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August 2006 - present
Publications
Publications (254)
This paper examines how global climate mitigation policies articulate with urban political–ecological transformations. It focuses on South African waste-to-value projects as case studies, exploring how local processes of urban ecological modernization combine with global climate finance through the now largely defunct Clean Development Mechanism (C...
This paper examines how global climate mitigation policies articulate with urban political-ecological transformations. It focuses on South African waste-to-value projects as case studies, exploring how local processes of urban ecological modernization combine with global climate finance through the now largely defunct Clean Development Mechanism (C...
Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water ju...
In this paper, we explore this dissonance between knowing and acting that produces the current climate deadlock by focusing on ‘enjoyment’ as a political factor. The enjoyment that infuses the climate change consensus and climate activism stands as an avatar for the wider impasse that characterizes most attempts to inflect the trajectory of the fut...
The notion of Culture Wars-and, with it, the rise of illiberal populist regimes and political movements-is customarily mobilized by self-styled cosmopolitan, enlightened, truth-embracing, and assumedly progressive liberals who consider themselves to be stalwart defenders of a democratic, humanist, socially inclusive, and free society. This contribu...
In this first chapter of the book, we develop a critical perspective of urban resilience through the lens of urban political ecology, with an eye towards charting a trajectory that may open new political possibilities. The chapter is divided into five parts. The first part demonstrates how the urban and the urbanisation process implies an uneven di...
O artigo explora como a eminência da questão ambiental, em particular o problema da mudança climática, a uma preocupação pública global e consensualmente estabelecida é tanto um marcador quanto uma força constituinte da produção da despolitização. O artigo tem quatro partes. Primeiro, eu problematizo a questão da Natureza e do meio ambiente. Segund...
This book addresses the key question of why socially innovative initiatives, including attempts to rejuvenate democracy by introducing new modes of participation, are not leading to a democratization of the State or overcoming the gap between political leaders and people. Offering insights from three leading voices of contemporary social sciences t...
This paper focuses on what I refer to as Climate Populism and how this structures not only many radical climate movements but also the liberal climate consensus. I argue that the architecture of most mainstream as well as more radical climate discourses, practices, and policies is strictly parallel to that of populist discourses and should be under...
In this contribution, I shall consider the apparent deadlock signalled by the current climate condition, namely the extraordinary dissonance that prevails between the consensually established and agreed facts of climate change and the need for immediate and urgent action on the one hand, and the plainly disastrously failing attempts to deflect the...
In this chapter, I argue that there is nothing inherently critical or progressive about the current state of ‘Political Ecology’, urban or otherwise, neither as a practice nor as a theoretical perspective. I shall make a case for the need of a ‘Critique of (Urban) Political Ecology’. This heading is of course freely borrowed from the title of Karl...
Actualmente existe un consenso generalizado sobre la realidad del cambio climático y la necesidad urgente de tomar medidas inmediatas y de gran alcance. No obstante, a pesar de la preocupación científica y la retórica alarmista, las variables climáticas empeoran. En este artículo sostenemos que la negación de lo Real de los antagonismos políticos y...
The main trust of this article unfolds around the impasse of democratic politics today, marked by the fading belief in the presumably superior architecture of liberal democratic institutions to nurture emancipation on the one hand, and the seemingly inexorable rise of a variety of populist political movements on the other. The first part of the art...
This chapter describes the dynamic institutional, technical, social and political ecological landscape of waste management in South Africa and how this in turn is shaping the practices by which waste is transformed into economic and social value, who is allowed to claim such benefits, and what makes for successful claims. Drawing on urban political...
Post-foundationalism departs from the assumption that there is no ground, necessity, or objective rationale for human political existence or action. The edited volume puts contemporary debates arising from the »spatial turn« in cultural and social sciences in a dialogue with post-foundational theories of space and place to devise post-foundationali...
This paper engages centrally with the political impotence of much of critical theory today and suggests how a Lacanian-inflected perspective may offer a possible way out of the present intellectual and political deadlock. Lacanian thought has been central to many post-foundational theorizations of the political, yet the radical implications of a La...
The main trust of this paper unfolds around the impasse of democratic politics today, marked by the fading belief in the presumably superior architecture of liberal democratic institutions to nurture emancipation on the one hand, and the seemingly inexorable rise of a variety of populist political movements on the other. The first part of the paper...
In this afterword to the special issue on processes of politicization of activist struggles of undocumented migrants and their allies, I first briefly enumerate a number of key commonalities that run through the special issue. I subsequently explore some of the wider theoretical and practical lessons to be drawn from the arguments advanced in the s...
