Looking through the water glass: Drinking water in the urban realm of movement and rest

Nirali Joshi, Mumbai - India

• Setting the context• Introducing the study• Methods and regional context• Key explorations and findings• Reflection

WATER - HUMAN WARS

Scarcity – economic good/public good/merit goodIncreasing commodification, privatization and enclosure of water resources; of global, regional and local injustice in access and distribution; over contestations of use and abuse of the resource; over debates on its fundamentality as a human right.

In the Urban Context, Municipalisation versus privatisation, fuzzy categorisations of formal/informal, authorised/unauthorised, legal/illegal, and contestations over volumetric allocation at household and locality level,

Objective of this study- unravelling the socio-ecological landscape of drinking water availability for people on (and within) the go in the city

SETTING THE CONTEXT

Drinking water in the urban realm of movement and rest

Looking through the water glass

Nirali Joshi

Drinking water in the urban realm of movement and rest

• Micro level empirical observations

• Visual References: • Help bring out

densely texturisedcharacter of urban spaces

• As much attention to the socio-material and spatial configurations in which drinking water appears on the street

Image Courtesy: Vastuvidhaan Architects

Source: Vaastuvidhan Architects

Demarcation into abstracted eras during which they were

• materialized and patronized (mid 19th-20th century), and ;

• consequent decades where they suffered decline and distrust with the onslaught of the ‘germ theory’ (1970s-80’s)

• resurgence of advocacy seeking to highlight the resilience of drinking water fountains in the face of privatization and commodification of drinking water (especially with a change in the very vocabulary of drinking water consumption, with bottled water now conceived as a competing beverage) (especially post 2000)

Public drinking water fountains

Salient aspect of public drinking water fountains across time– they have historically been promoted predominantly by private enterprise.

The first public drinking water fountains in England were set up in 1959 by the Metropolitan Drinking Water Association with support of its two founding members /philanthropists Samuel Gurney MP and Edward Wakefield.Source:http://www.drinkingfountains.org/

Wallace fountains that were built around Paris using designs and money donated by British philanthropist Sir Richard Wallace after the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune devastated the city's drinking water infrastructure.

Source:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/14/history-of-water-fountains_n_6357064.html

While the first public drinking water fountain was created using public money in New York city in around 1859, their actual proliferation occurred only post 1880, when their construction received patronage and funding from wealthy residents.

1974 - Safe Drinking Water Act making water safer by limiting dumping and setting contaminant standards, but made it mandatory for the municipalities to notify residents of contamination immediately

1986 - EPA study concludes that the tap water used by at least 38 million Americans contained dangerous levels of lead.

Jim Crow laws – 1890-1965Source: httpchronicle.comblognetworktenuredradicalfiles201108colored-only11.jpg

Source: Shirgaonkar, V. (2011) “Exploring the Water Heritage of Mumbai”

Public drinking water focus in some parts of the world today

• countering health-risks arising from increased consumption of bottled beverages such as colas (the obesity red-alert of the USA),

• of curbing environmental pollution exacerbated through proliferation of plastic packaging of beverages,

• may be among the most credible means of ensuring sanitised water for consumption of the extremely poor and homeless.

• might need to conceived as vital to resilience of cities in the face of climate change

Public drinking water fountains as investments capable of

Source: http://www.slowtrav.com/blog/annienc/2010/02/water_fountains_in_venice.html

VENICE

Source: FinalReport_B10_PreserVenice.pdf

Landscape of public drinking water fountains facilities in Mumbai: readjusting pixel size

A change in vocabulary: pyaus enter disaster mitigation plans

• Public drinking water facilities not on an action area or priority of the civic authority

• Large number of practical challenges in provisioning as well as maintaining public drinking water facilities

• Several colliding regulations brought on for safeguard/regulation of other components of urban life and landscape impinge upon and subsume public drinking water facilities

• Civic as well as religious institutions play a significant role in holding out drinking water to the people on the move

• Individual and collaborative arrangements at various scales are to be found across neighbourhoods. The more open the community aspired, the more committed the level of monitoring

• Where present in functioning order, drinking water fountains are found to be used extensively, yet largely on one (poorer) side of the class divide

Some Findings:

• A policy lens with a normative mandate to ‘enable’ the proliferation of more such infrastructure and encourage (or the least, facilitate) public participation in their creation and sustenance

• Safeguard the existing and potential creation of such structures from the rash, inconsistent de-patronising by governing authorities

The need? Is it -

• a model of sharing ? • just one of advantaged/conditional redistribution through

philanthropic investments in this infrastructure?• the real nutrition that sustains the processes of commoning that

enable the creation of this landscape of water availability?– Is it the presence of other commons (such as streets? )

– Or the ubiquitous category of ‘municipal water’ that enters into various kinds of containers and places itself on myriad physical platforms?

– Is it to be attributed to the persistence of socio-cultural ethos that dissuades the refusal of a drink of water to a fellowperson?

– is this landscape or its suggested culture of sharing currently only sustained by a hitherto critically unthreatened (although widely contended) water supply that the maximum city has afforded itself?

Reflecting upon:

Thank you.