Contributors

The history of Mexico City can be told through the ways in which water flows both into and away from it. 500 years ago, the then capital of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain was a city undergoing an unparalleled transformation. The conquest of the indigenous lands was set to change not only the politics, economics, and society of this territory, but also its environment. Once covered by five interconnected lakes, two freshwater and three brackish, the Spanish set to desiccate the basin, transforming it into a valley. They did this through canals, tunnels, and other water infrastructures, built by the hands of thousands of workers, mostly indigenous and forcibly conscripted to carry out this labour. By the beginning of the 20th Century, the desiccation was almost achieved, except from some lacustrine areas south of Mexico City that were left. The Mexican capital could finally enter modernity, cleared of the waters that hampered its economic development and made it sick, according to the elite in power. Diego Rivera’s mural “Water, Origin of Life on Earth”, within the old River Lerma water deposit After the problem of desiccation was apparently solved, a new set of issues appeared. Mexico City was now facing […]

As part of the African Centre for Cities‘ International Urban Conference, Kathleen Stokes and Nate Millington organized a series of sessions dedicated to thinking about the relationships between labor, infrastructure, and politics in cities of the global south. We received numerous papers from scholars working in cities all over the world, from Accra to Delhi. Below, we highlight the presentations that were given in order to highlight the work being done by researchers interested in situating urban political ecological research through sustained engagements with cities of the global south. Old engines, pipes, pumps, and cables at a SACMEX workshop. Photograph by Alejandro De Coss. In his presentation, Maintaining Mexico City’s Lerma water supply system: an ethnography of labour and infrastructure, Alejandro De Coss (Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science), looked at the ways in which the Mexico City water system is maintained and repaired. In particular, he focused on the Lerma System, an inter-basin transfer built between 1942 and 1951, which still supplies the city with approximately 14% of its daily water use. During the course of one year, Alejandro worked alongside the repair and maintenance teams of the Mexico City Water System in two different sites. One was the Lerma […]

In this commentary Kampala based photographer and film-maker Joel Ongwech reflects on his participation in a recent exhibition at The Square Gallery in the city Most of my work has started with research and then developed into film or photography through a situated approach that allows me to really get to know my subjects and the contexts in which they live in this city. For this particular project, it all started through my involvement as a researcher on a project led by Will Monteith at the School of International Development at University of East Anglia and Shuaib Lwasa at the Urban Action Lab at Makerere University in Uganda. As a researcher, collecting data in the form of multiple interviews across the cities helped develop my perspective on refugee life in the city.  I then looked into these collected stories from an artistic perspective. So when the opportunity for participating in the OPEN DOORS exhibition came along I did not hesitate to apply since I had already a good understanding about the refugee situation in the urban city of Kampala and was keen to develop an artistic response. My photographic investigation focused on Elvis, a 27 year old Congolese refugee who moved to Kampala from […]

In 2015, the National Research Institute of Colombia “Alexander von Humboldt” (commonly known as Instituto Humboldt), promoted Urban Nature: Platform of Experiences, a book project giving voice to diverse sets of knowledge that come into play when addressing and managing biodiversity and ecosystem services in Colombian cities. Over 80 authors presented 40 case studies across 11 cities. In 2016, the first edition (Spanish) was launched in Bogotá, Colombia and the second edition (English) has just been published. This post is based on my experience as editor of Urban Nature, but it is also an invitation to the readers of Situated UPE to learn more about Colombia and our cities. It’s a well-worn phrase—but Colombia is diverse. Accounting for 14% of the Earth’s biodiversity, it is listed as one of the world’s “megadiverse” countries. It stretches from a Caribbean coastline to the deep forests of the Amazon basin, and from there to high mountains and a coastline on the Pacific Ocean. You also find over 1100 municipalities (municipios), including five large cities with one to eight million people, a wide group of mid-size cities (100,000-500,000 people), and rapidly growing smaller towns (<50.000 people). The Constitution of Colombia recognizes over 700 indigenous […]

