FIT FOR WHAT?
Karachi's water crisis at the intersection of neoliberalism and infrastructure disparities
Ahmad Tahir
fitness
Fitness in its colloquial understanding is the condition of being physically strong and healthy (Cambridge Dictionary, 2013) and is generally achieved through various exercises. Fitness today has transformed into a culture and a marker for personal growth. Contemporary fitness has disassociated itself from its obligation and the historical connotation of obligatory health exercise and has become an indicator of maintaining social status. People go to gyms with the goal of fitness and subject their bodies to experiments to reach a certain threshold that can define not only the individual health status but also class status.
rise of individualism under neo-liberalism
This emerging fitness regime has parallels with various other cultural phenomena that lead to an individualistic conception of human identity, in which self-improvement and individual well-being are valorized above the community (Llamas-Rodriguez, 2018). This is similar to the neoliberal understanding of self, where everyone is an entrepreneur and has the ability to exploit their human capital. According to Michel Foucault, neoliberalism was not confined to economics and governmental politics but also represented a scheme for the reorganization of society and conduct of the self. As T.W. Schultz states it, "Not all investment in human capital is for future earnings alone. Some of it is for future well-being in forms that are not captured in the earnings stream of the individual in whom investment is made" (Schultz, 1962). Physical improvement of the body becomes important in the conception of the neoliberal self, as it defines the social status of a person, and therefore the maintenance and improvement of the body image becomes important as a means to appreciate one's own human capital.
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In neoliberalism, unequal economic resources and polarization of rights to various services are not considered as a problem to be solved, but as natural and necessary for progress (McGuigan, 2014). Under neoliberal governmentality, the individualistic concept of fitness becomes a goal to be achieved by the population with its own struggles, ignoring the reality of the economic position of the various, not so homogeneous, groups of the population. Although fitness as a goal to be achieved is not isolated, neoliberalism treats it as a goal that ignores the fact that physical fitness also depends on various other factors.
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Therefore, the individualistic concept of fitness only applies to a group of people who are able to set aside time and economic resources for the pursuit of fitness. As Rodriguez describes it, "the withdrawal of state assistance in its citizens' well-being has led to the commodification of personal health and to the development of a well-oiled fitness industry" (Llamas-Rodriguez, 2018). Now, fitness is something that every individual must strive for and is not available to everyone.
fitness apparatus and role of infrastructure
Infrastructure is defined as the basic physical and organizational structures that are needed or the operation of a society of enterprise (Oxford Dictionary, 2018). As physical elements, infrastructure not only facilitates the flow of goods and services that constitute the economy to organize the market, but also regulates the flow of people, ideas and their behavior by enabling their exchange over space. Infrastructure comprises the architecture of circulation, which literally forms the undergirding of modern societies, and it creates the ambient environment of daily life (Larkin, 2013). As Judith Butler explains it, "For a body to move, it must usually have a surface of some kind, and it must have at its disposal whatever technical support allows for movement to take place. No one moves without a supportive environment and set of technologies" (Butler, 2016). Infrastructure plays the role of this supportive environment for the body, enabling it to function in a certain way and to perceive the idea of being modern and progressive.
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At present, infrastructure development is influenced by the process of neoliberalization, because it brings into play the question of return on investments into play. Gandy Describes , "A key dilemma behind the shift to an increasingly market-driven conception of urban infrastructure is that the elements of fixed capital with the greatest "sunk costs" generate significantly lower rates of return than other infrastructure networks such as telecommunications" (Gandy, 2004). Based on these factors, neoliberal policies prioritize and categorize infrastructure that is worth investing in and where it should be specifically provided, and in this process some of the welfare provisions of infrastructure are left behind for not being too profitable. Since the role of state intervention is already reduced, the governments in developing countries do not invest in universal access policies because it is easier to leave it to the market.
