City Water Matters: Cultures, Practices and Entanglements of Urban Water—An Introduction

Abstract

This book argues for the importance of water as a cultural object, and as a source of complex meanings in everyday life, bringing cultural practices to the fore, and arguing for their embeddedness in a wider social, political, economic and technological context. Water is emblematic of the powerful interconnections between human/non-human, and nature and culture. Water has the capacity to make things happen, to bring new socialities and publics into being. Water is an intrinsic part of everyday life, often invisible in its workings and taken for granted, only entering public discourse and visibility when it becomes a matter of concern. Water is highly contested and deeply political, implicated in relations of power and constitutive of social, cultural and spatial differences and a site of complex meanings.