When Garbage Trucks Meet Tricycles: How Unofficial Practices Frustrate Global City Plans

• In Event: 254 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Paper Session. Transformations in Contemporary Urban Governance: New Theoretical and Empirical Directions

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of how urban infrastructures are co-created by state programs and unofficial practices in postcolonial state contexts in order to examine the construction and limits of contemporary urban statehood. Taking a case from Delhi, India – where expanded municipal household garbage collection programs were introduced in 2009 – the article asks why the local government decided to implement a new program despite the existence of a comprehensive informal garbage collection workforce that promoted recycling. It then goes on to examine how existing informal recyclers managed to continue working despite the threat of displacement. In doing this, the paper introduces rich ethnographic evidence collected between 2011 and 2015 and argues that rather than being a completely dominant presence, the state is itself constituted in part through the ideas and practices of everyday infrastructures such as garbage collection. In effect, the state appears neither monolithic nor hegemonic, which brings into question its ability to introduce programs for economic development, and especially to act as the backbone for neoliberal reforms.

Author

• Dana Kornberg, University of Michigan