After the Oslo Accords (ca. 1995), Palestinian Authority waste experts were charged with protecting the environment “shared” between the occupied territories they partially governed and Israel. Experts sought to manage Palestinian wastes in the West Bank independently of Israel. Managing waste was for many a national duty in that it aimed at building Palestinians a liberated state. Waste management was also newly considered “technical” work, work therefore divorced from politics—defined as direct engagement with military occupation. As it turned out, however, there was little the PA could do to build environment-protecting infrastructures that did not involve Israel in their designing, planning, licensing, constructing and even operating stages. The “authorship” of PA infrastructures designed to be “by the nation, for the nation,” was therefore not singular. This paper examines the case of the PA’s recently halted Ramallah regional landfill plan, which had been an Israeli civil administration plan in the 1980s. Between the mid-1990s and 2014, the PA borrowed measurements designing the landfill from the earlier Israeli plans. This paper asks how experts were nevertheless able to view their work as technical and as national (and therefore not as political) while they “admitted” to borrowing designs from the occupier from whom the nation’s infrastructures would help wrest independence. My answer points to the field of what I call the “technical-national,” which emerged as a post-Oslo, local framework for understanding PA waste management reforms toward the building of a state. The technical-national can be viewed as a framework capacious enough to offer a resolution to one of the many incoherencies of statecraft attempted under military occupation. This paper also examines some of the effects of the technical-national’s emergence on the relationship between governors and governed. PA reformers’ own training recommended calculations and infrastructures alternative to the ones they had borrowed from Israel, for example. One effect of the technical-national was thus that--in defense of their borrowed plans--experts repeatedly disavowed the forms of expertise in which they themselves had been trained, when facing critical local publics. The same measurements that offered experts the possibility of governing the occupied landscape thus also rendered that governance illegitimate in the eyes of those they governed.

Within international water management circles, one of the most commonly cited reasons for poor water management is ignorance. People do not understand the scarcity of water or the most efficient methods of utilizing it, so the argument goes, and hence use it wastefully. The solution, therefore, is to raise awareness. This paper examines the idea of awareness raising as a route to improved water governance through the case of Egypt. In Egypt, management of the limited water of the Nile, which provides 96% of the country’s water, has become a critical concern. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with farmers, irrigation engineers, government officials, and development practitioners, I explore the common refrain that Egyptian farmers, who use 90% of the country’s water, need more awareness (wa‘ai). I look at how efforts to raise awareness are employed in initiatives to promote modern irrigation, establish water user associations, and encourage adaptation to climate change. I look, also, at how farmers use the term “awareness” in contrasting ways. The paper demonstrates the conflicting notions of what it means to be aware and the limitations of education programs designed to improve water governance that fail to interrogate underlying assumptions about knowledge and expertise.

How does the prospect of future disaster shape the governance of the city? Istanbul is located in an active fault zone with a long history of devastating earthquakes, and the majority of its fifteen million inhabitants live and work in potentially unsound buildings. The deadly earthquakes that struck the Marmara region in 1999 and eastern Turkey in 2011 generated widespread anxiety about Istanbul’s vulnerability to a similar disaster, and gave rise to a range of state and nongovernmental efforts to prepare for the coming earthquake. This paper examines the technopolitical project of securing Istanbul’s seismic cityscape against the threat of future earthquakes through efforts to measure, map, and mitigate earthquake risk. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with engineers, architects, seismologists, disaster preparedness planners, activists, and local residents, I explore the production of earthquake risk as both a technical calculation and a political category, one that enables particular forms of intervention in the built environment. I then trace the implementation and contestation of several such interventions, including building code enforcement, a mandatory earthquake insurance policy, and the ongoing “earthquake-focused urban renewal” process created by a controversial 2012 disaster risk reduction law. These projects intersect with the broader politics of urban transformation, environmental protection, and neoliberal restructuring of the economy that have become central to the clash between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and the opposition movements that coalesced in the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in 2013. In the paper, I argue that expert knowledge about risk is mobilized both by local and national authorities to justify their governance of urban environments, and by communities of activists and residents that seek to challenge state policy and practice.

This paper examines the politicization of urban planning and architectural design in Istanbul and Cairo in comparative perspective. Through an analysis of the planning and implementation of six urban rejuvenation projects in historical neighborhoods, the paper examines the entanglement of the seemingly apolitical practice of architectural design in the production of socio-political transformation. The paper relies on a multi-sited ethnography of urban rejuvenation projects funded and planned by an international NGO, private sector entrepreneur and executive state agency in each of Istanbul and Cairo to illuminate the technopolitical dimensions of architectural design in an era of neo-liberalization and globalization. First, I trace how distinct actors work to produce divergent, and often competing, political orders through the techniques of architectural design. Then the paper traces the networks linking various actors funding urban rejuvenation in Cairo and Istanbul to local and international circles of architectural expertise emanating from distinct architectural schools. In the paper I focus especially on the different actors’ work to engineer new communal configurations they see necessary for empowering desired political orders in each neighborhood. I find that different actors justify their architectural practices in terms of empowering distinct “imagined communities” and modes of governance. For example, in Cairo I trace how the international NGO, the Aga Khan Foundation, mobilizes architectural techniques to empower a vision of autonomous communities that self-govern local neighborhoods without relying on the state, while an entrepreneurial venture, the Ismailia Consortium, decided to forego economic profits in planning the rejuvenation of an adjacent neighborhood in order to empower a vision of a unified Egyptian nation that it saw as essential for reviving the now defunct state as the main governing actor. As the actors investing in urban redesign increasingly view the architectural redesign of buildings as performative in producing desired socio-political transformation, I ultimately find that these actors work to justify new rights and privileges that should be accorded to buildings as they perform their newly-found responsibilities. Thus, the paper then ultimately explores the growing construction of new political personhood for the urban built environment in Cairo and Istanbul, and the increasing acceptance of new rights and protections for the city’s buildings and spaces as normal and desirable, even if at the expense of accepted citizen rights struggling to renegotiate that personhood.

At the face of growing concerns regarding climate change and energy scarcity, investors and governments started promoting smart and eco friendly urban developments as sites of value production and potential salvation from a seemingly apocalyptic future. As part of this trend, cities built from scratch offer a vision of technologically complex, eco-friendly, and enjoyable modes of living, and serve as engines for economic growth. In exploring this trend more closely, this talk centers on oil-rich Abu Dhabi’s eco-city project, Masdar City. Drawing on seventeen months of multi-sited fieldwork at Masdar, as well as at MIT and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn, this talk demonstrates that the Masdar City project attempts to generate “an economy of technical adjustments,” a means for vaulting over to a future where humans will continue to enjoy technological complexity, without interrogating existing social, political and economic relations. Invested in an image of the future drawn from science fiction, the economy of technical adjustments serves as a method for concentrating on modifications that bring forth promissory capital, enabling a multiplicity of actions and nonactions to be taken in the face of global environmental collapse. Yet this talk demonstrates that professionals at Masdar not only advocated such market-oriented technological solutions for climate change, but also consistently crafted justifications for their projects in light of the various contradictions that they saw exist in such a perspective.Analyzing the metaphor of “spaceship in the desert,” which the producers of Masdar City popularized, it inquires into the forms of temporality and spatiality the eco-city engendered. In this way, the talk seeks to draw attention to the alternative futures rendered invisible by the dominant drive for an economy of technical adjustments.