ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book integrates urban political ecology with urban environmental history and studies on anthropology of infrastructures to rethink the politics of water in a Latin American city. It provides key historical context of the changing patterns of utility company in which the municipal hydraulic paradigm was adopted as a model to secure the universalization of basic public services in the city. The book then illustrates how models of water infrastructure provision built during the municipalization period were transformed through the corporatization of Empresas Publicas de Medellin (EPM). It also explores the concrete ways in which disconnected households experience new strategies offered by EPM and the municipality to redress inequalities in water distribution and how they organize themselves to make claims on the state and what impact they have. The book traces a dynamic infrastructural landscape that stands in sharp contrast to centralized network.
