Ross Beveridge

University of Glasgow | UofG · School of Social and Political Sciences

This article responds to both ongoing urban practices and strands of urban theory by arguing for a (re-)turn to the everyday as a means of thinking about antagonism and political possibility. We examine how the everyday might be conceived politically and wonder what it is about the current conjuncture that is fuelling the reimagining of the politic...

In this introduction we first set out an engagement with the interconnections between forms of anti-politics and spaces of politicization and how these are figured in the special issue. We then detail the ways the papers in the special issue examine questions of depoliticization and politicization of austerity. The final section briefly outlines so...

The progressive potential of urban politics is the subject of growing interest. However, debates have been largely focused on large cities with strong progressive constituencies of activists and Left-voting residents. We know little about the opportunities and challenges for progressive politics in smaller urban areas. This article addresses these...

In debates urban wastelands can appear caught between stigmatisation and romanticisation, viewed either as blight or obscure opportunity. How can we conceive of these spaces in a more productive, yet contingent, way? This article examines the political and conceptual meanings of urban voids and explores their significance to understandings of citie...

This article explores the political potential of the local state through an engagement with the case of Sheffield City Council in the 1980s. The new municipalism movement has generated renewed interest in the “local” and “urban” as transformative projects. The local state holds a pivotal if problematic role in these debates, often seen as the decis...

In our initial paper we presented the urban as a question of democracy. The aim was to advance thinking about democracy through thinking about the urban, to use contemporary urban theory to theorise contemporary democracy. Seeing Democracy Like a City involves looking differently at the urban world out there, but also looking a little differently a...

Right-wing populism has become increasingly embedded in contemporary political systems. It poses challenges not only for societies but also for geographical analysis. This review article develops a fresh perspective through examining how right-wing populists are engaging with urban infrastructure. Examining the literature on populism and urban infr...

Urbanisation is changing landscapes, social relations and everyday lives across the globe. But urbanisation is also changing the ways democracy is understood and practiced. Nevertheless, the relation between urban-isation and democracy remains conceptually and empirically underdeveloped. Our aim in this paper is to provide a novel way of thinking a...

We live in an urban age. It is well-known that urbanization is changing landscapes, built environments, social infrastructures and everyday lives across the globe. But urbanization is also changing the ways we understand and practise politics. What implications does this have for democracy? This incisive book argues that urbanization undermines es...

Much social science literature on water reuse focuses on problems of acceptance and economic problems, while the spatial and political dimensions remain under-researched. This paper addresses this deficit by reformulating the issue in terms of sociospatial politics of water reuse. It does this by drawing on the work of Mollinga (2008) and the Terri...

This article draws novel links between ‘anti-politics’, austerity and a political horizon centred on the urban. Research on anti-politics often invokes a binary understanding of a politics of and within the state and an anti-politics at a distance from or hostile towards the state. This article argues that in the context of austerity, this binary l...

Privatization of urban space is increasing, the needs of the global economy push out those of ordinary citizens and austerity increasingly provides the horizons of urban politics. On these grounds, one can quite easily understand the appeal of the post-political city thesis as articulated by urbanist Erik Swyngedouw. His post-political city is larg...

Unter dem Schlagwort „Recht auf Stadt“ sind soziale Bewegungen zu einer Vielzahl an Themen in Berlin aktiv. Neben stadtpolitischen Konflikten um die Gentrifizierung von Wohnquartieren, Großprojekten und den Erhalt von Freiräumen spielen dabei zunehmend auch das Eigentum und der Betrieb städtischer Infrastrukturnetzwerke eine wichtige Rolle. Der Bei...

This issue of the WATERLAT-GOBACIT Network Working Papers includes six contributions. The first article, by Mark Drakeford, presents a historical analysis of the changing arrangements for the provision of essential water and sanitation services in Wales. The second article, by Ross Beveridge, discusses the troubled process that characterized the pr...

