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Paper short abstract:

The outsourcing of metabolic infrastructures to peri-urban villages constitute an understudied dynamic. Research along drinking and wastewater canals in Gurgaon looks at how water produced for urban metabolism becomes implicated in the reconfiguration of socio-ecological relations in the peri-urban.

Paper long abstract:

Among the different processes of urbanization in the city's edge that precede the materiality of the city, the emergence of metabolic infrastructures of water, power, waste, etc. in the peri-urban constitute one of its most under-studied dynamic. Indian cities are increasingly 'outsourcing' their metabolic infrastructures to their peri-urban fringe, establishing a new form of social, material and political relationship between the urban and the peri-urban. Water treatment plants, drinking and wastewater canals, high-tension power lines, landfills, etc. render the peri-urban as a space saturated with the markers of urban metabolism. This displacement is driven by the logic of land prices in the city as well as the aesthetic of rendering urban metabolism subterranean or hidden from view (See Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000).

According to general bureaucratic discourse, these infrastructures are supposed to constitute a claim by the city only on peri-urban land; compensated for by land acquisition rates. I argue, however, that these infrastructures also make a secondary claim on peri-urban nature. By looking at drinking-water and waste-water canals in the peri-urban villages bordering Gurgaon city, this research argues that metabolic infrastructures of water by processes of groundwater recharge, seepage, irrigation and theft produce an unintended second nature with often profound consequences for the predominantly agrarian livelihoods in conduit villages. The canal water that is produced for urban metabolism is implicated in the reconfiguration of socio-ecological relations in the peri-urban and in the production of a particular socio-nature.

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