water gets to go to one neighborhood and not another and then to the pipe is a very important actor in this story, which is something you wanted to also get at, but think about it as a hydraulic system. But unlike with other engagement I'm having with his work through this through this shed is to draw attention to the ways in which the hydraulic does not quite work like a water type machine, as you describe it, right that the hydraulic infrastructure in Mumbai, to the extent that you can call it. On working of functioning does in a way it works precisely because it distributes water in ways that it's not supposed to. You know that that that it is generative also because it's leaking, you know? And so here's where I would like to push against the idea that the hydraulic machine is functional because of it's as expected performance. You know, the diagram, the machine of the fame and growing attention to the gaps and the and the leakages that actually make the machine as this work, right? It would be very different, city in a very different public. It's the hydraulic city as a machine in focus turns.

Speaker1: [00:38:12] Do you want to tell us a little bit more ethnographic about that leaky ness where you saw that appearing in your fieldwork?

Speaker3: [00:38:17] Yeah. So I think I found, you know, like to think about bleakness was something that I guess was the first chapter I wrote. Then the sort of meditation and the last chapter. Finish it with a book, and I've been thinking about it for some time at different kinds of ways right around the time of doing fieldwork. There was a project to privatize water distribution in one ward of the city. And one of the reasons that was given actually for this the need to privatize was that the system was very leaky. Interestingly enough, the project fell apart because nobody was stabilized measure of how much water was actually leaking. But regardless, either which way, much of the city's water is leaking. No one knows exactly how much, but also no one exactly knows what is meant by the leakage. And they found that slippage a little interesting, which is to say no one knows how much is going to look in legitimate ether or how much of it going into the ground. Of course, water that then goes into the ground through a pipe, which has a hole in it, also then can get used by users at a different moment of time and life through wells and the like right through groundwater use.

Speaker3: [00:39:30] And so I found the veracity of the pipe a very interesting way in which residents who are not officially permitted then by city rules to access water nevertheless were able to use it and live in the city. So like leaking a assets like life, giving a very literal and material way. Right. But making also then with the grounds for like new state projects to reduce leakage and new technologies that were being proposed to make sure that the water remained in the pipe and went only to those that were eligible to receive it. So. So I found it to be about a way in which leakage to be a with state always justified its need for intervention and buffing new contracts and new projects on one end building you dance, for instance, and on the other, which also being a way for residents to to live in the city despite the rules and the practices of the City Water Department. So, yeah, and you know, it's not an insignificant amount of leakage like with energy and think much of the city's water is leaking through this grid. So expect around 30 to 40 percent, which is along the length of water leakage in New York and Philadelphia.

Speaker1: [00:40:47] Yeah. And actually, you know, I just was talking to somebody about New Orleans, which apparently still has a lot of terracotta pipes that have through the shifting of the soil and subsidence and so forth come to rupture and bless its terracotta. It wasn't meant to last forever in the first place. Yeah. So you have, I think the leakage levels in New Orleans are way above that. And so, yeah, it's fascinating to think. On the one hand, you got this sort of techno political striving towards perfectly sealed systems and then the reality of it, which is always much messier and leak here. But I love this idea that it actually gives rise to two forms of life that couldn't exist without it sneakiness so that in a sense, the leaky ness is also an infrastructure, is also an infrastructural aspect to be considered

Speaker3: [00:41:31] Pretty much the extent to which boggles the mind. One of the 24 wards in which I did research, there were 2000 leaks reported in one year alone. Right? So just think about that multiply by 24 conservatively and you get a sense of how much water people know is leaking, which is quite rich, a subset of actually how much water must be leaking, right? Because many of these pipes are underground with similarly crumbling histories. You know,

Speaker2: [00:41:57] I was kind of asked to Nickeil about, I know that you've written a piece fairly recently that has to do with hydraulic publics and the question of water and pressure, publicity and public subjectivity. Can you disentangle for us some of the the similarities or the differences between hydraulic citizenship and a kind of hydraulic public or the creation of a hydraulic?

