Alison Post, “What can studying infrastructure teach us about urban politics? Lessons from intermittent water supply in India”, 31.05.2022, 5:30pm-7:15pm

Seminar Cities are back in town

What can studying infrastructure teach us about urban politics? Lessons from intermittent water supply in India

Tuesday 31 May 20225.30 – 7.15 pm CESTSciences Po, exclusively online

Reflecting on a set of related research projects on the politics of water delivery in Bangalore, India, I will propose revisions to a number of standard theoretical accounts of urban politics, as well as methodological approaches to studying urban policy in the Global South and more broadly. Five themes will be emphasized: the importance of understanding bureaucratic politics, and especially the political roles exercised by street level bureaucrats; the need to shift our focus from service access to service continuity; the importance of examining the specific and overlapping roles played by state and non-state actors in service provision; the necessity of acknowledging technical constraints upon the politics of distribution; and complementarities between ethnographic and new modes of quantitative of data collection, such as crowd-sourcing, remote sensing, and geo-tagged surveys.

Speaker

Alison Post, Associate Professor of Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley

Alison Post holds the Travers Family Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Chair of Political Science and is Associate Professor of Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative urban politics and comparative political economy, with regional emphases on Latin America and South Asia.

She is the author of Foreign and Domestic Investment in Argentina: The Politics of Privatized Infrastructure (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and articles in the Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Governance, Perspectives on Politics, Politics & Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, World Development, and other outlets. She is a former President of the Urban and Local Politics section of the American Political Science Association, and currently Chair of the Steering Committee for the Red de Economía Política de America Latina (Repal).

Discussion

Éric Verdeil, Professor of Geography and Urban Studies, Sciences Po, CERI

Compulsory registration