Commentaries

Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi has become a focal point of large-scale and ambitious transport projects set to resolve the mess that is road traffic in the city. Such projects include the construction of the Thika superhighway, several by-passes and the controversial expressway, an elevated toll road connecting the affluent sides of Westlands, a business and residential area, with the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Recently inaugurated, the expressway has been termed a road for the rich. In these developments, evictions and demolitions of houses and sometimes entire villages with no compensation are a norm that continues to highlight that Bulldozers are a de facto planning tool of the city. Of surprise, however, is that the mess seems to never be resolved and what follows are often incremental fixes on the newly constructed infrastructures. This has been the case for the Thika Superhighway, where some modifications made in its short life of 10 years include the removal of speed bumps and a plan to have a BRT system. The BRT case is particularly telling for its incrementalism. In 2019, for example, the innermost lanes were marked as preferential lanes for the expected BRT buses, and in 2021 there […]

From the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi: Where is the water for our people? And what challenges do they face trying to make sure they can get enough for their families everyday? Our Art for Social Change campaign made a song about water struggles, and it features powerful commentary and activists from across Nairobi. Big up to the artists and to Hood Creation for the images and sound. We are also grateful to Mary Lawhon and the Examining nature-society relations through urban infrastructure project (project number: P19-0286:1)  for the support! See the video above!  

Arianna Tozzi, Irene Leonardelli, Enid Still, and Sneha Malani describe their work with counter-mapping. Using rivers and the flows of water and pollution as entry points, they capture urban-rural interdependencies in their rich and multi-faceted website Troubling Waterscapes. Here they provide a background to their counter-mapping project. This project began with a friendship between three PhD researchers, and an artist/practitioner, with a common interest in water and agriculture, and a desire to explore creative methods of engaging with our research topics. ‘Troubling Waterscapes’ was developed as an online exhibition for the bi-annual POLLEN conference in September 2020: Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration. Rather than classic academic presentations and panel discussions, where words and theoretical concepts dominate, we invited participants to think with and through water in creative ways. We used ‘troubling’ as a praxis of questioning dominant narratives of resource commodification ‘from above’ and victimhood ‘from below’, inviting the audience to think through the complexities of the uneven socionatural relations that surround us.  Our story begins in Pravah, the fictional name for a rural village in Maharashtra, India, where Irene lived during her PhD research, learning from the farming practices of women growing flowers to supply to markets in the nearby city of […]

Emmanuel Awohouedji, a Benin environmentalist and educator, shares his experience of building and teaching a curriculum focusing on environmental problems and issues for middle and high schools in the Republic of Benin. This type of teaching is missing in Benin and requires overcoming administrative, structural and material hurdles—but also provides rich experiences for others to learn from. My pedagogical work in the Republic of Benin refers to the planning and implementing of a comprehensive environmental education curriculum that can help young students understand and have a growing interest in—and impact on—their surrounding environments. For the last two years I have developed this curriculum and while much is left to do, it is clear that this curriculum is missing in Benin today. Despite efforts in the early 2000s to implement environmental education, today none of the seven subjects taught in secondary classes or the nine taught in high school have a serious focus on environmental issues. Considering however the changes affecting the Beninese environment, the impacts of environmental issues, climate impact on water, food, energy, health, ecosystems, various sources of pollution (Boko, Kosmowski and Vissin n.d.), and the legislation related to environmental protection, this form of environmental education is relevant. Through working with  my students I […]

Accra is a city of storage. While walking across its busy roads, one can spot a myriad of objects used to transport, store and sell water: Water is sold at the traffic light in tiny plastic ‘sachet’ bags, plastic or metal containers mounted on trucks are used to transport and sell bulk water, and residents carry and store water in plastic buckets or in large plastic containers known locally as ‘polytanks.’ Despite the widespread presence of storage facilities, these find only limited space in analysis of the politics of urban water in Accra and elsewhere. Indeed, the attention is often concentrated on the circulation of water through large-scale networks of pipes, and on the history, uneven geography and intermittent working of networked infrastructure. Yet, as Millington (2018) recently showed for São Paulo, attending to the role of technologies of storage is important to understand the functioning of urban water systems and the relations between water use at the household level and water provisioning at the urban and regional scale. In contexts of drought and rainfall uncertainty, as in São Paulo, focusing on storage facilities plays a crucial role in understanding residents’ everyday experiences of scarcity, revealing their differentiated capacities to […]

Most of my students have no idea what the difference between capitalism and socialism is. Let me say that differently: most of my students have emotional responses to those words. Some have strong instincts about which is good and which is ugly. But in terms of an ability to define and give distinguishing examples, maybe a few here and there walk in with this ability. (And given the conflation of terms in U.S. American public discourse, it seems hard to blame them). Some have taken introduction economics courses. If I were in charge of general education requirements, I’d make sure that student learn not (only) about mathematical principles, but about the logics of different economics systems. Until that point (!), I accept it means I have to do this work before I can teach about environment and society. One year, when still teaching from a textbook, I put capitalism up front. We spent a week dedicated to Marxian environmental critiques. I quickly found that does not work for my politically diverse classroom. Instead, I now break the ideas down, avoiding the most evocative terms until the building blocks are in place. We slowly talk about markets, explaining what markets do […]

