Well Connected by Tessa Farmer;

Author:Tessa Farmer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Municipal Utility Embrace

As I have shown in previous chapters, the delivery of potable drinking water in Egypt has been plagued by issues of access, quality, and cost. For many decades, Egyptian systems for pricing water have resulted in charges that were too low to cover the full cost of pumping, purifying, and distributing water and far too low to cover the long-term costs of maintaining water systems and making capital investments. Overall cost recovery in 2011 was estimated at 66 percent of the outlay. Two key issues affecting the shortfall—changes to tariff structures and to workforce numbers in the water sector—were seen as politically difficult to manage before the 2011 revolution, though the situation changed after the coup d’état in 2013.

Government actors and associated experts often characterize the public’s resistance to paying for water as rooted in the popular conception of water as a gift from God and in outdated notions about the state’s obligation to provide basic services to its citizens. State attempts to argue against perceived entitlements, whether of divine or historical origin, by using the logic of infrastructural legibility are bids to render technical (Li 2007) what are deeply political and morally inflected questions. State agencies seek to substitute one discourse for another when they urge residents to frame their increasing water bills as paying not for the water itself but for the infrastructure—the pipes and pumps that deliver water to doorsteps. This deliberate attempt to shift terrains from the object moving within the system to the system itself hinges on a project of cultivating the visibility of some things while reducing attention to others—a kind of background-foreground reversal (Hetherington 2019). Please pay attention differently, the state’s argument goes.

However, my research in Ezbet Khairallah demonstrates that residents were deeply aware of the material and bureaucratic realities of water systems—a fact that should be clear after the discussion in chapter 3 of the installation of the city sewage system in Ezba. For years, residents lived every day managing the inconveniences of trenches, leaks, overflows, and expensive but weak pumps. Residents knew these systems intimately, and they saw them as dysfunctional. To be clear, inhabitants of Ezbet Khairallah did say that water is a gift of the divine, and they did believe that the state was required to provide water to citizens. But this was not the source of their unhappiness about the idea of paying some money for water services. Their discontent came from the real politics of the delivery and billing systems and the quality of the potable water they were paying for.

Work on the anthropology of infrastructure has addressed how infrastructure, and particularly the legibility of it, articulates specific political relationships. Early theorizations saw infrastructure as visible only in its absence or breakdown, reflecting the way that built environments and material or administrative systems can fade into the background of daily life (Star 1999). As Brian Larkin (2013) eloquently shows, however, the visibility of infrastructural systems spans the gamut from background to spectacle. Larkin suggests that

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