[Reader-list] belated july posting: visible and invisible grids

[Karen Coelho]

VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE GRIDS

Harping on my theme of "something urban there is that loves a grid," I have been cataloguing the myriad grids that form the urban landscape - from fences and gates to scaffoldings and service maps -- and recognize how fully the form has insinuated itself into the everyday urban aesthetic.  While crafting solutions to urban concerns of security, separation and vertical access, it also compels our imagination and dominates our visual sense of order.  

What of the invisible?  I have been examining how the order that undergirds urban life, specifically the subterranean networks of pipes, cables and channels that constitute urban infrastructure services, the material of our daily water and energy supplies, are imagined and represented in discourses of urban change.  In cities like Chennai, which set their benchmark at "world class" based on endless expansion of service and infrastructure facilities, glimpses of the underground grid carry burdens of meanings associated with progress, growth and dynamism.  Sometimes these glimpses are not so promising, like the more-than-occasional pools of overflowing sewage that spread on the city streets, telling of a block in the underground drainage system.  But most of the urban excavations occurring in the city these days, the disemboweled streets with pipes and cables lying exposed, the torn up sidewalks and gaping trenches, are all part of a vocabulary of urban progress, indexing expansion of the cable network, broadband access for all, improvements to the water system, modernization of the electrical grid.  A few citizens remain cynical.  An activist engaged in campaigns to revitalize water bodies around Chennai commented on the symbolism of the large pipe segments lining the streets: "The government wants to show that they are doing something on the river conservation project, that they are improving the drainage system - it is nothing but show!"    

To most of us urban terrestrials, the underground grids remain conceptual, if not mythical.  Not even the engineers who built them, nor the workers who repair and handle them everyday have first-hand knowledge of the underground network in its entirety.  They have seen, built, repaired segments, and then proceeded to picture the rest in the form of grid maps by assembling pieces from narrative history, scientific interpolation, popular knowledge and guesswork.  A Metrowater engineer revealed how tenuous official knowledge of the pipe system was and how much the water officials relied on the local knowledge of residents and depot laborers: "When I am out there trying to fix a leak, it is often the public that comes and points out, 'Sir, this is where there is a joint, or a sluice valve, this is where somebody had fixed a leak some time back.' One of our biggest challenges on the job is handling water pollution, diagnosing where it comes from.  It is like detective work - hard for an engineer.  This is where the public really helps - 'Sir, there was a stormwater drain built here in 1956.'  And eighty percent of what they say is true!"   

 

This account of service maps pieced together from memories of workers and local residents was corroborated by a city councilor I interviewed: "There are no blueprints at all for the pipes that have been laid, they [the Metrowater staff] rely on us to tell them where the pipes are! They have some maps at the depots, but these are 25 years old and they are not updating them as they do all these renovations.  It is only the old employees of Metrowater who know the real facts of the pipes, where the loop lines are, where the valves are.  They tell the new AEs [Assistant Engineers]."  

 

No state bureaucracy worth its salt would be content to let things lie thus.  Getting a better grip on the hidden grid is at the core of efforts to improve the city.  In Metrowater, gathering detailed empirical data on the state of the underground pipe network is an important component of the reforms undertaken since the mid-1990s.  Data on locations, lengths, diameters and interconnections of pipes are being meticulously assembled from multiple sources.  As a retired senior engineer told me, "Information was available in bits and pieces with a number of people, now it is being compiled in one place.  Historical data, like when the pipe was laid, is not so complete.  ...Completion drawings are supposed to be done at depots, but are not usually available.  Or they get lost during transfers from one official to the other.  Now completion drawings are available with the construction wing but we need to digitize them. Only recently we have put in the stipulation that a contractor has to give detailed information on water pipes. This is one of the major assets created.  Earlier we only had very sketchy information on it."

 

He went on: "Definitely major projects now are implemented on a better data basis.  For two reasons: one, we have the data, and two, funding agencies, like the Government of India, have demanded that all projects be supported by documentation and data.  So the new procedures have been in operation since about 1998, now we won't have any problems in the future. "

Writing large this bid for closer surveillance of the underground grid, the Tamilnadu government embarked on an ambitious scheme to visualize the entire subterranean network.  As The Hindu reported in June 2005, "A three-dimensional map detailing every nook of the city and its sub-surface systems will soon be a reality.  The power supply lines, the telecom network, the water supply and sewerage lines and buildings dotting the cityscape will all be incorporated into the map, officials involved in its preparation said. The number of service lines criss-crossing the metropolis has grown tremendously as the city (sic). The service agencies - Chennai Corporation, Metrowater, Electricity Board and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited - have struggled to keep pace with the swelling demand for utilities and thus planning suffered." (The Hindu, June 6 2005).  The report claimed that the base map would be created from aerial photos taken by the Survey of India, with other information plotted into this frame, and that the map would cost a crore of rupees, at the rate of Rs. 60,000 per sq km.

But transparency and visibility cannot be bought for this price.  Available maps of the underground network -- which, by the way, are pretty elaborate and authoritative - are half-truths with a purpose.  A senior government official described to me the drainage system in the city, confessing, in her characteristically pithy style, that official representations of the grid misrepresented the real situation: ".In Choolaimedu a brand new [sewage pumping] station was constructed, but when we went to the slum near there, it was just covered in shit, there was shit everywhere, even inside the pumping station.  The station was not functioning at capacity.  Nobody was taking sewage connections!!  It was just too expensive!  We claim that the city is 90% sewered, but in reality this figure does not make sense because the main sewage lines may cover 90% of the area, but not all houses are connected to this system." 

 

Available maps remain schematic and speculative not only because they reflect the planner's wishful thinking, or deficiencies in information, but because they seek to euphemize the web of secrets, lies, compromises and settlements through which the service is negotiated on the ground   The official contours of the grid are daily manipulated by bypass connections, hidden diversions, illegal lines, most of these installed by Metrowater's own workers and many with the knowledge or active collusion of field engineers.  Some of these get eventually "regularized," others remain illicit, lucrative sources for the government staff who installed them. Thus complete transparency about the underground grid is not only hard to acquire, it is actively subverted by local interests. The grid is a favored urban myth because it glosses over the messiness of lived reality, offering a cleaned-up presentable version that is almost believed. 

 
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