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Building a park, immunising life: Environmental management and radical asymmetry
Abstract
This paper engages in a critical assessment of environmental management as a way of rethinking our co-habitation with earthly powers. Focusing on the post-disaster reconstruction of Constitución, a Chilean costal city severely damaged by the 2010 tsunami, we argue that environmental management theory has not fully recognised that, sometimes, we humans confront excessive forces that cannot be diplomatically managed or assumed as manageable objects that will readily accept our invitation to compose a common world.
Thinking with Sloterdijk’s notions of atmosphere and immunisation, this paper proposes a theoretical programme to re-frame post-disaster environmental management as the creation of life-enabling membranes to contain, isolate and immunise human existence from indifferent forces such as tsunamis. More specifically, we follow the technopolitical controversies around the design of an anti-tsunami park in Constitución to draw attention towards two crucial moments of this process: the definition of the park’s composition and the debate around the park’s fallibility. We argue that these moments point to a type of environmental management engaged in the articulation of an immunising atmosphere to secure an interior for human dwelling. Moreover, these two moments specify empirical challenges not fully developed in Sloterdijk’s atmospheric philosophy: the rearrangement of science, politics and materials that is brought along in the process of erecting an immunological membrane; and the bioeconomy of life (and death) that emerges upon the possibility of an immunitary breakdown. In the concluding section we turn to the ecological and ethical challenges opened up by an atmospheric approach to environmental management.
... Prosthetics may be used as tools in architecture to guide building users to operate in emergency cases where there is minimal chance of survival for people in an impact zone [10]. The study shows the critical assessment of environmental management as a co-habitation method with natural disasters such as Tsunamis and presents the post-disaster reconstruction of Constitución, a Chilean coastal city. ...
... The study shows the critical assessment of environmental management as a co-habitation method with natural disasters such as Tsunamis and presents the post-disaster reconstruction of Constitución, a Chilean coastal city. The research results highlight that a geo-meteorological event that defies scientific calculability and social imagination causes absolute vulnerability and uncertainty but should not be used to express the need for fast or bold actions to 'save the planet' [10]. The authors argue that exceptional events need to humbly recognize the presence of excessive forces that cannot be managed diplomatically. ...
The paper aims to explore and understand the ideas that contribute to the design of prosthetic architecture. The objectives to achieve the aim were: (1) to investigate ''prosthetic building design'' through previously published research, and (2) to design prosthetic architecture in an academic environment. The research opted for a systematic literature review assessing all accessible research related to prosthetic building design. It was complemented by the conceptualization and prosthetic architectural design of a Graduate design studio presented through various drawing techniques. The paper provides empirical insights such as achieving the design of prosthetic architecture by using representative qualities that are objectively proportionate to existing building elements but simultaneously reinforce their novel character. Due to the chosen research method, the research results may lack generalizability to other types of buildings requiring a prosthetic hence researchers are encouraged to test the proposed outcomes further. The research fulfils an identified need to study how prosthetic architecture can be designed.
... Disasters, to be sure, have gained methodological and theoretical relevance within sociology because, as a Bpunch^to the system, they make visible the material, institutional, cultural and political consensuses configuring normality (Kreps 1998;Oliver-Smith 1999;Oliver-Smith 2002;Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002;Perry 2005). In this context, disasters challenge in significant ways the way participation as traditionally construed by both sociology and STS (for a review see Tironi et al. 2015). First, as Btotalizing events^(Oliver-Smith 1999, 20; see also Erikson 1994) disasters dissolve any attempt to draw teleological or ordered sequences for decision-making. ...
... The projects debated in Foros Híbridos were finally voted on in a massive referendum. The voters had to rank projects and approve the most important project of the plan: the construction of a large anti-tsunami green park, the Maule Fluvial Park, PRES Constitución's flagship project (Tironi and Farías 2015). ...
In public discourse and much sociological research disasters are understood as critical situations in which the engagement of citizens is critical to rebuild the political, material and social texture sustaining everyday life. However, it remains unclear how post-disaster participatory techniques help in the modulation of certain types of citizens. In this article we ask: Do disasters, as a specific setting of participation, qualify or specify how citizenship is construed, thought, and brought into being? Drawing on the case of the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in Chile, we explore the role of responsibility distribution, inscribed in the organization and deployment of participatory exercises, in the performativity of citizens. Using in-depth interviews, ethnographic data and archival material we compare three different post-disaster participatory interventions, what we term participation apparatuses. Describing how participation theories and techniques were mobilized to define “who ought to do what,” we argue that different participation apparatuses enacted distinctive responsible publics. We label these publics the epistemic, decisional and narrative responsible publics. Our larger point is that research on the performativity of participation requires an expansion of both the settings of public participation and the mechanisms of performativity within participation apparatuses.
... Natural disasters are inherently political events because they pose questions about environmental management and who should be allowed to assess damage and how (Tironi 2018(Tironi , 2014Rodríguez-Giralt, Tirado & Tironi 2014;Tironi & Farías 2015;Auyero & Switstun 2009). One way to respond to disaster is to relocate the affected population as part of a risk reduction strategy (Iuchi & Mutter 2020;Najarian, Majeed & Gasparyan 2017). ...
Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in marginal, low-income, Belenino river communities located in Iquitos, a fluvial city in the Amazon basin. By using ethnographic methods and semi-structured interviews, this article traces how risk is associated with life in Belenino communities and how the identity of Beleninos and the river at the heart of a resettlement project are politically constructed rather than empirically constructed. In this case study of resettlement, understandings of risk and development by Belenino river communities and the government both conflicted and overlapped, I identified three elements that help to shape the concept of risk in both groups that highlight the disjunctive meanings provided by culture and demonstrate the complexity of the analysis of both populations. Finally, by putting the state’s weak presence after a developmental project failure under ethnographic approximation, the article reveals an imbalance in validity and power in terms of the perspectives of the river and Belen.
