Maintenance practices of urban water in Aktau, Kazakhstan: exploring the concept of brokenness

Abstract (English)

For the past decade, everyday life in Aktau has been accompanied by a slowly unfolding crisis of water infrastructure. Every week, there is a new news item about what kind of breaks there are in different parts of the city and when to expect water cuts. This paper examines maintenance practices of urban water in Aktau and explores the condition of brokenness produced by different actors.

The Aktau power plant not only provides electricity and heat, but also supplies a large proportion of the city's fresh water by desalinating it from the sea. Its capacity no longer meets current demand, and the city's infrastructure and pipes are prone to regular breakdowns. This paper builds on research on the boundaries between dysfunctional and functional infrastructure (Martínez and Laviolette, 2019) and explores how maintenance practices are shaping the brokenness of urban water infrastructure. This paper is based on data from 7 month of my 2022-2024 fieldwork, which includes in-depth interviews with different actors involved in the city's water supply infrastructures, ethnographic observations of maintenance and media analysis, with particular attention to the materiality of infrastructures and their everyday existence (Henke and Sims, 2020; Domínguez Rubio, 2020).

In Aktau, urban water is produced through a few important socio-political and material conditions. Firstly, the water deficit becomes a reference point by which different actors judge the state of the infrastructure and normalize its breakdowns and shortcomings. Secondly, the forthcoming modernization of the water infrastructure becomes a tool in itself, in which the promise of it becomes more important in everyday maintenance practices than the action itself. Finally, the future of water in the city in the face of the Caspian Sea's shallowing and the impending emergency becomes contested, allowing residents to demand more action to solve the water crisis. Using the urban water in Aktau as an example, this paper proposes to look at any water infrastructures through the lenses of brokenness, being it global south, east, or north, and critically approach both urban water governance and practices of coping with breakages and shortages.