Life After Water: Detroit, Flint and the Postindustrial Politics of Health

In the United States, the reorganization of municipal services in postindustrial cities threatens to erode foundational infrastructures of public health and safety. This is exemplified by the rapid regression of access to safe and affordable water and sanitation in cities across the state of Michigan, most notably in Detroit and Flint. In a region considered to be one of the most water-secure in the world, longstanding issues with water contamination from industrial toxins are converging with currents of economic crisis, climate-related changes, and contemporary anxieties about the future of cities. This dissertation explores these emerging forms of water insecurity as a means of examining contemporary transformations in urban biopolitics. It is based on fieldwork conducted intermittently between March 2015 and July 2018, with full-time engagements from June to August 2016 and November 2016 to March 2017. In conjunction with ethnographic research, I participated in two community-led public health studies assessing the impacts of the Detroit water shutoffs. Drawing on grassroots critique and critical race theory, I show how the legacy of racial residential segregation and regional power are reworked into contemporary urban environment through water in new ways. I extend Michel Foucault’s generative theory of biopolitics to consider how contemporary security techniques seek to contain – but often proliferate – the kinds of threats to “life as usual” posed by emerging and endemic water contaminants. I also examine the fear that social security administrations work to ‘secure’ the separation of families from water, and each other, as protections of the welfare state are dismantled, making the privatization of water possible in theory and practice.Social movements and social theorists alike argue that urban water infrastructures have become increasingly important sites for rethinking the ethics and politics of collective living in the aftermath of industrial decline. This dissertation traces how those excluded from the city’s water – despite their claims to citizenship, property, and human rights – nevertheless engage in urban water politics, assembling water just as (and precisely where) water overflows the bounds of modern infrastructure ideals and neoliberal governance. These sites of excess and overflow point to spaces of possibility for new socialities and new types of politics, engaged under the oft-made claim that “Water is Life.” Attention to the physics and politics of hydrosocial assemblage opens up considerations for how life might be assembled otherwise