... To find ways to empirically conceptualize experimental atmospheric bubbles in planning processes, we draw upon Christian Borch's organizational-theoretical reading of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's work, as well as the partially related literature on affective atmospheres within cultural geography. Only recently have the implications of this latter strand of scholarly work begun to be explored in relation to urban planning practices and processes (see.g. Buser, 2014;Tironi & Far ıas, 2015;Marotta & Cummings, 2019;Mackrodt, 2019;Shilon & Eizenberg, 2020). These previous studies have generally focused on the affectivity of urban space understood as an outcome of planning, whereas discussions about the production and effects of affective atmospheres within planning processes are all but missing in the existing planning literature. 1 Additionally, literature from the research tradition of Actor Network Theory (ANT), such as the work of Latour (2009Latour ( , 2011 and Callon et al. (2009), is drawn upon to assist in problematizing the wider relational geographies of atmospheric bubbles. ...
Procedural planning experiments often attempt to influence how planning actors think through producing physical and social environments that affect how they feel. In this paper such experiments are conceptualized as attempts at generating atmospheric “bubbles” through the engineering of affective atmospheres. Our empirical examples show that purposeful affective engineering is very difficult to achieve – and one cannot expect that their eventual outcomes can be predicted on the basis of the ambitions that underpin them. Therefore, it is crucial to remain attentive to questions concerning the variegated, distributed and often unexpected effects of such endeavors.
... En el caso de Negri van desde el programa londinense de vivienda Focus E15 (Watt, 2016) y las viviendas informales del barrio Eliana Silva en Belo Horizonte (Morado, 2016) hasta los movimientos sociales surgidos contra el programa urbano desarrollado para los Juegos Olímpicos de Atenas (Afouxenidis, 2006). En el de Sloterdijk se han centrado en proyectos tales como la construcción de un parque antitsunamis en la ciudad chilena de Constitución (Tironi y Farías, 2014), el desarrollo de zonas de protección marítima (Ryan, 2015) o el análisis de gated communities como «contemporary fortress» (Klauser, 2010). ...
A diferencia de la ciudad medieval y de la metrópolis decimonónica, la lógica de funcionamiento de las actuales postmetrópolis se basa en un incremento sin parangón de la movilidad de personas, mercancías y capitales. Frente a la división ciudad (fueros)-campo (feudalismo), propia del medioevo, y a la división producción (colonia y/o fábrica-suburbio)-consumo, característica de la metrópolis clásica, la postmetrópolis ha multiplicado exponencialmente la diversidad y transversalidad de sus principales divisiones. En consecuencia, el sujeto político hegemónico generado por la nueva condición postmetropolitana ya no coincide con los desarrollados anteriormente. Este artículo indaga en los dos principales modelos concebidos por la filosofía contemporánea a partir de un análisis de las nuevas condiciones urbanas en las que se desarrollan esos sujetos: el concepto de multitud de Negri y el de emprendedor creativo descrito por Sloterdijk. Aunque sus concepciones y categorías sociopolíticas difieren, ambos autores coinciden en establecer una relación productiva bidireccional entre el medio y el sujeto.
... Given the political aspects of each step in the disaster process, we examine the growing literature on the political nature of disasters (Olson, 2000;Pelling & Dill, 2010), including interdisciplinary approaches such as (urban) political ecology (Coates & Nygren, 2020;Collins, 2008;Marks, 2015), science and technology studies (A. Fraser, 2017;Guggenheim, 2014;Tironi, 2015;Tironi & Farías, 2014), and critical urban studies (Gotham, 2016b;Gotham & Greenberg, 2014;Marcuse, 2009). With regard to politics, disaster recovery processes serve as "a window into the power structure of the society that has been stricken" (Vale & Campanella, 2005, p. 12) and are therefore intimately linked to equity and justice. ...
... Environmental Management Initiatives and Environmental Performance EMI is depicted as ecological asset preservation endeavours, natural approach and preparing and ecological public connection endeavours (Jia & Chen, 2019). In this manner, EMI is a significant function for developing of EP (Tironi & FarIas, 2015). EMI implies both an efficient implementation, but also the support granted for achieving EP (Nawroka & Parker, 2009). ...
Environmental Management Initiatives (EMI), as part of the sustainability management movement, have become an integrated part of the organisational management practices and of the current research. Since the implementation of Environmental Management System (EMS), there have been many studies analysing this relationship with the environmental performance. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) also gained a great importance for the organisations’ performance, including their performance in the environmental area. However, previous studies analysed the direct link between those variables and environmental performance, while the mediating effect of those variables has not been tested yet because using a mediator in the relationship between two variables is a rather new approach in the research area used in the behavioural sciences area. This research analyses the role of EMI in defining the Environmental Performance (EP) of hotel industry, given the strong relationship between those two variables and the importance of the tourism sector for the economic development, both in the developed, but especially in the developing countries. It also investigates the CSR authenticity as mediator between EMI and EP link. Data was collected through a questionnaire of managers of the hotels in Pakistan. Correlation, Structural Equation Model and linear regressions were applied for testing the hypotheses and for checking the viability of the model. Findings revealed that EMI and CSR authenticity are important and significant determinants of EP in the hotel industry. Findings show that CSR authenticity acts as a mediator for the EMI and EP link. The stakeholder pressures and customers’ environmental awareness have forced the hotel industry to implement environmental standards and this shift of focus is more important in the hotel industry. The current research demonstrates that efforts of EMI is a prerequisite for enhancing CSR authenticity in the environmental area, and this, in its turn, contributes to the increase of the EP of hotel and tourism sector in a developing country. Given the lack of large financial resources of the developing countries, this model is an important outcome for the tourism industry that helps hotels to become green, to attract more clients and to gain competitive advantages.
... Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene, 2007;Coulthard, 2014) and Audra Simpson (Mohawk, 2007 emphasize that the use of rigid juridical categories for legal recognition in the Canadian context has led to Indigenous peoples' misrecognition, forced economic development, and, ultimately, refusals to participate. South American scholars consider the political ontology of conflicts, where multiple worlds are forced to enter rational state logics that are by design exclusionary (De la Cadena, 2015; Blaser, 2009;Escobar, 2017;Tironi and Farías, 2015). Together these studies indicate the historical injustices of state lawmaking which are laid bare when Indigenous jurisdictions (c.f. ...
In this article, I examine how hydropower projects in Mapuche territory both form part of internationally recognized approaches to develop renewable energy and also anchor colonial relations in rivers. In pursuit of energy development, water and ancestral cultural practices of the Mapuche Pueblo are being seized by a nexus of state laws and informal practices of private sector actors. Concurrently, Mapuche people assert their jurisdictions and experience resurgence of Indigenous lifeways through defending their waterways. Drawing on collaborative research guided by the Alianza Territorial Puelwillimapu, a Mapuche-Williche alliance convoked by ancestral leaders, I provide a methodological contribution to legal geography's analysis of Indigenous rights. Bringing a legal geography approach to dispossession, I explain how collaborative mapmaking and systematizing the "layers of dispossession" provides a methodological approach to consider structural limitations to environmental justice on Indigenous lands. Overall, this case contributes to how we conceive of spatial justice in legal geography and in renewable energy development.
... Global warming, whose effects remain for the next hundred thousand years, is one glaring example of hyper-objects: "real objects that are massively distributed in time and space" and "massively outsize us and outlast us" (Morton, 2011: 80-83). In a radical asymmetry, the disasters are rather approached Working Paper Series as multiplicities of "elements, things, and forces" that violently surpass human power and forcefully shape human life in cities (Tironi & Farías, 2015). ...
... Lifestyle threatens the greater impact of natural disasters and citizens should consider opportunities through science and technology. The most important thing to the government is to develop a regional project as a natural disaster mitigation intervention [27] For example, the provision of land and open buildings where rapid evacuation can accommodate many people. In the context of current research, the terms 'smart', 'Digital', and 'innovative' are often used to describe Smart city. ...
This study proposes a framework for the utilization of IT resources in the face of natural disasters with the concept of Smart City in urban areas, which often face the earthquake, particularly in the city of North Sumatra and Aceh. Smart City is a city that integrates social development, capital, civic participation, and transportation with the use of information technology to support the preservation of natural resources and improved quality of life. Changes in the climate and environment have an impact on the occurrence of natural disasters, which tend to increase in recent decades, thus providing socio-economic impacts for the community. This study suggests a new approach that combines the Geographic Information System (GIS) and Mobile IT-based Android in the form of Geospatial information to encounter disaster. Resources and IT Infrastructure in implementing the Smart Mobility with Mobile service can make urban areas as a Smart City. This study describes the urban growth using the Smart City concept and considers how a GIS and Mobile Systems can increase Disaster Management, which consists of Preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery for recovery from natural disasters.
... In contrast to Ingold, however, I consider the idea of line in a more empirical and immanent way. Thus, rather than appealing to the idea of line as a way to speak, more or less abstractly, of the liveliness and inventiveness of birds -a crucial point but one that goes far beyond the scope of this paper (for a discussion on new materialist sensibilities see Tironi and Farías, 2015) -I use this concept to speak of an empirical transformation, an achievement in the controversy through which birds turned into boundless entities, trajectories that held significance ecologically as well as politically. ...
This paper analyses how in the aftermath of one of the worst environmental disasters ever to occur in Spain – the Aznalcóllar Disaster – various environmentalist and conservationist groups mobilised migratory birds to bring new insights and the need for new precautions to the controversy elicited by the spill. The case study, thus, revolves around how environmentalists established a “hybrid collective action” to draw attention to unconsidered risks and impacts of the disaster and thereby make the case for open debate. Building upon this, I engage with two different, though interrelated, theoretical debates that contribute to a rethinking of environmental management (EM) as a social and materially situated practice. Drawing on the idea of “tactic” (De Certeau, 1984), I draw attention to the devices, actions and procedures that environmentalists carried out to resist attempts to minimise the spill and to undermine administrations’ assumptions of control, coherence and singularity associated the idea of management. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s latest work (2007, 2008, 2011), I analyse environmentalists’ most successful tactic: the enactment of migratory birds as “lines”. Together with other authors in this special issue, I will use this notion to make an argument against some of the assumptions of the “hybrid ontology”. In contrast to more essentialists and static notions of non-human agency and politics, the idea of line is particularly useful as a way of understanding how nature(s) can be effectuated differently and how this leads to the imagining of new regimes of cohabitation, human and non-human management and intervention.
