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Paper short abstract

Urban waters in Ho Chi Minh City rarely stay within neat boundaries. Following groundwater, I show how partial traces and institutional cuts shape what becomes knowable and actionable, and use salvage speculation to ask whose knowledge and labour are drawn in, transformed, and given authority.

Paper long abstract

Groundwater rarely appears as a bounded object of urban governance. In Ho Chi Minh City, it becomes perceptible through leakages, damaged infrastructures, pumping records, subsidence and changing relations with sewage and drainage. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article uses groundwater as an entry point into the relational constitution of the urban underground.

I argue that governing the underground depends on speculative articulations that connect partial traces to relations extending beyond immediate observation. These articulations take shape across administrative and epistemic cuts that structure who can establish consequential relations between what is observed and what remains uncertain. I use salvage speculation for forms of speculative articulation that depend on observations, knowledge, labour and other capacities generated in relations they do not themselves produce or fully control. As these contributions are taken up and transformed into forms that can guide maintenance, regulation and intervention, the authority to speculate does not necessarily remain with those who produced them.

Across infrastructural functioning, water cleanliness and subterranean monitoring, the article shows how the politics of speculation lies in the cuts through which the underground becomes governable, in whose capacities are drawn across them, and in who can make the resulting articulations consequential.