The last couple of decades have witnessed a series of regional events that have threatened to shift the tides of global politics. For instance, it was not long ago that the notion of ‘Africa rising’ became such a hot story amidst optimistic accounts of a growing middle class, inclusive technologies, sprawling cities, and budding economies. It was also not that long ago that China’s growing clout in Africa and its connections with Europe began to attract extensive attention. This attention has become even more amplified at the global stage with China’s increased economic and strategic positioning through vast infrastructure development projects such as the ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative. However, it is the apparent shift toward “‘de-globalization’ and the return of the nation-state” in the West as witnessed by the events leading up to – and beyond – ‘Brexit’ and ‘Trump’ that has received the most critical attention. Critics have cited a broader shift in global flows and loops, and a purported shift toward decentring and multicentring alongside an increased redistribution of power and influence. They argue that this could potentially lead to a more fragmented reality synonymous with increased multi-polarity in which global institutions and establishments hold lesser legitimacy […]

Our academic culture continues to reward intellectuals who cite big-name, usually white, male, and European theories and theorists. French theorists, in particular, are given special attention. While sympathetic to the compulsion to harness the ideas of great men, one can no longer claim that this is the only way to succeed in the academic publishing world. Though the alternative might garner less attention, Southern theorists (such as Jean and John Comaroff or Raewynn Connell) have opened the way for an alternative way of doing academically accepted, publishable research. It is this framing that I kept returning to as I read Julian Brown’s South Africa’s Insurgent Citizens: On Dissent and the Possibility of Politics. It is at one level unfair to focus on this text when making an argument about over-use of French political theory, but let me focus on it as a specific instance of what I suggest is a wider concern (and note other reviews here and here).  Academic work generally takes two different tacks: using a case to contribute to theory, or using theory to explain a set of empirics. Brown’s book falls into the latter as he attempts to use Rancière, whom he defines as the most influential theorist […]

Imagine that you just alighted at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, only 25 minutes from Nairobi’s Central Business District. Obviously, the first thing that you will want to do is get connected. At the airport, there are often a handful of enthusiastic mobile telecommunications agents and personnel that are readily on standby, more than willing to introduce you to their product, service or offers. It is at this point that you are often led to a counter or compartment for an authorized agent within the vicinity of the arrival hall. Buying one of the Subscriber Identity Module (or SIM) cards will involve registration and subscription not only for communication services that include calling and Short Message Service (or SMS) texting, but also for moving money through the encrypted SMS and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (or USSD) platforms. These services provide the baseline infrastructure for a wide range of different services that offer unique and innovative mobile-phone based applications and systems. They rely on text and short code and often – in some ways – fall within different categories including M-Pesa, Airtel Money, Orange Money – the most popular of which is Safaricom’s (Lipa Na) M-pesa. For all the systems, registration processes […]

I’m walking through Guet Ndar, a neighbourhood in Saint-Louis, Senegal. We can hear the waves of the nearby Atlantic Ocean. During my last visit, a number of years ago, they seemed perhaps more distant, whereas now they seem almost upon us. We turn a corner near a mosque and look out. What were once streets are now the ocean, the elementary school has become a ruin of collapsed concrete and a new line of buildings stand facing the fierce Atlantic. The fishing settlement of Guet Ndar lays across from the historical centre of Saint-Louis. It operates as a crucial space for the fishing trade across the region, with distribution stretching into the Sahel and as far as Mali. With over 30,000 residents housed in this dense, popular neighbourhood, a strip of sand no more than one kilometre long, and nowadays 200 meters wide, a precarious future has become a lived present. The effects of rising sea-levels from climate change are being experienced in Saint-Louis in ways that foretell urban futures for millions of people living in coastal settlements across the continent. Here, the Atlantic Ocean in Guet Ndar is a paradox. It gives life through the incomes of the fishermen […]