La sección Simposio de la revista Estudios Públicos es un espacio de debate académico público en torno a ideas de alcance sustantivo. Se compone de un artículo original, sometido previamente a revisión de pares, que es críticamente analizado en contribuciones cortas por cuatro académicos desde distintos ángulos y disciplinas. El simposio cierra con una respuesta de los autores del ar-tículo original a los comentarios realizados. El Antropoceno, o la hipótesis según la cual la actividad humana se ha convertido en una fuerza capaz de alterar las dinámicas terrestres inaugurando una nueva era geológica, ha generado una serie de debates más allá de las ciencias de la Tierra. En el presente artículo revisamos tres discusiones que el concepto ha provocado en las ciencias sociales y las humanidades, y que ponen de manifiesto los equívocos que el Antropoceno trae consigo: la tensión entre simetría o irreductiblidad entre naturaleza y sociedad; la condición del agente humano al que se le imputan las transformaciones en curso, y el sentido y alcance ético-político de las acciones que comienzan a movilizarse para responder a la crisis. Sobre la base de los fértiles claroscuros y desacuerdos del Antropoceno, y atendiendo tanto a la crisis planetaria que enfrentamos como al inusual dinamismo geológico de nuestro territorio, especulamos sobre la necesidad de ‘geologizar’ la sociología chilena, incorporando elementos y fuerzas más-que-humanas en sus recuentos de la constitución de lo social. A modo de ejemplos, planteamos la importancia de crear analíticas y métodos para pensar la identidad cultural, la corporalidad y la política desde su composición e interdependencia geológica. Concluimos invitando a la sociología chilena a hacerse parte del problema y a dejarse interpelar por la pregunta con que el Antropoceno nos incomoda: qué haremos.
This article introduces the smart urban planning in the mitigation of natural disasters in urban areas in Indonesia especially North Sumatera. A smart city is a city-based social development, capital, citizen participation, transportation and information technology, natural resources and quality of life. Frequency and socio-economic impacts of natural disasters frequent in recent decades due to climate change and the environment. The approach used in this paper is a combination of Geographic Information System (GIS) and mobile IT in the form of geospatial information. Mobile services sector in which the city government is involved in the formation of smart cities. This article reviews the growth of smart cities and considers how a systems can improve mitigation and adaptation approaches to these risks and to recovery from the natural disasters.
The 2010 tsunami that severely affected coastal towns in Chile posed a novel cosmopolitical challenge: how to cope with the radical asymmetry between human life and overwhelming oceanic forces. In this article, I discuss the different ways master plans for sustainable reconstruction proposed to recompose an urban cosmos where human life with future tsunamis would be possible. I focus on three distinct cosmogrammatic operations: the territorialization of tsunami risk, the classification of entities and urban activities, and commoning of urban works. Through these operations, master plans seek not just to govern human populations, in order to reduce their exposure to mortal danger, but also to govern tsunamis, in order to soften, or even civilize, their behavior in the city.
The idea that we inhabit three dimensions is clearly not new, yet the explicit articulation of “volume” in recent literature has proved to be an extremely useful means through which to produce novel insights into the conduct and practice of geopolitics. Although the value of engaging with “volume” has been well established and taken discussions in new directions, yet the practicalities of doing this research are yet to be considered in great detail. How methodologically do we approach the three-dimensional within political geography? Although this paper does not seek to outline a methodological framework, it draws on my own research to prompt discussion about the role of “immersive” methodologies in generating different perspectives within political geography. The paper ends by suggesting that a stronger interface between political geography and methodologies utilised in other geographical subdisciplines might be useful in producing novel insights into the earth's geopolitical volumes.
The notion of hybrid forums has come to embody the promises and dangers of ‘technical democracy’; that ethico-political project that, according to Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe (2009. Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), aims at the democratization of expertise through the sustained collaboration among technical experts and issue publics on shared matters of concern. In this paper I study the managerial deployment of hybrid forums as participatory devices after the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in the city of Constitución, Chile. By carefully describing the genealogy, organization and consequences of said forums, I reflect on three critical tensions underlying such collaborative processes. Firstly, taking into account the tension between the notion of hybrid forums as a concept and a device, I describe how these were devised by a Chilean consulting company as a tool for managing controversies. Secondly, dwelling on the tension between emergent and procedural dynamics of collaboration, I show the limitations these forums confronted for incorporating pre-existing controversies about the present and future of Constitución. Thirdly, I discuss how what counts as political voice was constrained by and contested in these forums, looking in detail at how local fishermen mobilized forms of political claim-making that run against the collaborative project of technical democracy. I conclude by suggesting that the most urgent challenge of hybrid forums is not just to democratically respond to existing uncertainties and matters of concern, but also to actually participate in the manufacturing of uncertainty.
The 2010 earthquake-tsunami in Chile did not just destroy cities and towns. It also revealed how the neoliberal decentralisation of the Chilean state initiated during the Pinochet dictatorship had radically diminished and fragmented territorial planning capacities, representing a major obstacle to the planning and management of the reconstruction process. In the face of this situation, exceptional reconstruction agencies were created, which engaged in the elaboration of master plans, suspending in practice – at least temporarily – existing planning authorities and instruments. These new institutional arrangements were also subject to a number of critiques, sparking moral controversies among different public actors about the contribution of these exceptional governmental agencies to the common good. Drawing on the Chilean example, this article proposes expanding the concept of the state of exception to include cases in which what is reconfigured is not the relationship between the State and the population, but the relationship between the state and its territory, so that exceptional powers can be applied upon a ‘bare land’ rather than a ‘bare life’. To the extent that this different state of exception does not reduce citizens to bodies to be protected and administered, it requires a moral rather than a technical justification.
We propose an analysis of environmental management (EM) as work and as practical activity. This approach enables empirical studies of the diverse ways in which professionals, scientists, NGO staffers, and activists achieve the partial manageability of specific “environments”. In this introduction, we sketch the debates in Human Geography, Management Studies, Science and Technology Studies to which this special issue contributes. We identify the limits of understanding EM though the framework of ecological modernization, and show how political ecology and workplace studies provide important departures towards a more critical approach. Developing these further, into a cosmopolitical direction, we propose studying EM as sets of socially and materially situated practices. This enables a shift away from established approaches which treat EM either as a toolbox whose efficiency has to be assessed, or as simply the implementation of dominant projects and the materialisation of hegemonic discourse. Such a shift renders EM as always messy practices of engagement, critique and improvisation. We conclude that studying the distributed and situated managing agencies, actors and their practices allows to imagine new forms of critical interventions.
