The Thames Tideway Tunnel (TTT), often referred to as the Thames super sewer, is currently one of the largest infrastructure projects underway in any European city. Costing an estimated £4.2 billion, ...the sewer connects London’s Victorian sewerage network with the Thames Wastewater Treatment Works at Beckton. The latter facility has been described as the UK’s Water–Energy–Food nexus poster child, for its combination of desalination facilities, green energy generation and wastewater treatment. While physically connected to the Beckton plant, the TTT is, paradoxically, designed with an apparent disregard for the water–energy nexus. If the Beckton plant represents a nexus-based vision of integration – what Macrorie and Marvin (2016) refer to as Mode 2 Urban Integration – the TTT harks back to a view of urban integration carried from the Victorian era through to the present moment. What unites the two projects, and what undergirds the transformation of the hydrosocial cycle, is a financial model more focused on the extraction of rents from Thames Water’s consumers. Thames Water’s dismissal of genuinely integrated alternatives appears guided more by the financialisation of the urban integrated ideal than by what is needed to respond to London’s broader environmental needs. Contesting the project, therefore, will involve slicing through the various claims to integration, going beyond the many proposals for evidence-based alternatives, and capturing the transformations being wrought by finance’s entry into infrastructure provision.
通常被称为泰晤士河超级下水道的泰晤士泰德韦隧道 (TTT) 是目前欧洲最大的城市基础设施项目之一。该下水系统成本预计为 42 亿英镑，连接了伦敦的维多利亚式污水处理网络和贝克顿的泰晤士污水处理厂。后者的设施将海水淡化设施、绿色能源发电和废水处理相结合，被称为英国“水-能源-食品”之间联系的代表。TTT 在物理上连接到贝克顿工厂的同时，在设计中又悖论式地未考虑这种“水-能源”联系。如果说贝克顿工厂代表了以联系为基础的一体化愿景——Macrorie 和 Marvin (2016) 称之为“城市一体化模式二”——，那么 TTT 代表了从维多利亚时代至今的那种城市一体化模式。将两个项目联接起来、支撑水-社会循环转型的，是一个更关注从泰晤士水务公司消费者中抽租的金融模式。泰晤士水务公司放弃了真正的一体化方案，看来所受的引导更多是城市一体化理想的金融化，而不是应对伦敦更大范围的环境需求。因此，质疑这一项目，将涉及梳理各种一体化主张，超越众多主张而找到基于证据的替代性方案，并且捕捉到金融进入基础设施供给所带来的变革。
In recent years, the Smart City has become a very popular concept amongst policy makers and urban planners. In a nutshell, the Smart City refers to projects and planning strategies that aim to join ...up new forms of inclusive and low-carbon economic growth based on the knowledge economy through the deployment of information and communication technologies. However, at the same time as new urban Smart interventions are being designed and applied, insufficient attention has been paid to how these strategies are inserted into the wider political economy and, in particular, the political ecology of urban transformation. Therefore, in this paper we critically explore the implementation of the Smart City, tracing how the ‘environment’ and environmental concerns have become an organising principle in Barcelona’s Smart City strategy. Through an urban political ecology prism we aim to critically reflect upon the contradictions of the actually existing Smart City in Barcelona and how Smart discourses and practices might be intentionally or unintentionally mobilised in ways that serve to depoliticise urban redevelopment and environmental management. The paper stresses the need to repoliticise the debates on the Smart City and put citizens back at the centre of the urban debate.
Value–rent–finance Purcell, Thomas F.; Loftus, Alex; March, Hug
Progress in human geography,
06/2020, Volume:
44, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this paper, we develop a novel interpretation of the internal relationship between value, rent and finance, thereby enabling a new reading of the process of financialisation. As we argue, ...responding to the important question of how best to conceptualise the relationship between value and finance necessitates an understanding of the internal relations with a third moment, that of rent. We therefore develop a triadic understanding of these three interrelated moments. Crucially, we demonstrate that fictitious capital now actively pursues forms of rent, deepening the interrelationship between value, rent and finance. We conclude with a critical review of the literature on the financialisation of water, showing how the conceptual framework we develop sheds light upon the relations out of which water infrastructure has been financialised, as well as suggesting strategic entry points for its contestation.
Throughout the 20th century, urban gardening in central and northern Europe as well as in North America has received a great deal of academic attention. However, the recent proliferation of urban ...gardening in other geographies, such as southern Europe in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2007–2008, remains underexplored. The economic crisis put on hold urban developments in many southern European cities, leaving idle plots of land waiting to be urbanized. The crisis also triggered radical political demands, such as those of the Indignados, as well as fuelling narratives revolving around social entrepreneurship and social innovation. Barcelona emerges as a laboratory of urban gardening initiatives in vacant lots mobilizing either radical urban demands or embedding new post-crisis rhetoric around social entrepreneurship. Through a combination of qualitative methods, including participant observation, a literature review, semi-structured interviews, informal conversations and field diaries, we present a characterization and evolution of the three most prominent urban gardening initiatives in the city of Barcelona (including 54 gardens at the end of 2016): the Network of Municipal Gardens (municipally led gardens for retired people); the Network of Communitarian Gardens (social movements); and the Empty Plots Plan (social entrepreneurial urban gardening). Subsequently, we discuss the different meanings of gardening in crisis/post-crisis Barcelona as well as the urban politics that each initiative articulates. Our results show that urban gardens within the city are an expression of different and non-exclusive meanings that explicitly or implicitly, in a context of crisis and post-crisis, mobilize notions of political gardening.
