Presentation short abstract

A poststructuralist urban political ecological approach helps analyse how the everyday state shapes urban water governance in the city of Udaipur in India. The focus is on touristic imaginaries shaping the waterscape of Udaipur, including River Ayad and interconnected lake system.

Presentation long abstract

This paper focuses on the production of urban environments in South Asian cities, through an analysis of the urban waterscape in the city of Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. The governance of River Ayad and its interconnected lake system in Udaipur is central to shaping the city’s touristic urban imaginaries, which has implications for its society, culture, economy and the urban environment. Water governance is influenced by a range of actors - both state and non-state – which leads to complex governance patterns which have underpinnings of power relations (Cornea et al., 2017, Swyngedouw, 1999; Truelove, 2019). Such power gets enacted and reproduced in everyday practices and micro-politics of the actors and is an integral aspect of urban environmental politics (Anand, 2017; Gandy, 2022; Ranganathan, 2014). I conducted an ethnographic governance study (Cornea et al., 2017) to analyse the diverse powers, rationalities, knowledges and interactions between state and non-state actors, adopting a poststructuralist urban political ecological lens which enables studying the diffused and dispersed forms of power in everyday governance. The findings suggest that the power relations between municipal actors and smart city experts, and the knowledge politics between state actors and environmental activists interplay to form specific forms of urban environmental governance in the city. This study highlights the challenges of urban water governance in water-stressed, small cities across the post-colonial developing world, which are grappling with pressures from population growth, rapid urbanization, and climate change.