Malaria management involves the continuous calibration of micro-environments, namely of the entangled habitats of mosquitoes, parasites and humans. This article focuses on humans and mosquitoes as unruly actors of environmental management. Drawing on economic sociology, I show how framing mosquito nets as ‘humanitarian goods’ disentangles particular economic and ecological realities. Juxtaposing politico-economic processes of mosquito net production and distribution with the emergence of insecticide resistance in mosquitoes I show how their disentanglement creates unintended social and disease realities. This suggests rethinking the spatio-temporal politics of environmental management of mosquitoes and malaria, and nuances the patterns of how exactly humanitarian goods ‘do good’.
Ecological modernist approaches to climate change are premised upon knowing carbon emissions. I ask how corporate environmental managers know and do carbon, i.e., shape the reality of emissions. I argue that for managers’ practical purposes carbon exists as malleable data. Based on ethnographic fieldwork over a period of 20 months in a Fortune 50 multinational corporation, I show that managers materially-discursively arrange heterogeneous entities – databases, files, paper, words, numbers – in and between office spaces, enabling them to stage emission facts as stable and singular. Employing Annemarie Mol’s work on multiplicity, I show that multiple enactments of carbon hang together not by an antecedent body (CO2) but through ongoing configurations of data practices. Disillusioning promissory economic discourses of ‘internalisation’, I demonstrate: Management is materially premised upon preventing purportedly internalised carbon realities from entering capitalist core processes. This undermines carbon economics’ realist promises. Staging some carbon realities as in control is premised upon managers’ ongoing, reflexive, partial and always situated configuration of, e.g., standards, formal meetings or digital data practices in which humans do carbon-as-data. Carbon practices are materially-discursively aligned, forming a configuration. This configuration effects carbon as a malleable and locally configurable space rather than as a closed fact. Reconstructing managers’ practices as configuring carbon-as-dataspace, I argue, allows grasping adequately the contingency and constraints of managing carbon as a particular material-discursive form of environment. In conclusion I generalise the environmental management office as a space that can be configured to stage, beyond carbon, other global environments as well.
This article tells the story of long-lasting and ongoing struggles surrounding the construction plans for a major reservoir on the headwaters of the Kemi River in the Finnish Province of Lapland. A point of contention since the beginning of hydropower development on the river in the mid twentieth century, the reservoir project has been promoted and abandoned multiple times in waves of land purchasing, legal procedures, opposition campaigns, and the delineation of nature reserves. Despite a Finnish Supreme Administrative Court ruling officially setting an end to the project, it never entirely left public discourse and is currently being re-negotiated in slightly adapted form. Articulating voices and documenting practices of riverbank inhabitants, activists and hydro electricity managers, this article presents the struggle as multiple modes of heterogeneous engineering, where both proponents and opponents work towards creating different realities. The article develops the metaphor of heterogeneous engineering by drawing attention to three temporal dimensions central to the reservoir struggle: moments, which refer to the situated emergence of practices and strategies; futures, which speak to the attempts to build and contest expectations regarding conflicting projects; and durations, which consider the cumulative aspects of a decades-long struggle on people and landscapes. Thereby, the article contributes to discussions on making, planning and environmental management, and illustrates ways of studying these processes as situated practices in relation to time.
We propose an analysis of environmental management (EM) as work and as practical activity. This approach enables empirical studies of the diverse ways in which professionals, scientists, NGO staffers, and activists achieve the partial manageability of specific “environments”. In this introduction, we sketch the debates in Human Geography, Management Studies, Science and Technology Studies to which this special issue contributes. We identify the limits of understanding EM though the framework of ecological modernization, and show how political ecology and workplace studies provide important departures towards a more critical approach. Developing these further, into a cosmopolitical direction, we propose studying EM as sets of socially and materially situated practices. This enables a shift away from established approaches which treat EM either as a toolbox whose efficiency has to be assessed, or as simply the implementation of dominant projects and the materialisation of hegemonic discourse. Such a shift renders EM as always messy practices of engagement, critique and improvisation. We conclude that studying the distributed and situated managing agencies, actors and their practices allows to imagine new forms of critical interventions.
A substantial recent literature has examined insurance as a mechanism for economizing uncertain but potentially catastrophic events. Less attention has been paid to how insurantial techniques for economizing catastrophe have been deployed as political technologies. Focusing on discussions of US flood policy in the 1960s, the present article examines how insurance was used to forge new articulations and accommodations between political government and processes of rationalization. On the one hand, insurance provided a technical solution to problems that had long confronted US policy-makers: How to reduce losses from floods? How to fully compensate individuals who suffered losses? On the other hand, insurance was a device for reshaping the aims and objects of government, and for reframing questions that are more frequently situated at the level of political philosophy: What are the respective responsibilities of individual citizens and government in providing security? What tradeoffs must be made between the provision of security and economic rationality? What values are relevant in orienting public policy? In examining these issues, the article raises questions about standard narratives about the changing relations among risk, responsibility, and security in recent decades, particularly as they relate to neoliberalism.
Ecological modernist approaches to climate change are premised upon knowing carbon emissions. I ask how corporate environmental managers know and do carbon, i.e., shape the reality of emissions. I argue that for managers’ practical purposes carbon exists as malleable data. Based on ethnographic fieldwork over a period of 20 months in a Fortune 50 multinational corporation, I show that managers materially-discursively arrange heterogeneous entities – databases, files, paper, words, numbers – in and between office spaces, enabling them to stage emission facts as stable and singular. Employing Annemarie Mol’s work on multiplicity, I show that multiple enactments of carbon hang together not by an antecedent body (CO2) but through ongoing configurations of data practices. Disillusioning promissory economic discourses of ‘internalisation’, I demonstrate: Management is materially premised upon preventing purportedly internalised carbon realities from entering capitalist core processes. This undermines carbon economics’ realist promises. Staging some carbon realities as in control is premised upon managers’ ongoing, reflexive, partial and always situated configuration of, e.g., standards, formal meetings or digital data practices in which humans do carbon-as-data. Carbon practices are materially-discursively aligned, forming a configuration. This configuration effects carbon as a malleable and locally configurable space rather than as a closed fact. Reconstructing managers’ practices as configuring carbon-as-dataspace, I argue, allows grasping adequately the contingency and constraints of managing carbon as a particular material-discursive form of environment. In conclusion I generalise the environmental management office as a space that can be configured to stage, beyond carbon, other global environments as well.