Following Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States will withdraw from the Paris Accord, a number of US cities signaled their intention to symbolically join the agreement and demonstrate their commitment to avoiding more than 1.5 C warming. Cities have a unique relationship to global climate change as the historical locus of greenhouse gas emissions due to their central role in the global economy. The relationship between cities and greenhouse gases is a result of both industrial production as well as contemporary post-industrial economies driven by consumption. The relationship is scalar too: many cities are representative of both low carbon infrastructure as well as the displacement of GHG emissions ‘elsewhere.’ Cities are linked through chains of finance, the movement of goods, and the circulation of discourses. All these relationships matter for thinking about climate change through the city. Amidst these overlapping networks, the unifying factor is the sheer densities and connections present in cities: of people, of money, and of the infrastructures that, in part, form the city as a functioning assemblage. We are already locked into a significantly warmer future, and the physical impacts of that warming consistently outpace even the most severe projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on […]

Unable to attend the American Association of Geographers’ Annual meeting due to travel problems, Mary Lawhon reflects on the retirement of geographer and political ecologist Dianne Rocheleau in this commentary. Drawn from notes for a presentation that unfortunately did not happen due to flight delays, this commentary focuses on Dianne’s generosity as a scholar and her contributions to the development of Urban Political Ecology. I stayed in the airport a lot longer than I otherwise would have, all of Wednesday and Thursday morning, hoping to have a chance to say to Dianne in person and in public a most sincere thank you. But as I finally gave in to nature in its many forms – a storm trumping the wonders of flight, a baby and toddler needing more than airport chicken nuggets – I thought Dianne would certainly have not just understood, but wanted us to go home. So, a few thoughts constructed from my notes instead. First, a list of things I got from Dianne: Academic fashion sense, including unruly curls and a fondness for scarves (though this serves me less well in Florida). Relational thinking and specifically rooted networks (including work with Miriam Chion on rooted cosmopolitanism) The need to listen to […]

The aesthetic politics of graffiti removal in Contemporary São Paulo In this commentary, postdoctoral researcher Nate Millington comments on the aesthetic politics of Graffiti removal in São Paulo. In his first few weeks in office, the newly elected mayor of São Paulo—Jõao Doria, a businessman and reality tv star whose election was primarily a rebuke of the city’s rare flirtation with governance by the Worker’s Party—has spent considerable energy painting over graffiti in the city in the service of what he calls a ‘beautiful city.’ This represents a dangerous moment for those interested in urban life and its virtues and for those who celebrate the capacity of the city to give space to those who seek alternative lives. It is one more instance of the crude reshuffling of the visual, sensorial landscape in favor of one more conducive to global grade and elite forms of aesthetic appreciation. To be sure, Doria’s attempt to clean up the city is one instance in a longer history of the policing of certain kinds of expression. Beset for years by graffiti as well as pixação—a type of tagging specific to Brazil—leaders of São Paulo have long attempted to cohere its landscape through the development of […]

Report from “Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish? Project Workshop” with stakeholders at UCT, Cape Town, 17 February 2017 Nate Millington reports from a rewarding and constructive stakeholder workshop in Cape Town on the politics of waste management in South Africa. On 17 February 2017, researchers from the ‘Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish?’ (TLR) project met with researchers and activists associated with the waste sector in South Africa. The purpose of this meeting was to create connections between researchers and learn from local activists and experts. During a wide-ranging conversation that moved from the specific dynamics of research to broader questions about the nature of politics, TLR researchers explained their interests and were given suggestions about how best to conduct their projects. Participants in the workshop included Dr. Derick Blaauw (North-Western University),
 Musa Chamane (groundWork), 
Rico Euripidou (groundWork), 
Dr. Linda Godfrey (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research), Dr. Melanie Samson (University of the Witwatersrand), Dr. Andreas Scheba (Human Sciences Research Council), Dr. Catherina Schenck (University of the Western Cape), Caitlin Tonkin (Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation), Dr. Kotie Viljoen (University of Johannesburg), 
Dr. Harro von Blottnitz (University of Cape Town), and Quinton Williams (Green Cape), alongside the TLR research team.   After an introductory presentation […]