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The labour performed due to a lack of infrastructure is similar to that for fitness, making daily life into a strict cross-fit training regime where you have to perform every day. The inability to perform this labour will make you unfit for survival. Because of the necessity of these actions, they are reduced to physical labour of struggle and social disparities. The necessity of undertaking fitness labour is related to the freedom and will of the individual to regulate his or her potential through strict exercise schedules, but the labour performed due to lack of infrastructure has a different intent, i.e. survival. Such labour is both paid and unpaid, is made visible or invisible, and needs to be understood through the broader set of social relations in which it is positioned. (Luis Andueza, 2020 ). This is due to the fact that the fitness apparatus of modern life is enabled by various infrastructures that are not limited to the gym but also extend to the basic functioning of modern life in general. At the point where the physical infrastructure ceases to exist, the body has to become a form of infrastructure that undergoes the labour of various tasks, and fitness lies between the physical infrastructure and bodily infrastructure.
water infrastructure, fitness and health
While all the different infrastructures help the bodies to operate in space, we can focus our further progress on water infrastructure as the focus of our discussion. The reason for this focus is the ongoing water crisis in Karachi, Pakistan, which helps us to deconstruct the concept of fitness and understand the way in which it generates various class struggles.
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Water is indispensable stuff for maintaining the metabolism, not only of our human bodies, but also of the wider social fabric. The very sustainability of cities and the practices of everyday life that constitute ‘the urban’ are predicated upon and conditioned by the supply, circulation, and elimination of water (Swyngedouw, 2004).
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Water is the basic element for life and the infrastructure that carries it plays an important role in the constitution of modern life. Therefore the discussion of fitness in relation to water infrastructure becomes relevant here. It is not wrong to say that uninterrupted access to water enables individuals to perform, which would include physical fitness, while lack of water infrastructure forces people to participate in the physical labour of fetching water. Thus, infrastructure becomes a delineator of the power people exercise over their bodies.
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Water infrastructure is not only related to the physical fitness of the individual, but also to the biological fitness of the population when the health is considered, since water is the foundation of public health on which governments have primarily focused when building water infrastructure in many cities. The definition of fitness suggests that it is the condition of being healthy, and the justification for the scope of responsibility to exercise is also health. A further extension of the counting habit of exercise gives health a precise economic character. It determines the numbers for the days and hours of life (Greif, 2016). If the lack of something essential such as water infrastructure affects the health of the population, it can be argued that it also affects the fitness of the population.
the case of Karachi's water crisis
To challenge the understanding of fitness through the lens of infrastructure disparities, the case of the water crisis in Karachi serves as a good focal point. Karachi is the largest city in Pakistan, and 60 percent of the city's population lives in slums that lack basic infrastructure such as water, sanitation and electricity. On the other hand, Karachi, like other cities, is home to an elite class of people who live in upscale neighborhoods and enjoy a relatively smooth functioning of water infrastructure and fitness activities. Water is therefore not only a material element in Karachi, but also a critical dimension to citizenship rights of the various social classes.
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Karachi doesn't have a river flowing through the city, so water has to be pumped from the Indus River 130 km away, 40 percent of the water that is pumped is either lost or stolen (Toppa, 2016). Most slums in Karachi either do not have municipal water lines or are dry, while elite districts have access to an adequate water supply. Those who do not get water rely on private sources, commonly known in Karachi as the "water tanker mafia", who siphon water from state pipes and sell it to the rich making it a valuable commodity (Hashim, 2017). In addition, marginalized neighborhoods have a poor and old infrastructure where clean water gets mixed with sewage. Drinking dirty water affects the physical fitness of individuals and the biological fitness of the population, while at the same time creating serious health concerns.
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In order to understand the uneven distribution of water infrastructure, its historical development should also be taken into consideration. The first large-scale development of water infrastructure in Karachi took place during the colonial times with the construction of 15 wells for the water supply to the Military Cantonment area (Ali, 2019). The primary reason for this development was the initiative to improve sanitation and prevention of epidemics (Mushtaq, 2009). Later in the twentieth century, these wells were then connected to certain parts of the city. However the access remained highly uneven with only the well-off being able to afford the water infrastructure in their homes and the pattern still continues today. Karachi grew rapidly in the 20th century, but the development of universal water infrastructure remained incomplete, leading to fragmented forms of modernity within the city.
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During the same period, the British government in England faced problems due to the spread of diseases that threatened the health of the entire population. In order to combat these problems, the British government found a complex coordination between technological, social, political and economic interests to build a universal water and sanitation system. However, the approach of the same government in India was different. The water supply system was initially developed for the British enclaves and later provided for selected parts of the city. The reason for this was the reluctance of the British government to invest in overseas colonies, for whom any "internal improvement" had to be profitable. (Gandy 2008).