Speaker3: [00:42:22] Public, yeah, so the way I'm thinking about it, there's some people in public might be gathering citizens at that table in public life, and I think citizens are are are made around the shared concern around around water or around a particular site. Of course, the distribution, right well have the effects of the reticulated structure of the city's water network, you know, the branches and the south branch, the feeders and so on. So this lines is that these lines actually congeal and aggregate groups of people that that are concerned about the performance, right? And these groups might be of different classes or of different religions or different castes. But but joined by their concern around around sites of water distribution. Mm hmm. So here I'm thinking a lot with the work of newcomers in thinking about publics in this way as materially made and mediated. And I'm interested in the way in which residents of different of adjacent, different neighborhoods or different social positions in the city actually both endure and try and remake these points of access, right? There's nothing to say that hyperbolic publics need to be attached to pipes. Of course, you can have hyperbolic topics attached to other water bodies that residents care for together. So in some senses, the earliest hydraulic publics in Mumbai would be would be publics around that would gather around wells and tanks that were managed by philanthropists in the 18th and 19th century. And part of what I'm interested in wisdom with the public sector reconstituted and redistributed by different kinds of water infrastructure in the city. So in one neighborhood where I did fieldwork, residents were connected in one way to the city's water network and simultaneously, but in a different formation to a well water that would be managed by a different political leader. Right. And so it's possible to think about them of overlapping publics, but not the same public form, many different infrastructures.

Speaker2: [00:44:36] I mean, one of the things that comes across very, very clearly in much of the work that you've done, if not all of it is this question of distribution. And it seems to me that we have a dual sense of distribution in that Hydro's or water is hydraulically distributed through pipes and other mechanisms. But we also have distributed agency, if you will, or maybe partially distributed agency if we want to be learning about it, where political action and agency is becomes concentrated in these individual bodies and collective bodies of people making claims. I wonder, do you see do you with all the importance of distribution for really thinking through these kinds of politics and publics, do you see any effects or possibilities of mal distribution? Is there a way in which water and the hydraulics of it can be nefarious in some way or counter countervailing the the desires of people in Mumbai or or elsewhere? Is there a kind of a mal distribution that you ever witness? I mean, maybe beyond the leaking is there? Is there something grander and and spookier that we can look to?

Speaker3: [00:45:48] Yeah, I think I mean, before I jump into that, I really liked your think about distribution both of water, but also agency, right? It was tremendously difficult to actually locate sites of a gentleness or a sense of responsibility across and through, like the pipes of the city and its different lake authority responsible for it for their care. But partly as a result, I think there is tremendous mal distribution if by bad distribution. I, oh, you know, obviously signal inequalities of distribution between and within different wards of the city. Residents in Mumbai were very aware of this man distribution. I think that some people get a lot more than their rightful share, rightful share in June 30th. In fact, on the other hand, residents who are eligible for water connection see mal distribution as signifying the signaling the fact that people who buy rules should not get water by getting water despite the rules. So in some sense of the distribution of wealth was also up for up for grabs, right? And what it actually signified. But but yes, I think, you know, you look at many of the large political issues where they thinking about in the world today. And I think one way or the other, they attached to distribution of an equitable distribution of one sort or another. I think this is another exemplary case of that. And similarly, with the water infrastructure, it's. A little difficult to precisely locate agency and responsibility for those structures of distribution.

Speaker1: [00:47:29] So Nicole, just again being aware of your time, we wanted to also give you a chance to talk a little bit about what you're working on now. And I know one of those things, and I'm saying this with an entirely objective straight face is this incredibly important book on the promise of infrastructure. This edited volume that I think objectively is incredibly important work, even though I

Speaker2: [00:47:51] Have no everyone in my social circles is just frothing at the mouth, waiting to

Speaker1: [00:47:56] Get what they want to get their hands on that. That's sweet little volumes, but I hope it's coming. But beyond that, I would imagine that your interest in info political matters continues. Is this also going to be the next project or what are you thinking about now?

Speaker3: [00:48:12] Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for that excitement around getting your hands on the promise of infrastructure, which is the volume that I've been working on with with you, Dominique. And also I can look at and hand tell and several other great contributors.