This paper examines the work that measures and values do in policy in the context of an epochal change in the relations between knowledge and policy in Australia. I tell a story of successive attempts to rehabilitate a dying Australian river. The first attempt employs policy as the application of theoretically justified natural knowledge about rivers and their environs. The second attempt occurs after the evidence-based policy era has dawned in Australia. The contrast shows that measures, values and facts about the dying river justified by epistemic practices have been displaced. In an era of evidence-based policy and governance through market mechanisms, measures and values speak to policy through designs that can be bought and sold. In order to be able to better describe this shift I develop an analytic vocabulary to give an account of the intensive properties of what I call enumerated entities, and link the shift to the move from a disciplinary to a control society.
Grounded in critical theory and the Gramscian concept of hegemony, this article argues that environmental management (EM) can be understood as an accommodation to growing public awareness of environmental problems that potentially threatens dominant hegemonic coalitions. On the material level, EM is a set ofpractices that ameliorates the more egregious environmental consequences of industrial production; on the ideological and symbolic level, EM constructs products and companies as "green" and legitimizes the primacy of corporate management's role in addressing environmentalproblems. EM is thus seen to be more about political than environmental sustainability.
On 27 February 2010, a magnitude M
w = 8.8 earthquake occurred off the coast of Chile’s Maule region causing substantial damage and loss of life. Ancestral tsunami knowledge from the 1960 event combined with education and evacuation exercises prompted most coastal residents to spontaneously evacuate after the earthquake. Many of the tsunami victims were tourists in coastal campgrounds. The international tsunami survey team (ITST) was deployed within days of the event and surveyed 800 km of coastline from Quintero to Mehuín and the Pacific Islands of Santa María, Mocha, Juan Fernández Archipelago, and Rapa Nui (Easter). The collected survey data include more than 400 tsunami flow depth, runup and coastal uplift measurements. The tsunami peaked with a localized runup of 29 m on a coastal bluff at Constitución. The observed runup distributions exhibit significant variations on local and regional scales. Observations from the 2010 and 1960 Chile tsunamis are compared.
This chapter reviews Kai Erikson's account of the impact of disaster on communities in the context of the UK's 2001 foot and mouth epidemic. Though the disaster was deeply destructive, it is argued that the 2001 events also led to creativity and sociality.
Malaria management involves the continuous calibration of micro-environments, namely of the entangled habitats of mosquitoes, parasites and humans. This article focuses on humans and mosquitoes as unruly actors of environmental management. Drawing on economic sociology, I show how framing mosquito nets as ‘humanitarian goods’ disentangles particular economic and ecological realities. Juxtaposing politico-economic processes of mosquito net production and distribution with the emergence of insecticide resistance in mosquitoes I show how their disentanglement creates unintended social and disease realities. This suggests rethinking the spatio-temporal politics of environmental management of mosquitoes and malaria, and nuances the patterns of how exactly humanitarian goods ‘do good’.
This article asks methodological questions about studying infrastructure with some of the tools and perspectives of ethnography. infrastructure is both relational and ecological-it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms. Some of the difficulties of studying infrastructure are how to scale up from traditional ethnographic sites, how to manage large quantities of data such as those produced by transaction logs and how to understand the interplay of online and offline behavior: Some of the tricks of the trade involved in meeting these challenges include studying the design of infrastructure, understanding the paradoxes of infrastructure as both transparent and opaque, including invisible work in the ecological analysis, and pinpointing the epistemological status of indictors.
This paper analyses how in the aftermath of one of the worst environmental disasters ever to occur in Spain – the Aznalcóllar Disaster – various environmentalist and conservationist groups mobilised migratory birds to bring new insights and the need for new precautions to the controversy elicited by the spill. The case study, thus, revolves around how environmentalists established a “hybrid collective action” to draw attention to unconsidered risks and impacts of the disaster and thereby make the case for open debate. Building upon this, I engage with two different, though interrelated, theoretical debates that contribute to a rethinking of environmental management (EM) as a social and materially situated practice. Drawing on the idea of “tactic” (De Certeau, 1984), I draw attention to the devices, actions and procedures that environmentalists carried out to resist attempts to minimise the spill and to undermine administrations’ assumptions of control, coherence and singularity associated the idea of management. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s latest work (2007, 2008, 2011), I analyse environmentalists’ most successful tactic: the enactment of migratory birds as “lines”. Together with other authors in this special issue, I will use this notion to make an argument against some of the assumptions of the “hybrid ontology”. In contrast to more essentialists and static notions of non-human agency and politics, the idea of line is particularly useful as a way of understanding how nature(s) can be effectuated differently and how this leads to the imagining of new regimes of cohabitation, human and non-human management and intervention.