Vorgestellt werden die Möglichkeiten der Nutzung gereinigten Abwassers und einer Verbindung mit Energie als Ressource am Beispiel eines Forschungsprojektes in Berlin-Brandenburg. Dem internationalen Forschungsstand wird die spezifische Situation in der Region gegenübergestellt.

Much social science literature on water reuse focuses on problems of acceptance and economic problems, while the spatial and political dimensions remain under-researched. This paper addresses this deficit by reformulating the issue in terms of sociospatial politics of water reuse. It does this by drawing on the work of Mollinga (2008) and the Terri...

The argument that representative democracies are experiencing an age of depoliticisation has become increasingly prominent. However, there has been too little reflection on the assumptions made about politics within the depoliticisation literature. This has led to a lack of precision in terms of how we identify (de)politicisation empirically and th...

Berlin enjoys a reputation as an ‘activist city’ and in many ways this is justified. This is a city with a long culture and history of political protest, a vibrant scene of DIY politics and grassroots organisations and, in recent years, numerous, often successful urban social movements.1 It is also a city where the left have often been strong. Duri...

This commentary reflects on the influence of the post-political critique on urban studies. In this literature (e.g. Swyngedouw, 2014), the default position of contemporary democracies is post-politics – the truly political is only rare, random and radical. The ‘post-political trap’ refers to the intuitively convincing, yet ultimately confining acco...

What happens to urban politics when examined through the post-political lens? In our response to Derickson, Dikec and Swyngedouw we reassert the key elements of our critique: the prescriptive understanding of politics and the inconsistent use of the urban. We close this debate with some thoughts on how we might urbanise the political.

This first conceptual chapter focuses on the analysis of institutional change and what this can reveal about Germany’s energy transition. The authors begin with a critique of the understanding of structure and agency as defined by Anthony Giddens which has underpinned much transitions research in the past. Reflecting on recent developments in insti...

An approach is presented to address adequately the prevailing political and institutional constraints and opportunities of IWRM projects across different domains. The proposed means to achieve this is presented in ‘The IRS Handbook’ which provides an inductive, ‘bottom-up’ analytical framework and a methodological guide for utilisation plus an appe...

Introduction The emerging political science literature on de/politicisation has focused mainly on national and economic policy and the processes and effects of depoliticisation. This chapter seeks to broaden the scope of the literature by making two important contributions: focusing on the urban (regional/local) level and examining how strategies a...

After two decades of widespread privatization, German municipalities have started to re-purchase privatized companies. At the same time, social movements are campaigning for remunicipalization, promoting it as a means of achieving greater urban democracy, though these objectives are often divergent from those of municipalities concerned with reasse...

Analysing institutional and political contexts of water resources management projects

This article makes an important contribution to the depoliticisation literature by switching the focus on to how strategies and forms of depoliticised governance are repoliticised. At present, there is an absence of empirical research on how issues move from depoliticised to politicised arenas and the role of non-state actors in these processes. Th...

This article explores the constraints and contingencies of contemporary urban governance, with reference to the partial privatization (1999) and partial remunicipalization (2012) of the Berlin Water Company (BWB). It outlines the processes through which this major shift in Berlin politics occurred, showing how the mainstream consensus on privatizat...

This article makes an important contribution to the depoliticisation literature by switching the focus on to how strategies and forms of depoliticised governance are repoliticised. At present, there is an absence of empirical research on how issues move from depoliticised to politicised arenas and the role of non-state actors in these processes. Th...

In der post-politischen Stadt werden gesell-schaftliche Fragen nicht mehr politisch und da-mit potenziell kontrovers verhandelt. Politische Entscheidungsfindung wird zunehmend durch ökonomische Zwänge und technokratisches Wissen legitimiert. Dadurch werden Machtfragen ausgeklammert.

This article explores the background to and the recent development of the Energiewende in Germany. Specifically, it examines the on-going politics of this commitment to phase-out nuclear power, reduce fossil fuel use and ensure continued economic growth. Distinctions between the German Energiewende and energy transitions in other countries are draw...

