University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses December 2020 PRECARIOUS PIPES: GOVERNANCE, INFORMALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF ACCESS IN KARACHI Usmaan M. Farooqui University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Comparative Politics Commons, and the Urban Studies and Planning Commons Recommended Citation Farooqui, Usmaan M., "PRECARIOUS PIPES: GOVERNANCE, INFORMALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF ACCESS IN KARACHI" (2020). Doctoral Dissertations. 2017. https://doi.org/10.7275/18961339 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2017 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses PRECARIOUS PIPES: GOVERNANCE, INFORMALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF ACCESS IN KARACHI Usmaan M. Farooqui Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Comparative Politics Commons, and the Urban Studies and Planning Commons PRECARIOUS PIPES: GOVERNANCE, INFORMALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF ACCESS IN KARACHI A Dissertation Presented by USMAAN MASOOD FAROOQUI Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2020 Political Science © Copyright by Usmaan Masood Farooqui 2020 All Rights Reserved PRECARIOUS PIPES: GOVERNANCE, INFORMALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF ACCESS IN KARACHI A Dissertation Presented by USMAAN MASOOD FAROOQUI Approved as to style and content by: _____________________________ Regine A. Spector, Chair _____________________________ Timothy Pachirat, Member _____________________________ Lisa Björkman, Member _____________________________ Jesse H. Rhodes, Chair of the Faculty Department of Political Science DEDICATION For Abba and Amma ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is the product of a transnational group of people who have contributed their time, ideas, and actions towards a sometimes ambiguous goal. I offer my sincerest gratitude to them here for helping me bring that goal to fruition. First, I wish to thank my dissertation committee. My chair, Regine A. Spector, has helped me develop this project from the very beginning, throughout all its meandering twists and turns, and to its final form here. Regine has provided innumerous forms of support as a mentor throughout my time at the University of Massachusetts. But, most importantly, she has always pushed me to think about my reasons for writing this dissertation. I thank her for this grounding. I am also indebted to Timothy Pachirat without whose advice navigating my hometown of Karachi as a researcher would be impossible. Conversations with him reminded me to look everywhere for answers that were not forthcoming. I thank him for helping me see familiar contexts in a new light. Finally, I am deeply appreciative of the guidance I received from Lisa Björkman. Her truly unique insights into South Asian life and politics gave this work depth. I thank her for helping me make Karachi relevant. The process of writing the dissertation would be far less interesting without the help of Eric N. Sippert. In him, I have found a challenging academic rival and a lifelong friend. This work is a product of (mostly civil) disagreements we have had in graduate school about every topic conceivable. It is also equally a product of the words of support he offered me when he knew I needed them the most. I also want to thank members of the Department of Political Science at UMass. My Ph.D. cohort, Kira Tait, Beki Margalit, Luz Maria, Mary Mackie and Zack Albert welcomed me to a far-away place in 2014 and v helped me make it a home in those early years. With all their help and advice, the department staff and in particular Jennie Southgate, Emily White and Hind Elkalai made it possible to navigate the bureaucratic complexities of being an international student. I am also deeply grateful to Kevin Young who, though not directly involved in this project, was a truly wonderful faculty mentor throughout my time at graduate school. The fieldwork for this project was facilitated by generous grants from the UMass Department of Political Science, the UMass Graduate School, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. A timely writing fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies was critical in completing this work. I am thankful to these organizations, and in particular Heidi Bauer-Clapp at the UMass Graduate School, for having confidence in my proposed research. An earlier version of chapter four appeared in Urban Studies and I am thankful to the reviewers for offering their feedback on rough drafts. I have a large family full of colorful characters that, unbeknownst to them, left their mark on this dissertation. Naina and Nana are the best grandparents in the world. They spent hours listening to me talk about social science theories with nothing but encouragement. My aunts and uncles – Kaka, Abid Khalu, Amir Mama, Atif Mama, Asdi Mama, Huma Phuppu, Shaheed Phuppa, Zeba Phuppo and Apu – in always expressing their interest in this work, were constant sources of support. My cousins, Ali, Alina, and Affan helped me laugh when fieldwork was most difficult. Arman, my childhood friend, was the best company in Karachi. And, in reminding me that there is always light at the end of the tunnel (in that special way only siblings can) Apa, Sara, Naquiya and Bhai, helped me keep my feet on the ground. My parents, Ahmed and Yasmin Farooqui, have always supported my trajectory in life, even though they might have had different ideas about what I should do with it. In nurturing me, instilling in me a sense of right and wrong, and then allowing me to pursue what I thought was important from a very young age, they have done (and continue to vi do) what I know is perhaps one of the most difficult things for a father and mother. I thank them unreservedly with all my love and all my heart for the basic and not-so-basic opportunities they have afforded me. In what seems like the most unlikely turn of events, I found my life partner Alexandria J. Nylen thousands of miles from home. Since then, she has remained my one true constant. She is the invisible force that binds these pages together. Our non-human companions do more for us than we can ever imagine. I am truly pleased to know and care for Thor the cat. His timely demands for food and enigmatic personality made it possible to smile on some of the most difficult writing days. Finally, I offer my sincerest gratitude to the participants in this study for opening up their homes and lives to scrutiny from me. Though I cannot name you here, I hope that I represent your collective and individual voices in the pages that follow. vii ABSTRACT PRECARIOUS PIPES: GOVERNANCE, INFORMALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF ACCESS IN KARACHI SEPTEMBER 2020 USMAAN MASOOD FAROOQUI B.A., UNIVERSITY OF EDINGURGH M.Sc., LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Regine A. Spector This dissertation looks beyond narratives of the chaotic urban south to examine the politics of city planning and everyday service access in Pakistan. I draw on a case study of Karachi, what is perceived to be one of the world’s most unruly cities, to demonstrate how planning enables the representation of political order. Drawing on field research in the city, I also explore the materialities, subjectivities, and histories of service access that remain uncaptured by official discourses in this context. I begin by tracing how Karachi’s postcolonial planners have, for decades, described the rapidly expanding city as an object of correction. While early master plans sought to order and control Karachi’s physical form, planners in the 1980s, in line with a shift in global development ideas, sought to normalize already existing urban spaces through legalization and bulk service provision. Advocating “slum improvement” policies, planners thus presented the so-called informal city as integral to urban renewal, development, and governance. In doing so, planners both discursively produced the viii formal and informal city and presented this dichotomy as crucial to Karachi’s urban order. In contemporary Karachi, however, such representations of the city in artifacts such as maps and government ordinances, elide and exist alongside ongoing processes of urban stasis and transformation. I therefore subsequently turn attention to everyday politics in the city by exploring how Karachi’s residents access a service crucial for survival: water. Drawing on seven months of field research, I show how the urban poor and low-level state officials navigate and reproduce the city’s fickle hydrologies. I also focus on how Karachi’s residents utilize the formalized domain of electoral politics as an avenue for material claim making in order to counteract their everyday precarity. Karachi’s postcolonial past and millennial present shows how political authority discursively (re)constitutes itself out of the very materialities that challenge its existence. The everyday coping mechanisms and temporally-bound electoral politics of