“You Can’t Stop Development”: Hydraulic Shambles

While the disjuncture between the city’s built form and its water pipes seems to suggest that the world-class city would also be a dry city, this is not the case; the city’s new malls, gated communities, shimmering office towers, and glittering hotels do, generally speaking, get water. The imperative to make water available to the world-class city—notwithstanding the linear constraints of time and the material constraints of pipes—has thrown “the entire infrastructure in a shambles.” This chapter is concerned with “the shambles”: the technologies, hydrologies, and imaginaries that work to make (or attempt to make) water available to the rapidly changing space of the city despite the materialities of the pipes.