This paper provides a comparative review of the literature on the institutional challenges and politics of IWRM, in relation to the EU's Water Framework Directive (WFD). It reveals two parallel debates with little interaction. The extent to which IWRM is actually addressed in the WFD literature is questioned, as is the assumption that developing co...

This paper examines the effects of the growing presence of management consultants in policy processes. In particular, it addresses the key concern that consultants employed by governments often operate in new institutional arrangements not subject to the formal rules of political systems. Their activities, often secretive, are seen to undermine the...

This book provides a detailed analysis of the controversial privatisation of the Berlin Water Company (BWB) in 1999. As with other cases of privatisation around the world, the city’s government argued there was no alternative in a context of public debts and economic restructuring. Drawing on post-structuralist theory, the analysis presented here s...

On the 29th October 1999, the partial privatisation of the Berlin Water Company, Berliner Wasserbetriebe (BWB), was finalised when the city of Berlin entered a public-private partnership with RWE Umwelt AG/Vivendi (now Véolia) S.A/Allianz. This partial privatisation, the result of a lengthy and controversial policy-making process, occurred at the e...

Although this study is concerned with privatisation in terms of the policy that has emerged since the 1970s, privatisation is not a new phenomenon. It can, for example, be traced back to ancient Greece, where the government owned the land, forests and mines but ‘outsourced’ work to firms and individuals (Megginson and Netter 2001, 323). With regard...

Although only the BWB case was analysed, the approach employed here was not specifically oriented to water governance, privatisation processes or to the context of Berlin in the 1990s. Rather the aim was to develop a general, constructivist approach to policy-making, one which addressed the interdependencies between discourse, political agency and...

In January 1999, the Berlin government, in partnership with Deutsche Telekom, unveiled three new Mediapolis projects. These were presented as part of Die Wende (“the transition”) from an industrial-based economy to an information society. The emphasis was on “innovation”, “new media” and creating “knowledge networks” (Der Tagesspiegel 1999d). The h...

Despite the controversy one could expect with a partial privatisation of water supply and sewage services, particularly in a ‘left-ish’ city like Berlin, the BWB privatisation was presented by the government as commonsensical and its implementation was, according to interviewees, relatively straightforward. Given the debates over the effects of pri...

The previous chapter revealed some of the discursive and material processes through which the partial privatisation of BWB became ‘inevitable’. By exploring policy-making in 1990s Berlin with reference to the global city policy discourse, the aim was to get beyond a simplified account of how and why the privatisation decision was made. The purpose...

Policy-making in Berlin in the 1990s is as much a story of urban governance in the context of globalisation as it is an account of reunification. During this decade Berlin was suddenly exposed to the processes other industrialised cities had been facing since the 1970s. It is a decade defined by policy-making to “re-invent Berlin as a post-industri...

At the start of the study the partial privatisation of BWB and urban governance in Berlin were presented as being emblematic of broader political trends during the period. The BWB privatisation was characterised by the ‘no alternative’ study which accompanied many privatisations during this time, while the more general trends in governance in Berli...

This book provides a detailed analysis of the controversial privatisation of the Berlin Water Company (BWB) in 1999. As with other cases of privatisation around the world, the city’s government argued there was no alternative in a context of public debts and economic restructuring. Drawing on post-structuralist theory, the analysis presented here s...

Environmental innovation is a much discussed, highly prized yet often elusive objective of governance programmes. Despite this, there have been relatively few studies of the everyday realities of achieving innovation on the ground. Addressing this gap, the paper takes a specific example of how the EU's Urban Wastewater Directive sparks a pursuit of...

This paper combines the work from two case studies to draw some conclusions about the negotiated context of 'multi-level governance' on water resource management issues. The context is set up on the literature about Water Governance and in terms of the European Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC). The cases are described focusing on the ttransla...

Media and academic debates about the environment have increasingly made reference to the so-called ‘eco-preneur’ (‘green entrepreneur’ or ‘environmental entrepreneur’). These discussions encourage us to see the potential of such figures to act as drivers of environmental innovation. Their combination of entrepreneurial zeal and green motivations is...