Social Power and the Urbanization of Water

Social Power and the Urbanization of Water PDF Author: Erik Swyngedouw
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780198233916
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Social power and the Urbanization of Water takes the circulation of water as a lense through which to analyse how the natural and social fuse together in the process of urbanization. In addition, excavating the circulation of water provides a vehicle to examine the relations between social, political, and economic power which give structure to the urbanization process. These power relations become embodied in and expressed by the particular forms through which water becomes urban. This analysis, in turn, allows light to be cast on who controls the transformation and appropriation of nature and the citiy's environment. The city of Quayaquil in Ecuador, where 600,000 people lack easy access to potable water, provides the empirical background for this analysis. Historical political-ecological research is combined with an analysis of key contemporary power brokers who organize a highly uneven and deeply unjust urban water circulation system. --COVER.

Social Power and the Urbanization of Water

Social Power and the Urbanization of Water PDF Author: Erik Swyngedouw
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780198233916
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book

Book Description
Social power and the Urbanization of Water takes the circulation of water as a lense through which to analyse how the natural and social fuse together in the process of urbanization. In addition, excavating the circulation of water provides a vehicle to examine the relations between social, political, and economic power which give structure to the urbanization process. These power relations become embodied in and expressed by the particular forms through which water becomes urban. This analysis, in turn, allows light to be cast on who controls the transformation and appropriation of nature and the citiy's environment. The city of Quayaquil in Ecuador, where 600,000 people lack easy access to potable water, provides the empirical background for this analysis. Historical political-ecological research is combined with an analysis of key contemporary power brokers who organize a highly uneven and deeply unjust urban water circulation system. --COVER.

Social Power and the Urbanization of Water

Social Power and the Urbanization of Water PDF Author: Erik Swyngedouw
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191543799
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Taking as his case-study the city of Guayaquil in Ecuador, where 600,000 people lack easy access to potable water, Erik Swyngedouw aims to reconstruct, theoretically and empirically, the political, social, and economic conduits through which water flows, and to identify how power relations infuse the metabolic transformation of water as it becomes urban. These flows of water which are simultaneously physical and social carry in their currents the embodiment of myriad social struggles and conflicts. The excavation of these flows narrates stories about the city's structure and development. Yet these flows also carry the potential for an improved, more just, and more equitable right to the city and its water. The flows of power that are captured by urban water circulation also suggest that the question of urban sustainability is not just about achieving sound ecological and environmental conditions, but first and foremost about a social struggle for access and control; a struggle not just for the right to water, but for the right to the city itself.

Liquid Power

Liquid Power PDF Author: Erik Swyngedouw
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262548968
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
An examination of the central role of water politics and engineering in Spain's modernization, illustrating water's part in forging, maintaining, and transforming social power. In this book, Erik Swyngedouw explores how water becomes part of the tumultuous processes of modernization and development. Using the experience of Spain as a lens to view the interplay of modernity and environmental transformation, Swyngedouw shows that every political project is also an environmental project. In 1898, Spain lost its last overseas colony, triggering a period of post-imperialist turmoil still referred to as El Disastre. Turning inward, the nation embarked on “regeneration” and modernization. Water played a central role in this; during a turbulent period from the twentieth century into the twenty-first—through the Franco years and into the new era of liberal democracy—Spain's waterscapes were completely transformed, with large-scale projects that ranged from dam construction to irrigation to desalinization. Swyngedouw describes the contested political-ecological process that marked this transformation, showing that the Spain's diverse and contested paths to modernization were predicated on particular trajectories of environmental transformation. After laying out his theoretical perspectives, Swyngedouw analyzes three periods of Spain's political-ecological modernization: the aspirations and stalled modernization of the early twentieth century; the accelerated efforts under the authoritarian Franco regime—which included six hundred dams, expanded hydroelectricity, and massive irrigation; and the changing hydro-social landscape under social democracy. Offering an innovative perspective on the relationship of nature and society, Liquid Power illuminates the political nature of nature.

The Conquest of Water

The Conquest of Water PDF Author: Jean-Pierre Goubert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691085449
Category : Hygiene
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Studies the social, technological, historical, and cultural conquest of water discussing the role water plays in public and private life

The Fabric of Space

The Fabric of Space PDF Author: Matthew Gandy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262028255
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
A study of water at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure in Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Water lies at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure, crossing between visible and invisible domains of urban space, in the tanks and buckets of the global South and the vast subterranean technological networks of the global North. In this book, Matthew Gandy considers the cultural and material significance of water through the experiences of six cities: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Tracing the evolving relationships among modernity, nature, and the urban imagination, from different vantage points and through different periods, Gandy uses water as a lens through which to observe both the ambiguities and the limits of nature as conventionally understood. Gandy begins with the Parisian sewers of the nineteenth century, captured in the photographs of Nadar, and the reconstruction of subterranean Paris. He moves on to Weimar-era Berlin and its protection of public access to lakes for swimming, the culmination of efforts to reconnect the city with nature. He considers the threat of malaria in Lagos, where changing geopolitical circumstances led to large-scale swamp drainage in the 1940s. He shows how the dysfunctional water infrastructure of Mumbai offers a vivid expression of persistent social inequality in a postcolonial city. He explores the incongruous concrete landscapes of the Los Angeles River. Finally, Gandy uses the fictional scenario of a partially submerged London as the starting point for an investigation of the actual hydrological threats facing that city.

