City Water Matters

Cultures, Practices and Entanglements of Urban Water

Sophie Watson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789811378911
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811378928
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Geografia umana

Water is one of the most pressing concerns of our time. This book argues for the importance of water as a cultural object, and as a source of complex meanings and practices in everyday life, embedded in the socio-economics of local water provision. Each chapter aims to capture one element of water's fluid existence in the world, as material object, cultural representation, as movement, as actor, as practice and as ritual. The book explores the interconnectedness of humans and non-humans, of nature and culture, and the complex entanglements of water in all its many forms; how water constitutes multiple differences and is implicated in relations of power, often invisible, but present nevertheless in the workings of daily life in all its rhythms and forms; and water's capacity to assemble a multiplicity of publics and constitute new socialities and connections. Cities, and their inhabitants, without water will die, and so will their cultures.

© The Author(s) 2019

Sophie WatsonCity Water Mattershttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7892-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. City Water Matters: Cultures, Practices and Entanglements of Urban Water—An Introduction

Sophie Watson¹

(1)

Sociology Department, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Sophie Watson

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In Ulysses (Joyce, 1922) what was it about water that Leopold Bloom admired? It was its

universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level… its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity,… the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues… its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire? Its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe. (James Joyce’s Ulysses. Episode 17. Ithaca)

Human beings are constituted of water. All our organs are made up of different amounts of water—the brain, lungs and kidneys contain 85% water, the bones—31%. We not only depend on water, without water we would die. Water lies at the very heart of the interconnectedness and entanglements of humans with our environment and reveals, arguably more than any other substance, the impossibility of thinking of ourselves as separate from nature. Water is far from being a naturally occurring terrestrial resource but is shaped in multiple ways by human activities and cultural practices. Water exists as a resource through a complex intersection of socio-technical networks and systems and is a site of different cultural meanings and social practices across time and space. Water is both a source and a force, as the 2018 tsunami in Indonesia so graphically illuminated. Water elicits a set of technologies for containing it and directing it; it is enmeshed in a myriad of governmental and regulatory practices as well as private markets and complex forms of provision. Its abundance as well as its scarcity, though products of technology, is equally constituted in public discourses and political decisions, implicated in relations of power as these are so-called a ‘natural’ occurring phenomena such as rains, floods and drought. Water enables and assembles a multiplicity of publics, embodied practices, cultural practices and diverse forms of sociality. Water is far from being just the natural resource it is often assumed to be.

Water stretches and flows across human–non-human networks (Allon 2009). Nowhere are the effects of human activities on the Earth’s eco-systems, denoted by many as the Anthropocene, more visible. Not only does water cross the boundaries of different substances, with complex intersections and effects, the very complexities of current and impending water crises across the world, lead to greater uncertainties as to what kinds of solutions are possible. Indeed, many see water as the most pressing concern of the twenty-first century, which is likely to lead to massive migrations and water wars. At the same time, there is less and less certainty as to how best to resolve the scarcity of water, or its overabundance in the form of floods or rising sea levels in many parts of the world.

Water is never far away from the centre of life and thought. Different civilizations at different times have intervened in the flow of water and its provision, from the Ancient Mayan to the vast hydrological systems of the Roman Empire. Artists, engineers and scientists have been intrigued by its workings and powers. Leonardo da Vinci in his famous Codex Leicester (1506–1510)—bought by the Bill Gates foundation for USD 30.8 million twenty years ago—muses on the role of water in shaping the world, sketching its ebbs and flows and constructing practical schemes for its management.

For da Vinci ‘we may say that the earth has a spirit of growth and that its flesh is the soil… its blood the veins of its waters. The lake of the blood that lies around the heart is the ocean. Its breathing is by the increase and decrease of the blood and its pulses, and even so in the earth is the ebb and flow of the sea’. It would be a mistake to think that contemporary social theorists were the first to posit the human/non-human space where water resides.

Water is theorized in many different registers and through many different frames: crisis, infrastructure, symbol, culture, politics, management and delivery, consumption, the economic and the social. Each of these spheres are interconnected and related and not easily disentangled. Water is emblematic of the powerful interconnections between human/non-human, and nature and culture, where these entanglements are in a constant process of transforming cityscapes and landscapes, which in turn produce new waterscapes and manifestations of the ‘natural world’. Water has the capacity to make things happen, to bring new socialities and publics into being. Water is an intrinsic part of everyday life, often invisible in its workings and taken for granted, only entering public discourse and visibility when it becomes a matter of concern through, for example, its scarcity, or its potential for danger or for the accumulation of profit. Water is deeply political, implicated in relations of power and constitutive of social, cultural and spatial differences. Water is highly contested both as a resource and as a site of complex meanings.

Though the impending crisis of water scarcity is likely to be the greatest challenge of the twenty-first century, this is not the central thrust of this book—there are others far more expert and knowledgeable to make this case. The aim of this book is more modest, though it too has its political thrust. Here I follow in the footsteps of those who have argued for the importance of water as a cultural object, and as a source of complex meanings in everyday life, whether it be Mumbai or London, Hanoi or Paris, Sydney or Los Angeles. Humans need water to thrive, and many daily practices and habits that often go unnoticed are connected to the presence of water. Water is needed for bodies to keep clean, for embodied pleasures, for ritual practices, for the beautification of urban sites and so on, and each of these are enabled by the socio-technical systems and structures of a specific historical and material context. This book then brings cultural practices to the fore, arguing also for their embeddedness in a wider social, political, economic and technological context. In the next section, I briefly sketch some of the extensive research and writing on water, before outlining the strands and arguments that underpin this book.

