Events

This conference is jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, and Institute of Water Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

Life in Asian cities, home to 54% of the world’s urban population (United Nations, 2018), is an anthropocenic, although negotiated, contest with the demands of nature. Large technical urban infrastructures, particularly those conveying water, sewerage and energy, have become vital interlocutors of modern urban metabolic exchanges that power life in many Asian cities.

In this workshop, we focus on people’s relationship with water in the city, including the institutions of governance, public narratives and the policy and social implications of dependence on large, centralized hydraulic infrastructures. We use a governance lens to interrogate the permutations which water infrastructure can take, and the way in which people interact this artificial yet vital part of the hydrological landscape.

The general success of large hydraulic infrastructures has led to greater confidence and reliance by policy makers, sometimes referred to as the “hard (infrastructure)” path.  The promise of such hard-pathed, urban projects is to dramatically improve the quality of urban life and ‘resolve’ urban environmental problems and risks. Beyond their functionalities, large hydraulic infrastructures also double up as symbols of economic progress and stability, forming the hallmark and realization of the networked city—an ideal that is both historically-situated (in the age of the industrial and scientific revolution), and politically-driven by neoliberal ideologies (Gandy, 2004; Picon, 2018). 

The perils of such hard-pathed, urban water infrastructure reforms are however, equally large. Firstly, they pose a very high risk for failure and impact upon failure granting its extent of reach and scale. Secondly, they exact massive financial overheads to enable and insure its development, construction, and maintenance over a given life-cycle (Little, 2002; Graham, 2010). Thirdly, the installation of large infrastructures have not ensured, as promised, greater population access to goods, such as electricity and water, with examples abounding from project failures in post-colonial cities worldwide (see for e.g. Amin, 2013, 2014; Björkman & Harris, 2018).

In contrast to the hard water path described afore, a “soft” water path has been proposed as an alternative and complement to the hard path (Gleick & Wolff, 2004). The soft path represents a new paradigm and programme of water infrastructure planning and governance that reimagines urban water futures, beyond the installation of large, heavily-engineered technical systems. As Brooks and Holtz (2009) explain, “soft path policies are less a set of technologies than a socio-political process for choosing, from a range of technical, social, and economic options, specific ones that can move society towards a desired future state” (p. 89). If hard water paths favor top-down, “locked-in” solutions engineered by experts, soft water solutions are more open-ended, diverse and require sharing, communication and local autonomy (Bavikatte and Bennett, 2015: 12).

The discourse of resilience is also apposite for the study of water in the city. While the relationship between large, urban hydraulic infrastructures and people have been traditionally studied under narratives of resilience, it is also important to understand urban end-users’ interactions with and perceptions of these infrastructures, in constructing these narratives (Leong, 2018). Therefore, in asking if a city is resilient or otherwise, it is not only essential to address the question of whether its physical infrastructures can withstand environmental shocks, but also if its “human dimensions” have the capability of adapting to, and mitigating such risks (Leong, 2016). This workshop thus incorporates a study of the implications of hard-pathed urban water governance, on citizens’ responses to environmental risks and problems, in other words, citizen resilience.

In sum, the following questions guide this workshop:

1. What are the governance regimes and narratives that define, conscribe and instantiate the perceptions of urban dwellers, of water in their city?
2. How do urban users interact with large hydraulic infrastructures, and how does this shape users’ perceptions of risk, and perceived responsibility in managing environmental risks and problems, with consequences for users’ resilience to environmental risks and problems? 
3. How are citizen-community-state negotiation of responsibilities towards environmental risks, impacted or mediated, by large hydraulic infrastructures?
4. What alternatives are there to large hydraulic infrastructures, and what might be their impact on urban citizens’ resilience in the Asian region? What are the barriers to the uptake of these alternatives for city-making in the Asian region?

GUEST SPEAKERS

Prof Peter H. Gleick | Pacific Institute, USA
Prof Henning Bjornlund | Water Policy and Management, University of South Australia
Prof Sara Ahmed | Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University, India

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Assoc Prof Kong Chong HO | sochokc@nus.edu.sg
Asia Research Institute, and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

Assoc Prof Ching LEONG | ching@nus.edu.sg
Institute of Water Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore

Dr Corinne ONG | sppcopp@nus.edu.sg  
Institute of Water Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore