Hug March

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya | UOC · Department of Economics and Business Science

In recent years, the Smart City has become a very popular concept amongst policy makers and urban planners. In a nutshell, the Smart City refers to projects and planning strategies that aim to join up new forms of inclusive and low-carbon economic growth based on the knowledge economy through the deployment of information and communication technolo...

The 21st century has been hailed as the urban century and one in which ICT-led transformations will shape urban responses to global environmental change. The Smart City encapsulates all the desires and prospects on the transformative and disruptive role technology will have in solving urban issues both in Global North and Global South cities. Criti...

This paper presents a vegetal political ecology of weeds. Weeds have barely been analysed in the burgeoning field of ‘more-than-human’ scholarship, this despite their ubiquity and considerable impact on human social life. We review how geographical scholarship has represented weeds’ material and political status: mostly as invasive plants, annoying...

The draft Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework commits to achievement of equity and justice outcomes and represents a “relational turn” in how we understand inclusive conservation. Although “inclusivity” is drawn on as a means to engage diverse stakeholders, widening the framing of inclusivity can create new tensions with regard to how to manage...

In this paper, we develop a novel interpretation of the internal relationship between value, rent and finance, thereby enabling a new reading of the process of financialisation. As we argue, responding to the important question of how best to conceptualise the relationship between value and finance necessitates an understanding of the internal rela...

This paper contributes to the literature that critically engages with the so-called 'twin green and digital transition' by assessing the twin transition as a policy discourse. Our research question is: why and how is the twin transition legitimised and implemented in the European Union (EU) despite recognised pitfalls and uncertainties? The analysi...

La aceleración del cambio climático que estamos observando está desencadenando una de las crisis globales más profundas y amenazantes para garantizar un planeta justo y habitable para los más de 8.000 millones de habitantes y para la biosfera. La crisis climática es tan significativa y grave que ya se habla de emergencia climática. Nos encontramos...

There is growing pressure for cities to plan for and take action on climate change in equitable and just ways. Scholars, however, continue to debate what justice looks like in practice, and cities struggle to plan for and implement climate justice. This article investigates the case of San Francisco, a forerunner in climate action and a city experi...

“Smart consumption”. ‘What is that? Energy transitions are at the top of global agendas. The EU is positioning itself as playing a pivotal role in addressing climate risks and sustainability imperatives. Smart consumption as a key element of these efforts, however, mostly explored from a predominantly technical perspective thus often failing to ide...

The ongoing effects of the climate emergency and the recognition of the need to redesign cities to cope with future socio-environmental changes and increase the quality of life of urban inhabitants has pushed many cities to embrace the ‘re-naturalization’ of public space through Nature-based Solutions (NbS). Les Glòries park (Barcelona) is an ongoi...

Participatory scenario planning is a powerful approach to guide diverse stakeholders in creating and reflecting on visions of plausible and desired futures. However, this process requires tools to guide collective action to implement such visions within management agendas. This study develops, applies, and analyzes a novel visual tool within a virt...

We call for coupling degrowth with urban studies and planning agendas as an academically salient and politically urgent endeavour. Our aim is threefold: to explore ways for 'operationalising' degrowth concepts into urban and regional everyday spatial practices; to sketch pathways for taking degrowth conceptually and methodologically beyond localise...

Este trabajo analiza las desigualdades de acceso al agua en ciudades del Sur Global desde el prisma de la Ecología Política Urbana (EPU). Si bien las ciudades del Sur Global se caracterizan, entre otros aspectos, por las desiguales formas de acceso al suministro hídrico, estas desigualdades pueden ser aún mayores si se consideran otras dimensiones...

Informe de la investigación realizada por investigadoras del grupo TURBA para el proyecto "Amplificant l'interconnexió entre la justicia climàtica i la justicia sexual i reproductiva", coordinado por L'Associació - Drets Sexuals i Reproductius. Este informe nace de la inquietud desde un sector del movimiento en defensa de los derechos sexuales y...

La acción climática se ha consolidado en las ciudades a través de nuevas iniciativas sociales y estrategias institucionales. Este artículo pretende contribuir a entender la implicación social en la acción y gobernanza climática urbana a través de un análisis comparativo en dos ciudades españolas (Barcelona y Sevilla) guiado por tres preguntas de in...

Planetary Health has emerged as a new approach to respond to the existential risks that the clime and global environmental crises pose to human societies. As stated by various stakeholders, the challenges involved in Planetary Health are of such magnitude that education must be at the forefront to obtain a meaningful response. Universities and high...

With increasing threats due to climate change, scholars and practitioners turn to cities and their stakeholders as key players in climate governance and action. At the same time, there is an emerging body of literature that looks at the transformative potential of inclusive urban climate adaptation. This chapter sets out to examine and situate urba...

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...

This volume sheds light on urban resilience strategies in times of climate emergency and social and economic crisis by reflecting on related social vulnerabilities and inequalities within cities and showing the potential of participatory governance approaches for socio-environmental transformation. The book compiles critical research documenting th...

We explore responses of water supply providers during the first stage of the Covid-19 pandemic in Arequipa, Peru, contrasting actions by the public water company, dominant in the city core, and by neighbourhood associations, dominant in the unplanned periphery. The water company implemented instalment payments, the suspension of water shutoffs and...

Energy efficiency is at the core of sustainability solutions for 5/6G networks. We argue this is a too narrow perspective on sustainability, as it ignores the effects of the increased traffic demand these networks stimulate and the need for additional equipment that this demand requires. The hope is that techniques to reduce the network's energy co...

The history of hydraulic infrastructures is plagued with failures often with catastrophic consequences. Although the agency of water in disasters has been widely documented less well known are the substances in water such as salt that may cause infrastructural collapse and harm humans, flora and fauna. In the Llobregat River Basin (Barcelona), a 12...

Grassroots initiatives towards climate resilience in cities are likely to embed environmental education practices with potential transformative impact among young people. Through interviews and document review, we examine two initiatives involving different non-formal educational actions in Barcelona: a civic ecology practice based on the community...

We discuss the water remunicipalization process in the city of Valladolid (Spain), focusing specifically on its public financing model. Valladolid water remunicipalization has been a politically driven process, but implemented and managed in a technical way, through a public 100% municipality-owned company. As we show, it does not require the addit...

Much has been debated regarding the environmental and economic aspects that conform the pillars of sustainability in nature-based solutions (NbSs). However, the social implications are lagging behind in both theory and practice. NbSs are not inherently socially and environmentally just and they might not work for or benefit everyone. On the contrar...

Embracing the UN Agenda 2030 is a challenge for Higher Education Institutions, especially for those that already have well-established competence frameworks but without extensive experience in sustainability education. Among other things, they must embed sustainability values in their strategic academic planning and organizational work. Building ca...

1. Envisioning processes enable protected area managers to chart a course for future management to reach desired goals, but unexpected changes that could affect future visions are not usually considered. The global COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to explore changes in stakeholder visions, the values that underpin the visions, and their pe...

Housing social movements, in the course of their everyday activities, continually share and produce knowledge, a process defined as learning. This paper addresses a gap in the literature on housing activism, looking at learning as a crucial domain of housing movements’ politics and practice. By looking at housing activism through the lens of theori...

Using a socioenvironmental perspective, this paper analyses strategies of water demand management (WDM) in Arequipa, Peru, and their perception by residents through a survey of six city districts (three in the core and three on the periphery) complemented with interviews with key stakeholders. The results show significant differences in WDM. Strate...

Cities in developing countries are going through an unprecedented process of urbani zation that is reconfiguring their water supply systems. On the one hand, urbanization favors the expansion of formal water networks but on the other it also must resort to informal practices (pipe trucks, public pylons, etc.) especially in peripheral settlements. U...

The European Union’s (EU) Horizon Europe programme provides exciting opportunities for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research to contribute to the fulfilment of the EU’s ambitious policy goals on energy and climate change. This report presents 100 questions that have been identified by experts as priorities for SSH research on smart consumpt...

Covid-19 has come to intersect with water poverty exacerbating the impacts on vulnerable households. To address the pandemic's impacts, both public entities and water companies have undertaken different actions in what concerns water provision. In Spain, the national government prohibited disconnecting households from energy (electricity, gas) and...

Most protected areas are managed based on objectives related to scientific ecological knowledge of species and ecosystems. However, a core principle of sustainability science is that understanding and including local ecological knowledge, perceptions of ecosystem service provision and landscape vulnerability will improve sustainability and resilien...

Climate policy co-production represents an emerging institutional arrangement promising to better and fairly involve societal actors in resilience policy-making. Little evidence exists, however, on how climate policy co-production is understood, planned and performed in cities. This article sheds light on these co-production processes through an in...

The active participation of local stakeholders in governing protected areas is increasingly recognized in biodiversity conservation. While progress has been made in countries to facilitate inclusivity in conservation decision-making, there is limited practical guidance of participatory mechanisms enabling stakeholder engagement. Disentangling forma...

In recent years, the notion of urban resilience has permeated the responses of Spanish cities to the risks and effects of climate change, either through various municipal adaptation plans and/or the mitigation of climate change, or more general public policies such as development or civil protection plans. At the same time, citizens are organizing...

This paper explores the relations of centrality and hierarchy between cities and firms implementing Smart City strategies in the context of the Spanish Network of Smart Cities (RECI). While the literature has usually focused on the global dimension of cities and firms networks, exploring a national case offers interesting insights about the presenc...

This article addresses household strategies for coping with perceived tap water quality issues. By using a household survey (n = 581) in Catalonia (Spain) and three models, this article analyses the drivers and motivations behind the installation of in-home water treatment systems, and the use of bottled water for drinking and cooking. The main exp...

There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When t...

In this paper, we link the tools of critical cartography and cognitive mapping with more traditional gentrification studies in order to capture in situ the shifts associated with nascent processes of change in bodies, environment, and minds in Vallcarca, a liminal gentrifying neighbourhood of Barcelona, Spain. We ask: How do the simultaneous and co...

The persistence of urban floods and the inability of aging sewage infrastructure to deal with stormwater make sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDSs) one of the emerging paradigms in urban water management, in which stormwater is no longer a hazard but a resource. Although most of the global research has been done on the technical aspects of SUD...

This article examines the evolution of the ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban transformation through the lenses of worlding and provincialising urbanism. We trace this evolution from an especially dogmatic worlding vision of the smart city, under a centre-right city council, to its radical repurposing under the auspices of a municipal government led, after...

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...

Water infrastructure has been financed by differing combinations of private and public ownership throughout history and across different geographies. In the present moment, processes of financialization suggest a radical reconfiguration of these arrangements in a number of locations, such that water infrastructure is being transformed into a wealth...

The Thames Tideway Tunnel (TTT), often referred to as the Thames super sewer, is currently one of the largest infrastructure projects underway in any European city. Costing an estimated £4.2 billion, the sewer connects London’s Victorian sewerage network with the Thames Wastewater Treatment Works at Beckton. The latter facility has been described a...

Throughout the 20th century, urban gardening in central and northern Europe as well as in North America has received a great deal of academic attention. However, the recent proliferation of urban gardening in other geographies, such as southern Europe in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2007–2008, remains underexplored. The economic crisis p...

Water consumption by households is influenced by a host of factors, widely investigated in the literature. However, the effects of contingent situations like drought episodes and economic crises, which may strongly restrict direct water use in households, remain less explored, and especially a combination of both. Catalonia, a Mediterranean region,...

The mobilization of water has been key for the reconfiguration and modernization of the Spanish state. During the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975), the hydro-social reengineering of Spain was central to Franco's political mission but failed to provide for subnational, regionalist aspirations which subsequently pursued their own agendas for water...

In this paper, we document and analyse the recent decline (2007–2013) in domestic water consumption in Barcelona. The postulates of ecological modernisation and market environmentalism celebrate these declines as an example of sustainable development, thanks to the combination of more efficient technologies and economic incentives. However, these i...

Since the past few years, the smart city paradigm has been influencing sustainable urban water resources management. Smart metering schemes for end users have become an important strategy for water utilities to have an in-depth and fine-grained knowledge about urban water use. Beyond reducing certain labor costs, such as those related to manual met...

Facing the challenges of city planning in the frame of rapid urbanization in the Global South, this study addresses the relationship between the urban development of Hanoi, Vietnam, and water supply including users’ perception of water accessibility and satisfaction of coverage, quality, and cost. Because sociospatial disparities are particularly p...

Ecosystem services have become a critical issue in the environmental literature, however knowledge on whether women and men similarly value ecosystem services is still nascent. We aim at advancing the understanding of the relation between gender and environmental perceptions through the analysis of values assigned by women and men to ecosystem serv...

Harvested rainwater and recycled greywater are becoming new sources of water for urban areas. Together with demand-side management, their use can help to ease the pressure on conventional water resources. In the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, several municipalities have passed directives regulating the installation of rainwater harvesting and grey...

Against the trend prevalent during the 1990s and 2000s, large-scale infrastructural projects have made a comeback in the water sector. Although sometimes framed as part of a broader sustainable transition, the return of big infrastructure is a much more complicated story in which finance has played a crucial role. In the following article, we explo...

Over the last four decades the locus of economic power has shifted from industry to finance. As part of this trend, the 'financialisation' of the water sector has added a new layer of complexity to the hydrosocial cycle, witnessed in the emergence of new financial actors, logics and financing instruments. Such a shift has profoundly reshaped the re...

Over the last four decades the locus of economic power has shifted from industry to finance. As part of this trend, the 'financialisation' of the water sector has added a new layer of complexity to the hydrosocial cycle, witnessed in the emergence of new financial actors, logics and financing instruments. Such a shift has profoundly reshaped the re...

Urban gardens have been observed to multiply in response to crises. However, the meaning and motivations behind the emergence of gardening movements varies greatly over space and time. In this paper we argue that bottom up urban gardening initiatives taking place in Southern European countries in form of land occupation and communalization represen...

En los últimos años han emergido con fuerza alternativas socio-económicas, políticas y ambientales que quieren subvertir los lenguajes y los relatos hegemónicos que nos guían a la crisis permanente. Este es el caso del decrecimiento, un proyecto de transformación político-económica y socio-ecológica que busca "descolonizar" el imaginario social bas...

The design of water awareness campaigns could benefit from knowledge of the specific characteristics of domestic water use and the factors that may influence certain water consumption habits. This paper investigates water use in 450 households in 10 municipalities of drought-prone Alicante (Spain). We aim to increase knowledge about existing domest...

The so-called conventional water resources are increasingly subject to social contestation due to their environmental and socio-economic impacts. In parallel, various alternative resources are being implemented, such as desalination and reuse of treated wastewater. Despite their great potential, we have a limited understanding of how these alternat...

The so-called conventional water resources are increasingly subject to social contestation due to their environmental and socio-economic impacts. In parallel, various alternative resources are being implemented, such as desalination and reuse of treated wastewater. Despite their great potential, we have a limited understanding of how these alternat...

In the light of the collapse of the hydraulic paradigm, the intensification of the impact of climate change on the water cycle and rising global demands, desalination is portrayed as the solution to 21st century water issues. Led by state‐led desalination programs, but also with a strong participation of the private sector, the emergence and develo...

The so-called conventional water resources are increasingly subject to social contestation due to their environmental and socio-economic impacts. In parallel, various alternative resources are being implemented, such as desalination and reuse of treated wastewater. Despite their great potential, we have a limited understanding of how these alternat...

This article analyzes degrowth, a project of radical socioecological transformation calling for decolonizing the social imaginary from capitalism's pursuit of endless growth. Degrowth is an advanced reincarnation of the radical environmentalism of the 1970s and speaks to pertinent debates within geography. This article benefits from Ursula Le Guin'...

The design of water awareness campaigns could benefit from knowledge on the specific characteristics of domestic water use and of the factors that may influence certain water consumption habits. This paper investigates water use in 450 households of 10 municipalities of drought prone Alicante (Spain) with the objective of increasing knowledge about...

(paper in catalan) This paper introduces the most recent developments in the metropolitan and regional reconfiguration of the water cycle in Barcelona: the lease of the raw water supplier Aigües Ter-Llobregat and the creation of the mixed-capital metropolitan firm Aigües de Barcelona, Empresa Metropolitana de Gestió del Cicle Integral de l’Aigua, S...

Los cambios experimentados recientemente en las sociedades contemporáneas están transformando las formas de participación de la ciudadanía en la esfera pública, poniendo en tela de juicio las iniciativas de participación institucional promovidas por diversas administraciones durante la última década. Resulta del todo necesario evaluar estas iniciat...

This paper investigates the critical role of workers to enhance the resilience of water supply services in cities at war through analyzing the case of Madrid and the Madrid water company Canales del Lozoya during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). We argue that securing the protection of vital urban flows mediated through infrastructures is a key o...

Resumen Existe un consenso institucional en que el siglo XXI va a ser el siglo de las ciudades, y que por bien que estas puedan estar en el origen de muchas problemáticas ambientales, ellas mismas serán el motor principal de la transición hacia economías más sostenibles. Recientemente muchas ciudades globales, y sobretodo europeas, han hecho del co...

Since the turn of the century the global water industry has seen an influx of new financial actors, investment vehicles and markets along with a discernible change in the corporate strategies of big water operators. In this paper we argue that ‘financialisation’ is materially shaping ownership, control and geographical organisation in the global wa...

In this paper we explore the new orientation taken by Spanish water policy since the beginning of the 21st century and very specifically the shift towards desalination as an alternative to other water supply options such as river regulation or inter-basin water transfers. Desalination has been seen as the cure for everything that dams and inter-bas...

The water supply paradigm in urban Catalonia has experienced a significant transformation toward water decentralization since the approval in 2002 of the first ordinance on water conservation. Local water ordinances make mandatory the installation of rainwater harvesting and greywater reuse systems in new buildings. By 2012, about 50 municipalities...

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