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After the partition of British India, Karachi's demographic and economic development required extension of the water system, but politics in Pakistan was caught up in the political agenda of the ruling class, which repeatedly distracted from providing basic services in poor neighbourhoods. Today, the elite monopoly on the provision of public services in Karachi is developing from the successful occupation of the post-colonial state apparatus and the continuation of colonial dualities in development.
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the disparities of today and neoliberalism
One of the major issues that infrastructure development faces today is that the market decides which infrastructures are fit to be invested in. For a market driven model, a rapid return on investment is the decisive factor in selecting the types of infrastructure to be developed. That is why we see that telecommunications infrastructure is being developed rapidly, while water infrastructure is non-existent in many parts of the city. As a result, what we see is a concrete divide rather than a digital divide in the corporal experience of space, characterised by persistent inequalities in access to basic services.
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The water Water infrastructure also continues to experience deficiencies today because, unlike past health crises that affected rich and poor alike, the contemporary threats to public health are restricted to poor zones of the city. These disparities in public health also persist due to technological and scientific advancement that enable Karachi's elite to insulate themselves from environmental and health concerns. The invention of domestic water filtration systems is an example of such technology.
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Universal water and sanitation systems require that urban space be both homogeneous and spatially coherent, which is in contrast to the extreme polarization and spatial fragmentation observed in Karachi. Even today, the development of water infrastructure is not limited to fiscal realities, but also requires managerial expertise in urban governance. Such a development would therefore require the government to expand its capacities and include the health of individuals and the population among its objectives. These widening inequalities in the distribution and quality of urban services such as water supply are part of a process of urban polarization in which the state appears to play only a minimal role in the face of pressure towards further liberalization, deregulation and fragmentation. The state itself becomes irrelevant to this process, as it continues to play a pivotal role in facilitating the process of globalization (Sassen, 1998).
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This is clearly an act of state restructuring through neoliberal forces, in which the role of the state changes from welfare distribution of services to market facilitation, resulting into 'politics of forgetting" and "social segregation" being instituted in urban space. Such a political process renders certain groups invisible and forgotten within the dominant national political culture (Fernandes, 2004). Successive governments in Pakistan have neglected services in favour of ensuring weak regulation. This has not only led to weak provision of public services, but has also allowed market forces to invade infrastructure policy. Public infrastructure has deteriorated to such an extent that, according to neoliberal principles, it can be ascertained that the public sector is inherently unsuited to operate these corporations and services, but the private sector is (Javed, 2018). In this process, public consent has been influenced and transformed into the conviction of the neoliberal philosophy that the private sector is always better than the public sector because it brings competition, market prices and efficiency.
conclusion
Taking Karachi as an example, we can question the role of the state in the uneven development of infrastructure to show how the current economic model, which promotes individualistic concepts of well-being, creates deficiencies and different labour practices. At the same time, we can question the notion of fitness through class reading, when human labor must replace infrastructure inequality in order to survive. Class reading also helps us to understand the role of market forces in infrastructure development and the contradictions in the concept of fitness.
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Neoliberal governmentality assumes that there is an inherent legacy of infrastructure that can be operated according to the market driven model, but Karachi's case shows that infrastructure becomes a site of confrontation with market and neoliberal forces when there is no inherited legacy of evenly distributed services, while the majority of the population find themselves marginalized because they are not considered fit to be invested in. In this process, infrastructure becomes a medium of class struggle, while "fitness" presupposes that bodies have all the infrastructural and technological support that they need.
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Fitness as a discourse under neoliberalism does not take into account the fragility of individual bodily subjects who are dependent on other bodies and support networks. To understand fitness, a body cannot be fully dissociated from infrastructural and environmental conditions of living. Dependence on infrastructural support reveals a specific vulnerability that a body has when it is not supported (Butler, 2016), and with extreme social polarization and spatial fragmentation, there can be no homogenized form of fitness that different groups of people can enjoy, nor can it be achieved without ignoring the physical support relationships that bodies need to thrive.
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