Abstract:
Cities around the world are grappling with how to accommodate discourses of “growth”, “security”, and “sustainability”. These discourses exist within dominant technocratic and economistic paradigms, which largely mute the social implications of infrastructure. Merging interview data from Auckland water professionals with a condensed history of a “hydrosocial contract”, this thesis analyzes the impacts of power relations, institutional arrangements, and physical infrastructure on the politics of Auckland’s socio-technical assemblage. It was found that the “post-political” nature of growth, security, and sustainability discourses hides the messiness, injustices, and power-plays inherent to local urban governance. As a result, spaces for democracy are limited, as the more challenging, yet less explicit questions are ignored: what is to be grown, secured or sustained, defined by whom, and for whom. Experimentation with Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) was found to re-politicize a seemingly neutral water governance, reviving the idea that urban realities can be politically challenged. Rather than cloak controversial processes with utopian discourses, it is argued that cities should embrace the messiness of contested spaces, thereby creating space for democratic debate.