Infrastructures are the skeletons of the built environment. This interdisciplinary panel probes the effects and meanings of infrastructures and the conflicts surrounding them. Railways, highways, electricity and phone networks, and sewage and water systems are large-scale undertakings that order space and reconfigure the experience of everyday life. These undertakings mold and order local, urban, national, or regional space and make it amenable to various forms of manipulation including the circulation of people, commodities, and waste. They also give new meanings to this circulation, be it a sign of prosperity, a developmentalist necessity, a prerequisite for the creation of a national market, or an expression of transformations of corporeal and bodily regimes. Because infrastructures require the involvement of experts, they also make visible expert power over society. At the same time, they are often the sites of social tension and resistance, be it unexpected usage and redefinition, or contestations involving competing claims to knowledge. Infrastructures bring to the surface questions of political economy and the allocation of benefits and its contradictions. They raise questions regarding what is public and what is private. Historically, they gave rise to rival arguments about monopolies and corporate accountability. The scholarly literature on infrastructure enjoyed a welcomed revival during the last decade. This panel seeks to bring this literature to bear on the study of the Middle East and to further develop its analytical tools.
The first paper examines the transformations of urban water supply in British colonial Cairo. Focusing on a controversy over the quality of potable water, the paper argues that taste became the unlikely site of epistemological rivalry between official experts and lay Egyptians. The second paper narrates the end of empire in Egypt through the story of the administration of state railways. It explores how railways functioned as a crucial element in the managerial architecture of British colonialism, connecting Egypt in concrete and uneven ways to the larger world of empire. The third paper examines the American-funded highway construction in Turkey in the aftermath of World War II as a site where competing visions of modernization, as proposed by engineers, social scientists, and policymakers, collided and colluded. Unlike the first three, the final paper examines the breakdown of infrastructure. It interrogates how understanding the relationship between garbage and urban infrastructures in twenty-first century Palestine helps us rethink the relationship between infrastructural breakdown in fields dominated by experts, political authority, and uncertainty.
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Shehab Ismail
This paper investigates urban water supply in British colonial Cairo between 1882 and 1936. It looks at the growing conflict between traditional water carriers (sing. saqqa) and the concessionary Cairo Water Company, which provided filtered water to Cairo’s moneyed classes starting from 1865. The company slightly lowered its rates and installed free water taps in a number of poor neighborhoods only after strenuous negotiations with colonial authority in response to outbreaks of cholera and typhoid fever. The cornerstone of this paper is a controversy concerning the taste and purity of potable water that broke up between 1905 and 1910 when the water company altered its method of intake at the behest of the government, drawing water from artesian wells instead of the Nile. The majority of the Egyptian population of Cairo adamantly refused to drink from the new water supply, reportedly calling it “dead water” and reverting to the water carriers. Government officials, British advisors, and foreign scientists deplored that instead of being recognized as a purely scientific issue regarding chemical and bacteriological qualities, urban water supply became a “sentimental” issue involving the superstitions of the “natives.” Eventually, the government negotiated with the company once again to revert to water drawn directly from the Nile after urban elites and middle class effendis joined the chorus of complaints. I argue that the controversy pitted lay against scientific claims to knowledge. Against expert knowledge that was anchored in trust in science, the unforeseen opposition to the new water supply spoke in the name of a rival epistemology, according to which taste provided direct knowledge of what was healthy. Traditionally seen by many philosophers as the most subjective of the senses, taste became the perplexing site of tenacious resistance to one of the colonial regime’s pet modernizing schemes.
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Ahmad Shokr
This paper narrates the end of empire in Egypt through the story of the administration of state railways. It will explore how railways functioned as a crucial element in the managerial architecture of British colonialism, connecting Egypt in very concrete, and uneven, ways to the larger world of empire. Railways transported cash crops (mainly Egyptian cotton) for export into the world economy; they enabled the extension of British control over equipment procurement; and they ensured the Egyptian state's regular payment of its international debt obligations). The paper will examine how, in the twentieth century, these mundane processes and arrangements of railway administration became sites where the meanings of self-rule and the technical possibilities of national independence were worked out as Egypt, beginning in the 1920s, underwent a gradual process of managerial disarticulation as a territorial component of the British Empire.
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Begum Adalet
This paper describes the modernizing, civilizing, and democratizing tasks assigned to highways, as well as their unexpected consequences and unforeseen usages. After World War II, American funds and expertise were used to build a highway network across Turkey, which facilitated an unprecedented sense of mobility, and captured the imagination of American and Turkish modernization theorists alike. I draw upon parliamentary debates, newspaper articles, and engineering journals to show how scholars, experts, and officials on both sides of the Atlantic construed the provision of roads to the Turkish countryside, as a civilizational necessity, one that would enhance economic development, education, and access to an “open society.” The proponents of the program believed that roads would grant access to otherwise remote corners of the nation, especially areas populated by Kurdish minorities, and that highways would shrink distances between different parts of the country, and thus allow its subjects to participate in a shared national space and economy. While the beneficiaries were expected to imagine themselves as part of a unified nation consisting of modern subjects, the impact of roads, maps, and buses often exceeded the intentions of their providers and overflowed their expectations. Modernist visions of the highway system providing a path to a prosperous and open future were thus frustrated by local mistranslations, material roadblocks, and the misuse of vehicles and equipment, opening the very category of the modern up to contestation, appropriation, and redefinition.
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Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins
It is often argued that infrastructures become visible, and matters of political concern, when they break down. In twenty-first century Palestine, as in much of the Global South, it is just as common if not more so for the infrastructures of waste management to exist in states of suspension, unfulfilled promise, semi-functioning and breakdown. Yet unlike places like Lebanon and Egypt, Palestine has not seen widespread protests—or much public talk—in response to the pileups of trash on sidewalks, overflowing dumpsters and mounds of debris, plastic bags and bottles littering areas around checkpoints that dominate the landscape. Waste’s infrastructural failures are an “unmarked” everyday experience West Bank residents seem to shrug off or “get by.” Responses to wastes’ “successful” management (e.g. when landfills are built) garner no greater attention, however, whereas new housing projects, roads and telecommunications infrastructure do so, and widely. This suggests there may be something specific to the material and semiotic features of twenty-first century garbage in Palestine that distinguishes responses to its infrastructures’ breakdowns from political dynamics arising in other infrastructural contexts. It also suggests that waste infrastructures’ relationship to the political authority of experts mandated to manage the movements of garbage through Palestinian space (and never beyond its Oslo-defined borders) cannot be understood by asking normative questions about the relative success or failure of waste management as “development” or “environmental governance.” Nor can it therefore be assumed that residents’ acts of moving discards through that space (e.g. placing day old bread or soda cans on city ledges) can be read as direct responses to perceived municipal or Palestinian Authority failure, as “insubordination” to expert directives or, as many experts argue, as lack of “environmental awareness.” Based on over two years of ethnographic research, this paper will analyze trash pileups and the everyday movements of abandoned objects through the cities of Jenin (where the PA opened a sanitary landfill in 2007) and Ramallah (where landfill plans have been stalled since the 1980s) during those periods of suspension before municipal pickup and disposal. It will ask how understanding the relationship between modern garbage and urban infrastructures in twenty-first century Palestine helps us rethink the relationship between infrastructure, breakdown and political authority in infrastructural fields dominated by experts, trash and uncertainty in the Middle East and beyond.