This paper broadens out existing challenges to the divisions between the human and the animal that keep humans distinct, and apart, from other animals. Much attention to date has focused on how the Euro-American individuation of the human subject intensifies the asymmetries inculcated by these divisions. This paper rehearses some of this literature but goes on to attend to how these divisions undercut understandings of sociality and limit social organization to interaction between persons. Drawing together debates around the human/animal relation, the paper juxtaposes different perspectives of nature-cultures to bring 'worlds' of relations into view. Specifically, I distinguish here between the state of 'being alongside' and the process of 'being-with'. Ranging from approaches that try to settle ideas of difference through appeals to 'ethical health', through to work on identity that 'unconceals' a wealth of connection, this distinction will help to keep apart those situated moments of relations, where the constituent parts are left more provisional and contingent, from more sought-out relationships, where a sense of togetherness purposefully dominates the conjoining of activities. Contrasting hybridity as a totalizing form of 'being-with', with alongsideness, as a form of intermittent and partial connection, the analysis eschews the obfuscation of difference entrenched in contemporary emphasis on connectivity. Proposing instead the importance of creatures as 'division preserving', the paper theorizes ways to sustain regard for division as well as connection as key to understanding the arts of dwelling amidst different kinds.
New technologies have stimulated the rehearsal of old debates about what is new and what is old in descriptions of social life. This article considers some of the current uses to which the concepts of `hybrids' and `networks' are being put. It could be seen as following Latour's call for a symmetrical anthropology that gathers together modern and nonmodern forms of knowledge. In the process, the article reflects on the power of analytical narratives to extend endlessly, and on the interesting place that property ownership holds in a world that sometimes appears limitless.
In this article, I ethnographically examine “the biggest experiment in tropical conservation history,” an environmental management approach designed in Brazilian Amazonia. I focus on research conducted by scientists who support this approach using the results of their work at an open-air experiment. Drawing on this ethnographic study I critically revisit Bruno Latour’s deservedly influential ethnography of an open-air laboratory in Brazilian Amazonia. I also engage with his claim that open-air experiments constitute spaces in which scientists can avoid seeing the world as “Nature”—a gigantic collection of inert objects that experts sense they have to bring into order on their own. Latour shows that while working in their Amazonian open-air laboratory scientists perceived the forest as a network comprising human and non-human entities bearing creative capacities. He suggests that such experimentation enables humans to envision environmental management strategies based on human/non-human collaborations. In the open air, experts could thereby transcend the pervasive fatalism that plagues environmental policy circles and rekindle a more optimistic and enthusiastic stance toward environmental management. I argue that Latour’s is a visionary ethnography that anticipates contemporary trends in environmental management approaches. However, I also argue that his celebratory conclusions regarding open-air experimentation are misguided. I show that, while working in the open air, the scientists situated their work within capitalist experiments wherein humans and non-humans creatively collaborate in the construction of new, less inhabitable worlds.
Mr. Sloterdijk, as part of your trilogy on the spheres, 1 you set out to create a theory that construes space as a key anthropological category. Why this emphasis? We have to speak of space because humans are themselves an effect of the space they create. Human evolution can only be understood if we also bear in mind the mystery of insulation/island-making [Insulierungsgeheimnis] that so defines the emergence of humans: Humans are pets that have domesticated themselves in the incubators of early cultures. All the generations before us were aware that you never camp outside in nature. The camps of man's ancestors, dating back over a million years, already indicated that they were distancing themselves from their surroundings. In the third volume of your trilogy there is an extensive chapter on architecture, "Indoors: Architectures of Foam." Why did you choose such a provocative metaphor? First of all for a philosophical reason: We are simply not capable of continuing the old cosmology of ancient Europe that rested on equating the house and home with the world. Classical metaphysics is a phantasm on an implicit motif that was highlighted in only a few places, e.g., by Hegel and Heidegger, namely that the world must itself be construed as having the character of a house and that people in Western culture should be grasped not only as mortals, but also as house residents. Their relation to the world as a whole is that of inhabitants in a crowded building called cosmos. So the questions are, "Why should modern thought bid goodbye to this equation of world and house? Why do we need a new image in order to designate how modern man lives in social and architectural containers? Why do I propose the concept of foams?" The simple answer is: Because since the Enlightenment we have no longer needed a universal house in order to find the world a place worthy of inhabiting. What suffices is a unité d'habitation, a stackable number of inhabitable cells. Through the motif of the inhabited cell I can uphold the spherical imperative that applies to all forms of human life but does not presuppose cosmic totalization. The stacking of cells in an apartment block, for instance, no longer generates the classical world/house entity, but an architectural foam, a multi-chambered system made of relatively stabilized personal worlds. Is this deterioration of the world house or the all-embracing sphere into foam bubble an image of entropy? On the contrary, in modernity far more complexity is established than was possible under the classical notion of unity. We must not forget that metaphysics is the realm of strong simplifications, and thus has a consolatory effect. The structure of foam is incompatible with a monospherical mindset; the whole can no longer be portrayed as a large round whole. Let me use an anecdote to indicate the immense change: In his memoirs, Albert Speer recollects that the designs for the giganto-manic new Reich Chancellery in Berlin originally envisaged a swastika crowning the dome, which was to be over 290 meters high. One summer's day in 1939 Hitler then said: "The crown of the largest building in the world must be the eagle on the globe." This remark should be taken as attesting to the brutalist restoration of imperial monocentric thinking—as if Hitler had for a moment intervened in the agony of classical metaphysics. By contrast, around 1920, in his reflections on the fundamentals of theoretical biology [Theoretische Biologie], Jakob von Uexküll had already affirmed: "It was an error to believe that the human world constituted a shared stage for all living creatures. Each living creature has its own special stage that is just as real as the special stage the humans have. . . . This insight offers us a completely new view of the universe as something that does not consist of a single soap bubble which we have blown up so large as to go well beyond our horizons and assume infinite proportions, and is instead made up of millions of closely demarcated soap bubbles that overlap and intersect everywhere." Le Corbusier himself used the image of the soap bubble in order to explain the essence of a good building: "The soap bubble is completely harmonious, if the breath in it is spread equally, and well regulated on the inside. The outside is the product of an inside." 2 This statement could be taken as the axiom of spherology: Vital space can only be explained in terms of the priority of the inside.
