Epidemiological landscapes : the spaces and politics of mosquito control in Lahore

This thesis investigates the landscapes and ecologies of epidemic disease, and how they shape, and are shaped by, urban politics in the postcolonial city. Recent outbreaks of dengue fever, chikungunyia, and zika, and the proliferation of insect vectors, in cities in the global South are a reminder of the crucial role of urban environments in the spread and control of infectious diseases. The dangerous intimacies of humans and disease-carrying mosquitoes in urban environments are particularly heightened by ongoing infrastructural fragmentations, economic and social precarity, global climate change, ecological degradation, and changing cycles of land and urban development. Meanwhile epidemiological factors, regulatory norms, and everyday practices are contoured by long-standing colonial imaginaries of natural environments, the production of colonial subjects and racialised others, as well as extant architectures, technologies, and bureaucracies. Integrating perspectives on the political ecologies of cities, biopolitical regimes of public health, the entanglement of humans and nonhumans, and the remaking of the “colonial present” in contemporary cities, this thesis provides a situated account of mosquito-borne diseases and the discourses, technologies, and spatial practices of vector control in and around the city of Lahore. It draws on the historiography of empire and disease to attend to the ways in which landscapes of disease are deeply marked by longstanding and renewing inequalities — while keeping a critical eye on narratives that present the fracturing geographies of southern cities, erroneously, as anomalies within teleological narratives of progress or as naturalised sites of pathogenic rupture. The empirical research for this dissertation is based on the accounts of people — scientists, entomologists, and public health workers — whose own practices are informed by the habits and habitats of mosquitoes. Following those who follow mosquitoes, this project focuses on the localised construction of scientific knowledge, governmental frameworks, and spatial imaginaries. The first part of the thesis (Chapters 2 and 3) is based on archival research, and examines the intersections of malaria, mosquito control, and urban development in Lahore during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, showing how malaria enabled and unsettled colonial constructions of landscape and public health subjectivities. The second part (Chapters 4, 5, and 6) builds on these histories to present an in-depth ethnographic portrait of contemporary efforts to control dengue fever in Lahore. Through close observations of vector surveillance and qualitative semi-structured interviews with government officials and frontline health workers, it shows how the technologies and procedures of public health configure the state’s view of the city; how the mundane micro-ecologies of stagnant water (as mosquito breeding site) reveal long-standing forms of infrastructural fragmentation; and how the governance of dengue fever enables the state to allocate responsibilities for urban maintenance in the face of ongoing urban infrastructural failures. By paying attention to the embodied practices, movements, and labours of vector control workers; the lively intimacies and dangerous entanglements of human-mosquito encounters; and their implications on the everyday lives and spaces in the city, this thesis argues for new perspectives on the environmental politics of urban health, which move beyond landscapes of fragmented and individualised responsibility to create new capacities for care and response in the city.