The social life of land is one of struggle to appropriate resources and extract financial value; a struggle we characterise, we argue, by ‘asset-class war’. A fictitious commodity in Polanyi’s sense, land has both use value and exchange value but no value understood as socially necessary labor time. As a result, land has a distinct political econom...
The full book can be freely downloaded from: http://waterlat.org/publications/books/water-territorialities/
This edited book presents eleven chapters addressing the politics of water in Latin America. It brings together contributions from members of the WATERLAT-GOBACIT Network (www.waterlat.org) from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, the United Kingdom...
This article chronicles the complex, meandering, contested, and path-dependent unfolding of the remunicipalisation agenda pursued by a range of political forces and social movements in Barcelona as it has developed over the past few years. The remunicipalisation of water services management debate in the city has been marked by increasingly convolu...
The “Anthropocene” is now commonly mobilised by geologists, Earth Systems scientists, and scholars from the humanities and social sciences as the name to denote the new geological era during which humans have arguably acquired planetary geo‐physical agency. While recognising a wide‐ranging and often contentious debate, this chapter argues that the...
This chapter focuses on the book’s central theme on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Framed against the background of five major transformations that deal with planetary urbanisation to de-politicization, we argue that while UPE and associated fields have offered ways to analyse the politics...
The political is categorically and fundamentally performative. Those that gain a voice as equals do not do so by demanding a right to speak within an already policed order, they stage equality and produce new spaces from where equality and freedom can be thought and acted out. This notion of the political, we argue, has to (again) become central in...
We develop the term “the Anthropo-obScene” to show how various discourses on “the Anthropocene” have created a set of stages that disavow certain voices and render some forms of acting (human, non-human, and more-than-human) off-stage. Examples include consensual narratives of adaptive, resilient, and geo-engineered governance, but also more-than-h...
"Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities" centres on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism.
Across its theoretical and empirical chapters, written by leading scholars from anthropology, geography, urban studies, and political science, the book explores new...
El artículo parte de la premisa que es de vital importancia reconocer la rápida tasa de urbanización planetaria como el principal impulsor del cambio ambiental y la creación del Antropoceno. Por lo tanto, este documento no se ocupa mayormente de la cuestión de la naturaleza en la ciudad, como de la urbanización de la naturaleza, entendida como el p...
The ‘resource nexus’ has emerged over the past decade as an important new paradigm of environmental governance, which emphasises the interconnections, tensions and synergies between sectors that have traditionally been managed separately. Nexus thinking presents itself as a radically new approach to integrated governance in response to interconnect...
The possibility of a new emancipatory and democratizing politics, explored through the lens of recent urban insurgencies.
In Promises of the Political, Erik Swyngedouw explores whether progressive and emancipatory politics is still possible in a post-political era. Activists and scholars have developed the concept of post-politicization to describe...
In the corpus of Marxist thought as well as in mainstream socialist strategies and politics, the theoretical and politically strategic position and role of space, nature, and the urbanization process in the expanded production and reproduction of capitalism, and in the transformation to socialism, remains—with a few notable exceptions—largely margi...
The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx provides an entry point for those new to Marxism. At the same time, its chapters, written by leading Marxist scholars, advance Marxist theory and research. Its coverage is more comprehensive than previous volumes on Marx in terms of both foundational concepts and empirical research on contemporary social problems. I...
In The notion of "nature" constitutes an empty signifier, which is colonized and filled with meaning by scientists, experts and policy-makers, and through a variety of techno-administrative procedures. This is a gesture par excellence of de-politicization, of placing "nature" outside the field of public dispute, contestation, and disagreement. In o...
Just as space, territory and society can be socially and politically co-constructed, so can water, and thus the construction of hydraulic infrastructures can be mobilised by politicians to consolidate their grip on power while nurturing their own vision of what the nation is or should become. This book delves into the complex and often hidden conne...
This chapter outlines the aims and content of this volume, delving into the complex and often hidden connection between water, technological advancement, and the nation-state. The chapter initially delineates the main theoretical and conceptual approaches underpinning our understanding of how water resources are enmeshed with multiscalar processes...
This chapter outlines the aims and content of this volume, delving into the complex and often hidden connection between water, technological advancement and the nation-state. The chapter initially delineates the main theoretical and conceptual approaches underpinning our understanding of how water resources are enmeshed with multiscalar processes r...