This paper presents a vegetal political ecology of weeds. Weeds have barely been analysed in the burgeoning field of ‘more-than-human’ scholarship, this despite their ubiquity and considerable impact ...on human social life. We review how geographical scholarship has represented weeds’ material and political status: mostly as invasive plants, annoying species in private gardens and spontaneous vegetation in urbanized landscapes. Then, bringing together weed science, agronomic science and the critical geography of agriculture, we show how weeds ecology, weeds management and the environmental problems which weeds are entangled have critically shaped the industrial agriculture paradigm. Three main arguments emerging from our analysis open up new research avenues: weeds’ disruptive character might shape our understanding of human-plant relationships; human-weeds relation in agriculture have non-trivial socio-economic and political implications; and more-than-human approaches, such as vegetal political ecology, might challenge dominant modes of considering and practicing agriculture.
This article examines the evolution of the ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban transformation through the lenses of worlding and provincialising urbanism. We trace this evolution from an especially dogmatic ...worlding vision of the smart city, under a centre-right city council, to its radical repurposing under the auspices of a municipal government led, after May 2015, by the citizens’ platform Barcelona en Comú. We pay particular attention to the new council’s objectives to harness digital platform technologies to enhance participative democracy, and its agenda to secure technological sovereignty and digital rights for its citizens. While stressing the progressive intent of these aims, we also acknowledge the challenge of going beyond the repurposing of smart technologies so as to engender new and radical forms of subjectivity among citizens themselves; a necessary basis for any urban revolution.
We call for coupling degrowth with urban studies and planning agendas as an academically salient and politically urgent endeavour. Our aim is threefold: to explore ways for ‘operationalising’ ...degrowth concepts into urban and regional everyday spatial practices; to sketch pathways for taking degrowth conceptually and methodologically beyond localised experiments and inform larger scale planning practices and international agendas; and to critically assess the multiple ways in which such a radical urban degrowth agenda will have to differ in the Global North and in the Global South. We outline five steps for such a programmatic, yet paradigmatic, urban degrowth agenda. These are: (1) grounding current degrowth debates within their historical–geographical context; (2) engaging (planning) institutions in linking degrowth practices to urbanisation policies; (3) examining how urban insurgent degrowth alliances can be scaled up without co-optation; (4) focusing on the role of experts and professionals in bringing degrowth principles into everyday urban practice; and (5) prefiguring how degrowth agendas can confront the diverse and unequal urban social relations and uneven outcomes in the Global North and South.
The 21st century has been hailed as the urban century and one in which ICT-led transformations will shape urban responses to global environmental change. The Smart City encapsulates all the desires ...and prospects on the transformative and disruptive role technology will have in solving urban issues both in Global North and Global South cities. Critical scholarship has pointed out that private capital, with the blessing of technocratic elites, has found a techno-environmental fix to both reshuffle economic growth and prevent other alternative politico-ecological transitions to take root in urban systems. Against this bleak outlook, the paper argues that these technological assemblages might be compatible with alternative post-capitalist urban transformations aligned with Degrowth. Through a cross-reading of research on Smart Cities with theoretical perspectives drawn from the literature on Degrowth, I suggest that Degrowth should not refrain from engaging with urban technological imaginaries in a critical and selective way. As the paper shows through alternative uses of Smart technologies and digital open-source fabrication, the question is not so much around technology per se but around the wider politico-economic context into which these technological assemblages are embedded.
•Smart City is a technology-led urban response to global environmental challenges.•Smart City may imply technological determinism, privatisation and depoliticisation.•ICT may open the prospect of alternative, non-capitalist urban transformations.•Degrowth should establish a critical dialogue with ICT-led urban transformations.
•We develop a critical and reflexive perspective on the use of desalination in Spain.•Desalination plants were massively implemented by means of the AGUA Program.•We focus on the Mancomunidad de los ...Canales del Taibillla in South-eastern Spain.•High price and the crisis of the building sector explains the low use of desalted water.•Other alternative water sources and demand-side management should be promoted.
In this paper we explore the new orientation taken by Spanish water policy since the beginning of the 21st century and very specifically the shift towards desalination as an alternative to other water supply options such as river regulation or inter-basin water transfers. Desalination has been seen as the cure for everything that dams and inter-basin water transfers were unable to solve, including droughts, scarcities, social conflicts, environmental impacts, and political rivalries among the different Spanish regions. Desalination also means a new and powerful element in water planning and management that could provide water for the continuous expansion of the urban and tourist growth machine in Mediterranean Spain and thus relax possible water constraints on this growth. However, by 2012 most new desalination plants along the Mediterranean coast remained almost idle. Focusing on the case of the Mancomunidad de los Canales del Taibillla in South-eastern Spain, our aim is to develop a critical, integrated and reflexive perspective on the use of desalination as a source of water for urban and regional growth.
Over the last four decades the locus of economic power has shifted from industry to finance. As part of this trend, the 'financialisation' of the water sector has added a new layer of complexity to ...the hydrosocial cycle, witnessed in the emergence of new financial actors, logics and financing instruments. Such a shift has profoundly reshaped the relationship between water utilities and consumers in the South East of England, where the household has become, in the words of Allen and Pryke (2013), a human revenue stream for financialised utilities. In this paper, we make an argument that the water meter is one of the crucial mediators through which finance will touch the lives of individual subjects. In the South East of England, after initial opposition to universal metering - in part shaped by fears over fluctuating revenues - water companies are now embedding a metering programme within a billing and tariff structure that aims to ensure governable and predictable subjects. Drawing on Urban Political Ecology, we argue that the financialisation of the water sector in England shapes the emergence of new financial subjectivities while enabling new forms of political rule that operate at a range of spatial scales.
PDF
