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Short abstract:

This paper uses Detroit’s 2014 mass shutoff-for-nonpayment event – the largest residential water shutoff in US history – to examine how governments and publics differently and interactively understand and respond to such events, investigating the infrastructural politics that shutoffs illuminate.

Long abstract:

Drinking water service provision is a core function of government, exemplifying states’ use of infrastructures to construct and relate to constituencies. How and for whom water utilities (mal)function indicates the social and political values embedded in infrastructural systems. When water provision falls short, governments appeal to infrastructures’ technicality to shirk responsibility and depoliticize the social impacts of infrastructural failures. This paper uses Detroit’s 2014 mass shutoff-for-nonpayment event – the largest residential water shutoff in US history – to examine how governments and publics differently and interactively understand and respond to such events. Previous studies of water shutoffs and inequality highlight implications for water security, public health, and psychosocial wellbeing. I add to this work by investigating the infrastructural politics that shutoffs illuminate: how physical water infrastructures hold sociopolitical roles and meanings, which shutoffs – an experience of "infrastructural exclusion" – reveal. Through this prism of infrastructural politics, I use historical document and media analysis to scope the history of drinking water politics in Detroit, understand key points of contention in the debate, and characterize the arguments of government and resident-activist actors. I identify key themes of controversy that emerge as resident-activists (re)politicize shutoffs, while government depoliticizes and “technocratizes” them using anti-poor fiscal rationalities. This paper draws on STS, environmental justice, water policy, and urban politics work. In so doing, I use the “infrastructural imaginaries” concept to advance interdisciplinary scholarship, and demonstrate its utility for policy analysis and advocacy toward constructing more equitable water provision systems in Detroit and beyond.