This article tells the story of long-lasting and ongoing struggles surrounding the construction plans for a major reservoir on the headwaters of the Kemi River in the Finnish Province of Lapland. A point of contention since the beginning of hydropower development on the river in the mid twentieth century, the reservoir project has been promoted and abandoned multiple times in waves of land purchasing, legal procedures, opposition campaigns, and the delineation of nature reserves. Despite a Finnish Supreme Administrative Court ruling officially setting an end to the project, it never entirely left public discourse and is currently being re-negotiated in slightly adapted form. Articulating voices and documenting practices of riverbank inhabitants, activists and hydro electricity managers, this article presents the struggle as multiple modes of heterogeneous engineering, where both proponents and opponents work towards creating different realities. The article develops the metaphor of heterogeneous engineering by drawing attention to three temporal dimensions central to the reservoir struggle: moments, which refer to the situated emergence of practices and strategies; futures, which speak to the attempts to build and contest expectations regarding conflicting projects; and durations, which consider the cumulative aspects of a decades-long struggle on people and landscapes. Thereby, the article contributes to discussions on making, planning and environmental management, and illustrates ways of studying these processes as situated practices in relation to time.
This article examines how specific political arrangements are articulated to govern disasters. I suggest that disasters give rise to political experiments in which uncertainties are sensed, ordered and managed. I argue, however, that when the world is uncanny and indeterminacies are excessive and radically vital, the search for stability is messier than experimental politics might assume. Drawing on the cases of PRE Talca and Talca con Tod@s, two post-disaster participatory experiments that unfolded in Talca, Chile, I call atmospheres of indagation the expanded and enhanced political experimentalism unearthed by disasters. Of indagation because the inquiry was meticulous, open and agonically needed. And atmosphere because this indagation unfolded under the form of an overarching, multiform and ambiguous ambience in which everything could be explored, scrutinized and contested – including the experiments themselves. More concretely, I describe how these two experiments, via different participatory technologies, enacted different versions of Talca. But I attempt to show, as well, how PRE Talca and Talca con Tod@s were configured by openly contesting the principles and assumptions of each other. The result was a highly complex topological arrangement in which political publicness was expanded and re-articulated, thus defying conventional understandings on political experiments.
The failure of the Chilean tsunami warning system on the night of 27 February, 2010, opens up the question of the ontological politics of inquiry processes at the two national centres of recognition and civic protection involved. Focusing on approximately two hours of intense activity and communication, I identify three critical features of how non-human phenomena are enacted by these agencies and show how these features shaped the process of misrecognizing the ongoing tsunami. They involved, first, the problem of information and the tension between local and global assessments; second, the problem of interpretation and the tension between scientific evidence and political intervention; and, third, the problem of conclusions and the tension between certainty and uncertainty. The ensuing public and legal controversy about responsible actors of this fatal failure also offers an opportunity to reflect upon the precautionary principle as a model for action in uncertain situations. I suggest here that the failure of the tsunami warning system reveals the need of associating precaution to a cosmopolitical duty of recognition of non-human entities and forces.
The field of environmental management developed as a technocentric problem-solving initiative, providing ‘practical’ assistance to state officials involved in environmental management. Since the field was largely associated with what state officials and associated experts ‘dO', little effort was devoted to understanding the political, economic or cultural forces conditioning the process of environmental management. The potentially significant contribution of diverse nonstate actors – for example, farmers, shifting cultivators, businesses or nongovernmental organizations – to this process was notably neglected. The field has recently become the target of mounting criticism with ‘environmental managerialism’ dismissed as a research agenda divorced from key issues in human–environment interaction.
This article argues that a recognition of the limitations of traditional understandings of environmental management ought to serve as the basis for a rethink of this field of study. This argument is developed in two stages. The article first explores how the traditional approach understands environmental management as a state-centred process, assesses diverse problems with that understanding and sketches an alternative way of thinking about this issue. The article then assesses how environmental management as a field of study is usually understood, the pitfalls of that understanding and the possible contours of an alternative appreciation of the field of environmental management. By adopting a more inclusive understanding of what environ-mental management is as a process, a broader appreciation of the nature of environmental management as a field of study can be obtained. The article concludes that a revitalized field can overcome existing deficiencies so as to be in a position to make thereafter an important contribution to research on human–environment interaction.
Environmental management and its relationship to human development are in a period of dramatic change. Societies are now beginning to have serious discussions about ‘sustainable development’, but there is still a great deal of confusion over what this means and how to achieve it. Conceptions of what is economically and technologically practical, ecologically necessary, and politically feasible are rapidly shifting. Implicit in changing strategies are differing philosophies of human—nature relationships. Five fundamental paradigms of environmental management in development, of human—nature relationships, are described. From the primordial dichotomy of ‘frontier economics’ versus ‘deep ecology’, paradigms of ‘environmental protection’, ‘resource management’, and ‘eco-development’ are evolving, in a progression which involves increasing integration of economic, ecological, and social systems into the definition of development and the organization of human societies. Each perceives different evidence, imperatives, and problems, and prescribes different solutions, strategies, technologies, roles for economic sectors, culture, governments, and ethics, etc. Each actually encompasses several schools of thought, not always in complete agreement, and there are also areas of overlap. The paper explores the distinctions, connections, and implications of these five paradigms for the future of environmental management in development.
This is the refereed journal version of the World Bank Discussion Paper #80 published in 1990 and a Spanish version is also available. Two other related papers, one from 2013, are now attached in the "Supplementary Resources" Feel free to email me at mcolby@igc.org if you have questions. Thank you.