Alex Loftus (2006) Reification and the Dictatorship of the Water Meter. Antipode, 38 (5). pp. 1023 - 1045. ISSN 0066-4812
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In this paper, I seek to gain an understanding of the power that water meters are able to acquire in regulating the daily rhythms of life in the South African city of Durban. In doing so, I put Georg Lukács's writings on reification to work. Lukács's theorisation of the phenomenon of reification captures the twin processes of encroaching formal rationalisation and commodity fetishism. Charting the history of the introduction of water meters and the rise in power of associated infrastructures, I seek to put a historical geographical materialist imagination to work. Thus, I develop a relational ontology of the urban waterscape before seeking to identify lines of struggle that might challenge the dictatorship of the water meter and move towards radically democratic technologies for a more equitable distribution of water.
This is a Draft version This version's date is: 14/11/2006 This item is peer reviewed
https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/items/11bc0eec-7b38-6158-304d-8d28f4f14d6a/1/
Deposited by Al Dean (ZSRA118) on 17-Mar-2010 in Royal Holloway Research Online.Last modified on 17-Mar-2010
(C) 2006 Wiley-Blackwell, whose permission to mount this version for private study and research is acknowledged. The repository version is the author's final draft.
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