The Flaky Accretions of Infrastructure: Why Pune’s Water is "Smart" Before it is Functional

TL;DR

In Pune, India, the municipal water supply is a "live bomb." This paper argues that "Smart City" initiatives often fail by assuming infrastructure is a centralized, invisible utility. Through an ethnographic lens, the authors show how residents use "jugaads" (hacks), secret plumbing, and "tanker mafias" to create water security. In this context, citizenship isn't just a legal right—it's something people do every day through their pipes and pumps.

The "Urban User" and the Myth of the Functional Monopoly

Western design often views the "urban user" through a clean lens: a resident who pays taxes and expects services to "just work" in the background. When a pipe breaks, it’s an "infrastructural breakdown."

However, in Pune, the municipal water infrastructure doesn't just "break"—it is perpetually broken, or at least perpetually insufficient. The city has grown faster than its pipes can reach. As a result, the "Urban User" must also be an "Urban Engineer."

Methodology: Hydraulic Citizenship

The authors adopt the concept of Hydraulic Citizenship. This isn't about having a passport; it's about the effort required to be recognized by city agencies and the literal physical labor of getting water.

• The Struggle of Gravity: In high-rise apartments, getting water is a "tug-of-war" with gravity. Residents keep taps open as "alarms" to signal when the intermittent supply finally arrives.
• The Outsider Penalty: Renters and migrants are often excluded from the social infrastructures (like WhatsApp groups) that manage water delivery, creating "second-grade" citizens.

The Core: "Flaky Accretions" and Hacked Infrastructure

The paper introduces a powerful visual and physical metaphor: Flaky Accretions. This describes infrastructure as layers of social practices, politics, and materials (pipes, buckets, chemicals) accumulated over time.

Figure 1: Temporary tanks and haphazard piping coexist with new high-rises, illustrating the "layered" nature of Pune's water system.

The Rise of the "Informal"

Because the city can't provide enough water, two major players fill the gap:

1. Water Tankers: Often called the "Tanker Mafia," these are for-profit services that residents both depend on and deeply resent.
2. Borewells: Unregulated groundwater extraction that clogs washing machines with "cement-like" salt deposits.

Results: The Resistance to "Smart" Meters

The Pune government’s push for Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) illustrates a massive gap in trust.

• The Official View: Meters create a "ground truth" to debunk "false" resident complaints.
• The Resident View: Meters are a threat. When 5,000 meters were installed, residents immediately removed 350 of them. Why? Because these "smart" fixes strip residents of their agency.

A meter doesn't account for the fact that a resident might be mixing municipal water with expensive tanker water or hard borewell water. To the resident, their "jugaads" are a hard-won mastery over a failing system.

Figure 2: The saucer-shaped growth of Pune creates a landscape where "smart" tech is applied to a fragile, vulnerable core.

Critical Insight: Infrastructure (Re-)Gained

The most striking takeaway is the authors' concept of Infrastructure (Re-)Gained. In the West, we "lose" infrastructure when it breaks. In Pune, residents "gain" infrastructure by making it invisible through their own labor—buying tanks, using acids to clear pipes, and adjusting their lives to intermittent schedules.

If a resident doesn't feel the lack of water because they have spent $500 on a private storage system, they have "regained" the infrastructure, but at a high private cost.

Conclusion: Designing for the Real City

For CSCW and HCI researchers, this paper is a warning: Stop designing for "natural monopolies" that don't exist.

• Visions of a monolithic, top-down Smart City are doomed to fail if they don't value the "hacks" and "leakages" that actually keep the city running.
• We should aim to empower "infrastructured citizenship"—supporting the ways people already manage resources, rather than trying to replace their agency with an authoritative "truth" from a sensor.

In the age of climate change and "collapse informatics," the flaky, resilient, and hacked systems of Pune might actually be a more realistic model for the future of global urbanism than the sterile visions of Silicon Valley.