Producing Citizenship Through Infrastructure: The Political Materiality of Water Access in Urban Chile

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between water infrastructures and the identity dimension of citizenship. By combining concepts from urban political ecology and Foucault’s work on governmentality, this paper offers an analytical framework of hydro-social regimes of water access, which acknowledges both the material and discursive dimensions of urban infrastructures. This framework is used to analyse water access in the self-built neighbourhoods of Antofagasta, Chile. It is argued that urban infrastructures are crucial to the identity construction of urban dwellers as citizens, as they produce subjects with a particular sense of social belonging. This paper thus contributes to debates on urban infrastructures and citizenship in the context of self-built housing on the urban periphery