Urban Water Trajectories

Urban Water Trajectories PDF Author: Sarah Bell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319426869
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Water is an essential element in the future of cities. It shapes cities’ locations, form, ecology, prosperity and health. The changing nature of urbanisation, climate change, water scarcity, environmental values, globalisation and social justice mean that the models of provision of water services and infrastructure that have dominated for the past two centuries are increasingly infeasible. Conventional arrangements for understanding and managing water in cities are being subverted by a range of natural, technological, political, economic and social changes. The prognosis for water in cities remains unclear, and multiple visions and discourses are emerging to fill the space left by the certainty of nineteenth century urban water planning and engineering. This book documents a sample of those different trajectories, in terms of water transformations, option, services and politics. Water is a key element shaping urban form, economies and lifestyles, part of the ongoing transformation of cities. Cities are faced with a range of technical and policy options for future water systems. Water is an essential urban service, but models of provision remain highly contested with different visions for ownership of infrastructure, the scale of provision, and the level of service demanded by users. Water is a contentious political issue in the future of cities, serving different urban interests as power and water seem to flow in the same direction. Cities in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and South America provide case studies and emerging water challenges and responses. Comparison across different contexts demonstrates how the particular and the universal intersect in complex ways to generate new trajectories for urban water.

Water System Science and Policy Interfacing

Water System Science and Policy Interfacing PDF Author: Philippe Quevauviller
Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
ISBN: 1847558615
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
Recent discussions among scientists and policy-makers have highlighted that knowledge generated by many research and demonstration projects is not reaching policymakers in an efficient way. Conversely, the consideration of research results by the policy making community is not straightforward, and difficulties arise in integrating the latest research developments in legislation. The difficulty is enhanced by the fact that the policy-making community is not defining its role as "client" sufficiently well and the dialogue and communication channels are far from ideal to ensure an efficient flow of information. An increasing number of experts consider that improvements could be achieved through the development of a "science-policy interface" so that R&D results are synthesised in a way to efficiently feed policy implementation and that short, medium and long term research needs may be identified. This book examines the issue of integrating science into policy, with an emphasis on water system knowledge and related policies. An important feature of the book is the discussion of science-policy interfacing needs, illustrated by examples from authors from different countries in relation to water system management. This publication is timely in that the science-policy interfacing is now identified as a key challenge worldwide with regard to integrated water resource management, and therefore the book will be of great interest to scientists, water managers and stakeholders. Readers will also benefit from a better understanding of the needs, benefits and drawbacks of an established transfer mechanism of scientific outputs to policies.

What is Water?

What is Water? PDF Author: Jamie Linton
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774817011
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
We all know what water is, and we often take it for granted. But the spectre of a worldwide water crisis suggests that there might be something fundamentally wrong with the way we think about water. Jamie Linton dives into the history of water as an abstract concept, stripped of its environmental, social, and cultural contexts. Reduced to a scientific abstraction - to mere H20 - this concept has given modern society licence to dam, divert, and manipulate water with apparent impunity. Part of the solution to the water crisis involves reinvesting water with social content, thus altering the way we see water. An original take on a deceptively complex issue, What Is Water? offers a fresh approach to a fundamental problem.

The Social Life of Water

The Social Life of Water PDF Author: John R. Wagner
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857459678
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Everywhere in the world communities and nations organize themselves in relation to water. We divert water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers to our homes, workplaces, irrigation canals, and hydro-generating stations. We use it for bathing, swimming, recreation, and it functions as a symbol of purity in ritual performances. In order to facilitate and manage our relationship with water, we develop institutions, technologies, and cultural practices entirely devoted to its appropriation and distribution, and through these institutions we construct relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. Relying on first-hand ethnographic research, the contributors to this volume examine the social life of water in diverse settings and explore the impacts of commodification, urbanization, and technology on the availability and quality of water supplies. Each case study speaks to a local set of issues, but the overall perspective is global, with representation from all continents.

Water, Power and Identity

Water, Power and Identity PDF Author: Rutgerd Boelens
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317964039
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
This book addresses two major issues in natural resource management and political ecology: the complex conflicting relationship between communities managing water on the ground and national/global policy-making institutions and elites; and how grassroots defend against encroachment, question the self-evidence of State-/market-based water governance, and confront coercive and participatory boundary policing (‘normal’ vs. ‘abnormal’). The book examines grassroots building of multi-layered water-rights territories, and State, market and expert networks’ vigorous efforts to reshape these water societies in their own image – seizing resources and/or aligning users, identities and rights systems within dominant frameworks. Distributive and cultural politics entwine. It is shown that attempts to modernize and normalize users through universalized water culture, ‘rational water use’ and de-politicized interventions deepen water security problems rather than alleviating them. However, social struggles negotiate and enforce water rights. User collectives challenge imposed water rights and identities, constructing new ones to strategically acquire water control autonomy and re-moralize their waterscapes. The author shows that battles for material control include the right to culturally define and politically organize water rights and territories. Andean illustrations from Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile, from peasant-indigenous life stories to international policy-making, highlight open and subsurface hydro-social networks. They reveal how water justice struggles are political projects against indifference, and that engaging in re-distributive policies and defying ‘truth politics,’ extends context-particular water rights definitions and governance forms.