This paper argues that 'the Anthropocene' is a deeply depoliticizing notion. This de-politicization unfolds through the creation of a set of narratives, what we refer to as 'AnthropoScenes', which broadly share the effect of off-staging certain voices and forms of acting. Our notion of the Anthropo-obScene is our tactic to both attest to and underm...
Introduction In this chapter, we explore how changing political visions, socio-cultural imaginaries and hydro-territorial configurations interact with shifting practices of water justice. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates comments that justice is what those in power consider just. Over the centuries, this statement has haunted any discussions and effor...
In this paper we argue that “assetisation” has been a central axis through which both neoliberalisation and financialisation have encroached in the post-Fordist era. We focus on the mobilisation of land as a financial asset in northwest England's former industrial heartlands, offering an account of how property developer the Peel Group came to domi...
Bringing together a multidisciplinary set of scholars and diverse case studies from across the globe, this book explores the management, governance, and understandings around water, a key element in the assemblage of hydrosocial territories. Hydrosocial territories are spatial configurations of people, institutions, water flows, hydraulic technolog...
Geography is an eclectic and fashion‐prone discipline. The attention span in the discipline for major theoretical or methodological perspectives is rather short‐lived. For many a geographer, it is very hard to keep up with the endless re‐formulations of spatial or geographical perspectives and theoretical influences. In fact, the chapters of this r...
This introductory symposium article develops a framework for an urban political reading and a theorization of urban uprisings. We argue that there is a need to foreground the notion of the urban political as central to the theoretical and practical demands of urban research today. First, we revisit critical urban theory in light of recent urban ins...
This paper aims to redress the under-appreciated significance of rent for political ecological analysis. We introduce the notion of value grabbing, defined as the appropriation of (surplus) value through rent. A concept that is analytically distinct from accumulation, rent is both a social relation and a distributional process that is increasingly...
This contribution offers a critical engagement with the Critical Commentary paper of Beveridge and Koch (forthcoming) entitled ‘The postpolitical trap? Reflections on politics, agency and the city’. I argue that post-politicisation as a particular form of de-politicisation does not imply the disappearance of politics. On the contrary, it involves t...
This article aims to improve our understanding of post-politicization by examining the role of ‘ordinary’ urban protest movements, using the example of a protest in Alexandra Park, an inner city park in Manchester, UK. The critical literature on postpolitics has improved our understanding of exceptional, large-scale protests, but we know much less...
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 experience...
Matthew Gandy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014. x and 368 pp., notes, bibliography, index. $30.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-2620-2825-7); $21.00 electronic (ISBN 9780-2623-2175-4).
The inception of Spain’s ‘new water politics’ in 2004 elevated seawater desalination from supplementary water supply to an alleged panacea for the country’s recurrent water crises. Desalination became the subject of an extraordinary and delicate consensus that strategically aligned disparate (and sometimes unlikely) actors. This movement, the paper...
We define and explore hydrosocial territories as spatial configurations of people, institutions, water flows, hydraulic technology and the biophysical environment that revolve around the control of water. Territorial politics finds expression in encounters of diverse actors with divergent spatial and political-geographical interests. Their territor...
Despite heterogeneous epistemological perspectives ranging from Marxism to post-structuralism and beyond, political ecologists share the view not only that the ‘political’ matters in grasping and influencing trajectories of socio-ecological change and transformation, but also that ‘physical’ and ‘biological’ matter politically. This is felt to be p...
We outline a first framing of a conference and planned edited book: “Rupturing the Anthro-Obscene! Political Promises of Planetary & Uneven Urban Ecologies.” The book and event (in Stockholm 16-19 Sept 2015) is an intervention into the field of urban political ecology (UPE) in particular, and critical theory in general. We argue that while UPE has...
Our age is celebrated as the triumph of liberal democracy. Old ideological battles have been decisively resolved in favour of freedom and the market. We are told that we have moved 'beyond left and right'; that we are 'all in this together'. Any remaining differences are to be addressed through expert knowledge, consensual deliberation and particip...
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 t...
This chapter focuses on the significant socio-political, environmental and cultural-geographical transformations in democratizing Spain after the end of Fascism. The chapter explores the debate over national water planning that rages between 1975 and 2002 and chronicles the intense struggle over and contestation of the dominant hydraulic water para...
“Not a drop of water should reach the ocean without paying its obligatory tribute to the earth”, notes a 1912 parliamentary document from the Spanish Cortes. A commentator at the time noted that “Spain would never be rich as longs as its rivers flowed into the sea”. The project of modernization, articulated around the hydraulic nexus, became formul...
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...