Speaker1: [00:48:28] Is it can we say it's critically acclaimed already

Speaker3: [00:48:30] Or I'd

Speaker1: [00:48:32] Like to say it's a critically acclaimed

Speaker3: [00:48:33] Volume? Yeah, it's much anticipated, much anticipated.

Speaker1: [00:48:37] Excellent.

Speaker3: [00:48:37] Thank you. I'm waiting to get my hands on it, too. But, but yeah, and you know, in that quality is sort of talking about the way in which you might think old and lots of questions around time and temporality and promise and politics and new with the different infrastructures that we've been thinking through and working on for some time now. And I think, yes, I am, I am thinking of I have started new projects, I think, to, I guess, take some of these issues that came out and in my beloved city, but also the promise of infrastructure forward. And one of them is if a comparative project I've been working with Bethany, you begin with rising waters. Oh, that's great. Looks at Philadelphia and more by comparatively and thinking about the race and class geographies of injustice around rivers and wetlands, in water cities, throughout history and also the present. And that project is underway, and we hope to have students and faculty working on it, both in Mumbai and also in Philadelphia. And then the second project, I'm sort of like leaping off the certainty that the city and into the sea where I'm interested in thinking about the different ways in which the sea is made urban around Mumbai.

Speaker3: [00:50:02] You know, we talked a little bit about the after effects of Harvey in Houston, which is just one provocation to think about how these are not like beyond the city, but constantly being made our internal innovation with the city. Right, right. And so the work I'll be doing this that I started doing, some of that will continue through next year has to like attends to the ways and processes through which the city is. The fee is actually made with meaningful and urban and everyday life. One of the provocations around this, if I want to sort of like think with a different water about cities which for long have been ruled and governed with territorial force, right? So what, what, what, what can be done about cities if we think about them through water and more? Yeah. What might we learn about? I think you met them with water and through water instead of with land and ground and property.

Speaker1: [00:51:01] Yeah, that's brilliant. And I think it's increasingly relevant as more and more cities are going to become more and more. I don't want to say flooded in all cases, but let's say water is likely to become more and more present in the daily life of cities and also in unexpected, unanticipated ways, some of which could be serendipitous and marvelous. But many of which may be, you know, kind of experience instead as problematic and disasters. And I think of Miami, too in this idea of kind of, you know, noonday flooding events during king tides and suddenly a, you know, a street will filled with water in the middle of a sunny day. That's normally, I guess, anticipated as an oddity or is something disturbing. It's also could be taken to be something joyful, too, for children. I don't know.

Speaker2: [00:51:47] Perhaps you should get released from school early. It's always joyful, right?

Speaker1: [00:51:52] But it reminds us that in a sense, the sea is coming for us, and I don't mean that without without a bit of

Speaker2: [00:51:58] Trepidation that a Game of Thrones.

Speaker1: [00:52:00] Yeah, sea is coming. Exactly.

Speaker3: [00:52:02] Yeah, it's good turning off.

Speaker2: [00:52:04] All right. The Atlantic is

Speaker1: [00:52:06] Coming. But what I love about this project idea is it seems it could connect to so many cities, right? I mean, there's so many cities for which this paradigm could be useful.

Speaker3: [00:52:14] In fact, I mean, that's the that's the hope and the leap of faith. But yeah, I think that that's kind of that's the provocation to think about cities in which. As they become increasingly so right, so right.

Speaker1: [00:52:26] And do you want to talk a little bit more about the kind of class and race dimension of that project?

Speaker3: [00:52:31] Well, specifically looking at the race and class geographies of settlement and where settlements have been permitted and who have been permitted to settle or who have been permitted to settle as a way of thinking about these legal thinking about settlement in wetlands and in and on floodplains and in like exposed coastal areas as something that is both constitutive of the city and process the city making. But on the other hand, also throws marginalized communities in harm's way again and again. We've seen in New Orleans and Houston and Mumbai right when decisions have to be made as to where floods can remain and where they have to go with these these old stories written in you when it comes to marginalized groups in these in these cities.