Temporalities of Crisis: On Cape Town’s Day Zero By: Nate Millington and Suraya Scheba Cape Town is currently facing a water crisis. While Day Zero, the day when the city’s water would have been cut off, is apparently no longer a possibility in 2018, scarcity remains a concern. Arguing that water will only get scarcer in the years to come, the Cape Town municipal government response to the water crisis has been to invest in considerable efforts to reduce water consumption, including charging for excess usage and the continued rollout of water management devices for residents deemed to be over users. Additionally, the city has called for the acceleration of augmentation schemes, including desalination and groundwater access. Drawing from climate science and longer term strategies of demand management, the City of Cape Town is attempting to situate reduced demand within a changing climate.  Day Zero Cancelled. Photograph by Nate Millington.  In response to the possibility of citywide water cuts, commentators and journalists engaged extensively with Cape Town’s ongoing water dynamics. Many suggested that the city is a harbinger of things to come in a future marked by climate change and climate uncertainty. Critical to these analyses was the oft-repeated phrase that Cape […]

The history of Mexico City can be told through the ways in which water flows both into and away from it. 500 years ago, the then capital of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain was a city undergoing an unparalleled transformation. The conquest of the indigenous lands was set to change not only the politics, economics, and society of this territory, but also its environment. Once covered by five interconnected lakes, two freshwater and three brackish, the Spanish set to desiccate the basin, transforming it into a valley. They did this through canals, tunnels, and other water infrastructures, built by the hands of thousands of workers, mostly indigenous and forcibly conscripted to carry out this labour. By the beginning of the 20th Century, the desiccation was almost achieved, except from some lacustrine areas south of Mexico City that were left. The Mexican capital could finally enter modernity, cleared of the waters that hampered its economic development and made it sick, according to the elite in power. Diego Rivera’s mural “Water, Origin of Life on Earth”, within the old River Lerma water deposit After the problem of desiccation was apparently solved, a new set of issues appeared. Mexico City was now facing […]

‘Maybe, it’s okay for the big people [rich/elite] to live by the sea. But, for us [kampung residents], our rights have run out.’ –Interview with Kampung resident, 11 July 2017, Kampung Kerang Ijo. For traditional fishing kampung (urban villages) along North Jakarta’s coast, there have always been livelihood uncertainties. Residents daily manage how many fish they will catch or how much they will sell for. They monitor the sea for the ebb and flow of tides, knowing that coastal floods are both common and sudden. Yet, kampung residents face new uncertainties about how much longer their way of life may be viable, as they are squeezed out and overshadowed by mega-projects. Kampung cluster between large developments, open spaces, rivers, and formalised housing throughout Jakarta. They are usually high density, and are hubs of informal economic activity. In addition to encroachment from the increasing spread of high rise developments, residents in the north of the city are also subject to urban transformations that are intended to mitigate flood risks. One of these projects is the Great Garuda Seawall Project (GGSW; see this recent post), a partnership between Dutch firms and Indonesian ministries to construct a giant seawall that will close Jakarta […]

In Maputo, absence is felt in the infrastructure. I spend several months away from the city, and the skyline has changed. Banks and technology companies replace old lots that belonged to a friend of a friend’s grandmother’s best friend. Old traditional Portuguese bakeries, or pastelarias, are now serving single espressos alongside Chinese food restaurants and small household-run delis which cater to the expat community. In many ways, Maputo is not unlike similar cities in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Nairobi or Dar es Salaam. Foreign investment has made it a complicated ecosystem of growth and continued inequity. This plays out on streets housing multimillion dollar apartments that look down over roads which are repaired by hand – little to no machinery is available. Informal market stalls, once relegated to the periphery, are now dominating sidewalks along the main thoroughfare of Avenida Julius Nyerere. While this brings convenience, it also brings gossip. The gossip from the middle and upper classes living in older, established neighbourhoods of the city focuses on the unsightly nature of having people selling things on the side of the road. “During the Portuguese’s time, this would never have been allowed.” “Everyone seems to think they have the right […]

Our academic culture continues to reward intellectuals who cite big-name, usually white, male, and European theories and theorists. French theorists, in particular, are given special attention. While sympathetic to the compulsion to harness the ideas of great men, one can no longer claim that this is the only way to succeed in the academic publishing world. Though the alternative might garner less attention, Southern theorists (such as Jean and John Comaroff or Raewynn Connell) have opened the way for an alternative way of doing academically accepted, publishable research. It is this framing that I kept returning to as I read Julian Brown’s South Africa’s Insurgent Citizens: On Dissent and the Possibility of Politics. It is at one level unfair to focus on this text when making an argument about over-use of French political theory, but let me focus on it as a specific instance of what I suggest is a wider concern (and note other reviews here and here).  Academic work generally takes two different tacks: using a case to contribute to theory, or using theory to explain a set of empirics. Brown’s book falls into the latter as he attempts to use Rancière, whom he defines as the most influential theorist […]

