During the period leading up to the passage of the 2015 constitution in Nepal, the roads of Kathmandu were often interpreted by the city’s residents as symbols of the stalled constitutional process and of the faltering and corrupt nature of national politics in general. By detailing specific moments in which the inadequacy of roads and the inadequacy of the state were directly juxtaposed in everyday conversations, this article calls for sustained attention to the interrelationship between urban infrastructure and national- and local-level politics.
Figure 1. Road from Purano Baneshwor to Sinamangal. (Dennis, 2014)
The fieldwork on which this article is based was conducted with funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Virginia. The author would like to thank Andrew Nelson and Heather Hindman for organizing this special issue, the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback, and Avash Bhandari for his support during the research and writing process.