Commentaries
Commentaries
Arianna Tozzi, Irene Leonardelli, Enid Still, and Sneha Malani describe their work with counter-mapping. Using rivers and the flows of water and pollution as entry points, they capture urban-rural interdependencies in their rich and multi-faceted website Troubling Waterscapes. Here they provide a background to their counter-mapping project. This project began with a friendship between three PhD researchers, and an artist/practitioner, with a common interest in water and agriculture, and a desire to explore creative methods of engaging with our research topics. ‘Troubling Waterscapes’ was developed as an online exhibition for the bi-annual POLLEN conference in September 2020: Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration. Rather than classic academic presentations and panel discussions, where words and theoretical concepts dominate, we invited participants to think with and through water in creative ways. We used ‘troubling’ as a praxis of questioning dominant narratives of resource commodification ‘from above’ and victimhood ‘from below’, inviting the audience to think through the complexities of the uneven socionatural relations that surround us. Our story begins in Pravah, the fictional name for a rural village in Maharashtra, India, where Irene lived during her PhD research, learning from the farming practices of women growing flowers to supply to markets in the nearby city of […]
Emmanuel Awohouedji, a Benin environmentalist and educator, shares his experience of building and teaching a curriculum focusing on environmental problems and issues for middle and high schools in the Republic of Benin. This type of teaching is missing in Benin and requires overcoming administrative, structural and material hurdles—but also provides rich experiences for others to learn from. My pedagogical work in the Republic of Benin refers to the planning and implementing of a comprehensive environmental education curriculum that can help young students understand and have a growing interest in—and impact on—their surrounding environments. For the last two years I have developed this curriculum and while much is left to do, it is clear that this curriculum is missing in Benin today. Despite efforts in the early 2000s to implement environmental education, today none of the seven subjects taught in secondary classes or the nine taught in high school have a serious focus on environmental issues. Considering however the changes affecting the Beninese environment, the impacts of environmental issues, climate impact on water, food, energy, health, ecosystems, various sources of pollution (Boko, Kosmowski and Vissin n.d.), and the legislation related to environmental protection, this form of environmental education is relevant. Through working with my students I […]
How do we face the challenge of existing, obdurate built environments and infrastructures (and imaginaries and imperatives built upon and around them) in responding to the threat/s of climate change? Are such materialities as obdurate as is often imagined, and if so, to what degree? With what stakes, and with and for whom, do we engage this obduracy?
A recent Tweet [1] about the injustice of the rental housing stock in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, had me revisit my understanding of South Africa’s housing conundrum. My early career passion on urban slums and city spatial planning threw me into the abyss of just how difficult it is to provide dignified housing for all. Without major overhaul of the world economy, alongside systematic global redistribution of wealth, achieving spatial justice has proven a mammoth task. To be sure, the Bill of Rights of the South African Constitution (1996) states: ‘everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing’. While this leaves enough room for interpreting what ‘adequate’ is, there is a general public consensus in South Africa that living in a shack is not it. As I will show in this piece, creating an informal settlement or putting up one’s shack is part of the on-going struggle for adequate housing and property rights in South Africa. Many have heeded the call by Lefebvre (1996[1968]) and argued that the ‘right to the city’ is the access to social freedoms required to achieve spatial justice (Dikeç, 2002; Mitchell, 2003; Harvey, 2008; Huchzermeyer, 2014). Few have discussed the particular and paradoxical conditions […]
Accra is a city of storage. While walking across its busy roads, one can spot a myriad of objects used to transport, store and sell water: Water is sold at the traffic light in tiny plastic ‘sachet’ bags, plastic or metal containers mounted on trucks are used to transport and sell bulk water, and residents carry and store water in plastic buckets or in large plastic containers known locally as ‘polytanks.’ Despite the widespread presence of storage facilities, these find only limited space in analysis of the politics of urban water in Accra and elsewhere. Indeed, the attention is often concentrated on the circulation of water through large-scale networks of pipes, and on the history, uneven geography and intermittent working of networked infrastructure. Yet, as Millington (2018) recently showed for São Paulo, attending to the role of technologies of storage is important to understand the functioning of urban water systems and the relations between water use at the household level and water provisioning at the urban and regional scale. In contexts of drought and rainfall uncertainty, as in São Paulo, focusing on storage facilities plays a crucial role in understanding residents’ everyday experiences of scarcity, revealing their differentiated capacities to […]