I couldn’t quite figure it out. The entire project of housing provision in South African cities seemed to be marked by an almost obsessive sense of calculation, of rational town planning. Most notoriously there is the waiting list. After apartheid, the South African government embarked on a mass formal housing delivery program. In order to qualify for a home, residents in need must register at a local office and enter the demand database. Then there is the process of enumeration. Local governments don’t like shacklands to be unintelligible, and so they render them legible by assigning de facto addresses to every structure. In both of these processes, we can see at work what the German sociologist Max Weber famously called formal rationality. Yet exceptions abounded. Enumeration rarely kept pace with in-migration from elsewhere in the city, and small land occupations seemed to become large informal settlements in a matter of weeks. And everyone seemed to be on the waiting list for decades, whereas I’d also encounter people who received a house after a matter of years. Residents who slipped through the cracks of formal rationality began to challenge the state, ultimately in the courtroom, pointing to the post-apartheid constitutional guarantee […]

I’m walking through Guet Ndar, a neighbourhood in Saint-Louis, Senegal. We can hear the waves of the nearby Atlantic Ocean. During my last visit, a number of years ago, they seemed perhaps more distant, whereas now they seem almost upon us. We turn a corner near a mosque and look out. What were once streets are now the ocean, the elementary school has become a ruin of collapsed concrete and a new line of buildings stand facing the fierce Atlantic. The fishing settlement of Guet Ndar lays across from the historical centre of Saint-Louis. It operates as a crucial space for the fishing trade across the region, with distribution stretching into the Sahel and as far as Mali. With over 30,000 residents housed in this dense, popular neighbourhood, a strip of sand no more than one kilometre long, and nowadays 200 meters wide, a precarious future has become a lived present. The effects of rising sea-levels from climate change are being experienced in Saint-Louis in ways that foretell urban futures for millions of people living in coastal settlements across the continent. Here, the Atlantic Ocean in Guet Ndar is a paradox. It gives life through the incomes of the fishermen […]

Following Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States will withdraw from the Paris Accord, a number of US cities signaled their intention to symbolically join the agreement and demonstrate their commitment to avoiding more than 1.5 C warming. Cities have a unique relationship to global climate change as the historical locus of greenhouse gas emissions due to their central role in the global economy. The relationship between cities and greenhouse gases is a result of both industrial production as well as contemporary post-industrial economies driven by consumption. The relationship is scalar too: many cities are representative of both low carbon infrastructure as well as the displacement of GHG emissions ‘elsewhere.’ Cities are linked through chains of finance, the movement of goods, and the circulation of discourses. All these relationships matter for thinking about climate change through the city. Amidst these overlapping networks, the unifying factor is the sheer densities and connections present in cities: of people, of money, and of the infrastructures that, in part, form the city as a functioning assemblage. We are already locked into a significantly warmer future, and the physical impacts of that warming consistently outpace even the most severe projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on […]

Unable to attend the American Association of Geographers’ Annual meeting due to travel problems, Mary Lawhon reflects on the retirement of geographer and political ecologist Dianne Rocheleau in this commentary. Drawn from notes for a presentation that unfortunately did not happen due to flight delays, this commentary focuses on Dianne’s generosity as a scholar and her contributions to the development of Urban Political Ecology. I stayed in the airport a lot longer than I otherwise would have, all of Wednesday and Thursday morning, hoping to have a chance to say to Dianne in person and in public a most sincere thank you. But as I finally gave in to nature in its many forms – a storm trumping the wonders of flight, a baby and toddler needing more than airport chicken nuggets – I thought Dianne would certainly have not just understood, but wanted us to go home. So, a few thoughts constructed from my notes instead. First, a list of things I got from Dianne: Academic fashion sense, including unruly curls and a fondness for scarves (though this serves me less well in Florida). Relational thinking and specifically rooted networks (including work with Miriam Chion on rooted cosmopolitanism) The need to listen to […]

The aesthetic politics of graffiti removal in Contemporary São Paulo In this commentary, postdoctoral researcher Nate Millington comments on the aesthetic politics of Graffiti removal in São Paulo. In his first few weeks in office, the newly elected mayor of São Paulo—Jõao Doria, a businessman and reality tv star whose election was primarily a rebuke of the city’s rare flirtation with governance by the Worker’s Party—has spent considerable energy painting over graffiti in the city in the service of what he calls a ‘beautiful city.’ This represents a dangerous moment for those interested in urban life and its virtues and for those who celebrate the capacity of the city to give space to those who seek alternative lives. It is one more instance of the crude reshuffling of the visual, sensorial landscape in favor of one more conducive to global grade and elite forms of aesthetic appreciation. To be sure, Doria’s attempt to clean up the city is one instance in a longer history of the policing of certain kinds of expression. Beset for years by graffiti as well as pixação—a type of tagging specific to Brazil—leaders of São Paulo have long attempted to cohere its landscape through the development of […]