Speaker1: [00:53:19] No, it's fascinating. And again, very, very germane to our experience in Houston, where somebody decided to build a megacity in the middle of a swamp. And I think, you know, we're all we're all wondering why, you know, our life is suddenly so precarious

Speaker2: [00:53:32] And it never happens in in one lifetime or all in one shot. It's always iterative over time that the swamp becomes overtaken with concrete and asphalt. Right?

Speaker3: [00:53:43] Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's it's it's such a common story, right? And it's surprising, right? And like, like you said, it happened over many generations, but through similar language is an improvement in development, capital accumulation, urbanization and so on. It's really interesting. In Mumbai, historically, it's the swamp lands have been made urban and made ground by people so as to permit it to squat there in the wetlands and only when the ground was stabilized by that labor and settlement of areas under the city go ahead and declare them as illegal and move them out and make a killing off the real estate that they made it. So, so, so, so. So this project of actually looking at these twin effects of both displacement and horror of that that this process has accreted of its name.

Speaker2: [00:54:36] And of course, when we think about this overabundance of water in Houston, most recently because of the hurricane and we think of other cities that that struggle with water, as you said, Mumbai growing up there was water scarcity and yet there is no scarcity. There's plenty of water to go around to all the citizens of Mumbai. It's just a matter of the pipelines and the politics being in the right place. But it sort of raises the question about water more generally, of course, because most of the water that we use in the western part of the United States, for example, goes to agriculture. So most of our water use is in fact rural to sustain cities. And then we have these megacities like Los Angeles, which we say, we say in the same breath with the kind of ridiculous, ironic tone that we do about Houston as being built on a swamp. We say, you know, who would have built Los Angeles in the middle of a desert or Las Vegas or Las Vegas? An even worse example? So it begs the question of whether there is any natural place, if there is any environment that actually is able to sustain the density of urban life that that we now have.

Speaker1: [00:55:44] And there's a town in Iowa. I can't remember the name of it. Just just one place. Shut up.

Speaker2: [00:55:49] And note that it's a town. It's probably like a little village. Yeah, I think it's not as beautiful

Speaker1: [00:55:54] As the one that's that's terrible

Speaker3: [00:55:57] For the city. Well, we'll

Speaker2: [00:55:59] Have to see where to find that place that can handle the the incredible humid load of of urban space.

Speaker3: [00:56:05] So yeah. Anyway, you know, they like the process of making investing. We're making capital in these places as well, which is in some ways generative of so many problems, both in L.A. and one hand in Houston. You know, good to get it, but with a certain kind of city that where water is with land between land and water, birth control in marshlands to keep land dry, that is then one where water becomes a problem. But across that line, right where that line is that of a coastline or or or a shoreline or a riverbank?

Speaker2: [00:56:46] Right? Yeah. Know very, very well. But that's that's exactly right.

Speaker1: [00:56:50] So Nick Hill, we'll probably leave it there. But you know, as this project continues, please open invitation to come to rice to talk about it. We really want to hear how it develops. It sounds really fascinating. And in the meantime, we'll just advise everyone here to go buy a copy of Hydraulic City, your new book and to keep an eye out for the promise of infrastructure. Is that anything else upcoming that you'd like to let folks know about before we sign off?

Speaker3: [00:57:15] Well, I think those are those are a bit like you covered. Well, what I. Going on for now. It's about yet it's plenty.

Speaker1: [00:57:25] Yeah. But anyway, thank you so much for taking the time. I think your work is fascinating. It's been really inspirational to me as I've been trying to put together an analytic structure to think about Houston, post Harvey and and to find, you know, the hope and hydraulic citizenship, as as well as the slightly abject character of it. But that's kind of that's kind of the world as we as we experience it today, a little bit of hope, a little bit of abject ness, you know, some precarity thrown in

Speaker3: [00:57:52] And a lot of muck to go. Yeah, a lot of money.

Speaker1: [00:57:54] A lot of silt filled with toxic, toxic, a lot of mud materials.

Speaker3: [00:57:58] Yeah, exactly. But thanks so much. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Speaker2: [00:58:02] Yes. Thank you. Yeah. And we hope to see you sometime soon.