Most of my students have no idea what the difference between capitalism and socialism is. Let me say that differently: most of my students have emotional responses to those words. Some have strong instincts about which is good and which is ugly. But in terms of an ability to define and give distinguishing examples, maybe a few here and there walk in with this ability. (And given the conflation of terms in U.S. American public discourse, it seems hard to blame them). Some have taken introduction economics courses. If I were in charge of general education requirements, I’d make sure that student learn not (only) about mathematical principles, but about the logics of different economics systems. Until that point (!), I accept it means I have to do this work before I can teach about environment and society. One year, when still teaching from a textbook, I put capitalism up front. We spent a week dedicated to Marxian environmental critiques. I quickly found that does not work for my politically diverse classroom. Instead, I now break the ideas down, avoiding the most evocative terms until the building blocks are in place. We slowly talk about markets, explaining what markets do […]
What does it mean to teach a situated class? The easiest answer to this is to include ‘local’ examples. But for me, being deeply situated in my teaching has also meant starting from and responding to what the students know and helping them make sense of their own world. (In contrast to the typical academic textbook which is structured to present an academic field to students; it’s also in contrast to teaching what students ask for, for they often don’t know what they don’t know.) After teaching from the well-used Robbins, Hintz and Moore volume, and asking my students at the University of Oklahoma to write weekly response papers, I realized that the course I was teaching simply wasn’t setting the students up to do much with the content. I tried tweaking and supplementing, but eventually resolved to write my own quasi-textbook and work through a series of real-world explanations for environmental problems. The open, online format (ok, it’s not yet open; I want to test-run it first) is also hoped to better enable place-situated approaches by making it easy to swap out examples and case studies. I now have 10 weeks of text that presents different explanations for the […]
Building discussion around infrastructural labour and livelihoods By: Alejandro De Coss and Kathleen Stokes ** Many thanks to participants in our session. While we have endeavoured to capture key points, we also appreciate this summary should not be taken to not reflect everyone’s views. ** On April 18th, 2018, scholars from around the UK met for the symposium “Infrastructures for Troubled Times”. Hosted by the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics & Responsible Futures at the University of Brighton, the event sought to challenge and question the apparent neutrality of infrastructures, understanding them as “increasingly complex, multi-scalar and interconnected, affecting and effected by climate change, patterns of global economic debt, financial management and resource extraction/use.” As part of this symposium, we organised a session on “infrastructural labour and livelihoods” which stemmed from the perspective that human work and labour is necessary to the development, repair, and maintenance of infrastructures. Despite this, we find that labour is rarely explored in depth in contemporary debates around infrastructure’s role in shaping social and material worlds. Our session wanted to question the role of human labour in developing and maintaining infrastructures, and understand how such contributions are perceived and valued – particularly as […]
Temporalities of Crisis: On Cape Town’s Day Zero By: Nate Millington and Suraya Scheba Cape Town is currently facing a water crisis. While Day Zero, the day when the city’s water would have been cut off, is apparently no longer a possibility in 2018, scarcity remains a concern. Arguing that water will only get scarcer in the years to come, the Cape Town municipal government response to the water crisis has been to invest in considerable efforts to reduce water consumption, including charging for excess usage and the continued rollout of water management devices for residents deemed to be over users. Additionally, the city has called for the acceleration of augmentation schemes, including desalination and groundwater access. Drawing from climate science and longer term strategies of demand management, the City of Cape Town is attempting to situate reduced demand within a changing climate. Day Zero Cancelled. Photograph by Nate Millington. In response to the possibility of citywide water cuts, commentators and journalists engaged extensively with Cape Town’s ongoing water dynamics. Many suggested that the city is a harbinger of things to come in a future marked by climate change and climate uncertainty. Critical to these analyses was the oft-repeated phrase that Cape […]
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 […]