Epidemic Infrastructures and the Politics of Responsibility in Lahore

Abstract

In 2011, an outbreak of dengue fever struck the most urbanised districts of Punjab. After an initially slow response, the Punjab Government set up a digital disease surveillance system which was soon hailed as a model for epidemic control and public health governance. Despite these successes, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have continued to take advantage of the micro-ecologies of Lahore’s urban landscape—in part because of the fragmented and uneven socio-spatial dynamics of water access, storage, and use. This paper brings into conversation, and in tension, these different infrastructural dimensions of dengue, namely the celebrated system of vector surveillance and the fractured infrastructures of water, within a single frame of “epidemic infrastructures”. It conceptualises the long-standing unevenness of Lahore’s water systems as “infrastructures of transmission” and techno-managerial systems of control as “infrastructures of problematisation”. The paper uses the lens of heterogeneity to bring together different components of these systems and explore their intersecting effects. I show how the transmission of dengue paradoxically follows both the scarcity and abundance of water use in the city. Yet these socio-ecological complexities are bypassed in the technical matrices to visualise, enumerate, and emplace vectors, which also provide the means to narrativise state successes. I argue that epidemic infrastructures work together to reinforce individualised responsibilities for infrastructural maintenance and urban health to residents and workers.