Contesting access to power in urban Pakistan
本文通过伊斯兰堡贫民窟和中产阶级社区获取电力的民族志研究，揭示非正规性在服务获取中的普遍存在，以及人们对正规性缺乏信任的集体想象。
Studies of informal housing and urban citizenship in South Asia frequently link the precariousness of squatter life with the struggle to formalise engagement with the state. However, this article argues that the transition to a more formal mode of making claims on the state is a shift in terrain that is no less negotiated and contested. Through an ethnography of access to electrical power in Islamabad, Pakistan, this article explores the pervasiveness of informality in access to service delivery for a squatter settlement and its bourgeois neighbours. The politics of access to urban infrastructure reveal a state of pervasive predation and a collective imaginary which puts little credence in formality.