Crisis

The current crisis of water is framed in two ways—there is too little and there is too much.

Climate change brought about by human activity is the major culprit in both cases, with wetter regions typically becoming wetter and drier regions becoming drier. It is estimated that half the world’s population (3.6 billion) live in areas that are potentially water scarce for at least one month of the year (WWAP 2018: 3). The global demand for water has been increasing by 1% annually due to population growth. Water pollution has worsened in the majority of rivers across Africa, Latin America and Asia, and there has been increasing ecosystem degradation due to the poor condition of soil resources with impacts on higher evaporation and erosion, and the degraded state of the world’s forests. Importantly water scarcity is unevenly distributed.

There is a tendency in much of the literature towards pessimistic discourses. But as the World Water Council point out ‘the crisis is not about having too little water to satisfy our needs. It is a crisis of managing water so badly that billions of people—and the environment suffer badly’ (WWC 2018). The WWC makes a crucial point, which is that as long as we do not ourselves face water scarcity, we believe that the taps will keep on flowing. Huge quantities are wasted through water-intensive industrial and agricultural practices (which account for 20% and 70% of global water withdrawals respectively) and through individual practices. For the former two, greater regulation is required; while for the latter this is to a large extent a question of habits and everyday consumption practices, which are hard to change. Peoples’ habits and practices are an area of current intervention by water authorities, as we see in Chap. 3. But there are also cultural shifts at a wider level that matter. One significant arena is that of food, where an increasing understanding of the quantities of water required to produce beef—1 kg requires 1300 litres, in contrast to potatoes—1 kg requires only 100 litres of water—has led considerable numbers of people, particularly younger people, to adopt vegetarian or vegan diets. Ironically, another trend towards substituting cow’s milk with almond milk has deleterious effects where water is concerned. 1 litre of almond milk requires more than 2 litres of water, yet 80% of the world’s almond crop comes from California which is beset by droughts. Scarcity leads to tensions between different users and trans-boundary conflicts and to migrations of populations to water-rich areas. Some commentators predict water wars in the coming decades. Water scarcity is highly political and distributed unequally across nations constituted in relations of power. Deforestation affects some parts of the world and large multinationals run roughshod over resistances from powerless groups, often indigenous populations who for centuries owned and managed their lands for centuries with environmental awareness.

Equally a consequence of climate change are rising sea levels and flooding, with severe impacts on coastal cities from Miami to Mumbai. Jeff Goodall (2017) provides a stark analysis in his book The Water will Come; Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilised World. The collapse of the ice sheets in the Antarctic and Greenland at a greater rate than previously thought are leading to predictions of rising sea levels of 8 feet by 2100—a figure raised to 11 feet if carbon emissions continue at present levels. According to Goodall, the difference of a three feet sea rise and a rise of six feet is the difference between a wet but liveable city and a submerged city. Major infrastructures like New York’s JFK airport or coastal nuclear reactors are likely to be underwater in 100 years. Yet it is the 145 million people who live three feet above sea level who are the most likely to be affected. This too is a highly politicized crisis, which will affect many people in the Global South, creating generations of climate refugees and making the current refugee crisis seem like a drop in the ocean (to deploy a water metaphor). Similarly, the disastrous effects of flooding in cities of the Global North are more likely to affect poorer urban populations with limited resources, as the rupture of the levees in New Orleans so clearly demonstrated. As Goodall points out, wealthy people will move or elevate their homes or build sea walls to surround their gated communities.

These narratives of disaster can be disempowering though resulting in a response of despair and passivity. Even Goodall suggests a sharing of resources and know-how to build more adaptive city environments, while national and international water organizations provide clear policy initiatives which could at the very least halt this trend towards disaster. Local communities are increasingly mobilized to devise new ways to manage water at the local level. The UK Water Partnership (2015) report on the ‘Future of Cities’, for example, proposes new urban design initiatives to raise city areas: improved city groundwater management, shifting water-related habits, decentralized urban infrastructures and groundwater management while larger-scale directives and reports by international organizations like United Nations Water consistently draw attention to water issues in their reports.

Water Resources and Infrastructures

Geographers have eloquently drawn attention to water flows and infrastructures as physical and material landscapes as well as landscapes of power. Swyngedouw (2004) argues that the water supply relies on constant mastering and transforming of ‘natural water’ to the extent where it is impossible to imagine the provision of water outside of the large bureaucratic and engineering control systems which enable centralized decision making and monopoly control where profits can be extracted (Swyngedouw 2004: 1). This Promethean modernist project disrupts our imagination of water delivered from the tap at home, as being connected to the vast technological shrines of the dams and reservoirs, often distances away (Kaika 2005: 3). Such a connection only becomes evident when the water supply is threatened. As Kaika (ibid.: 4) argues, the project of modernity was based on ‘establishing intricate flows of natural elements, social power relations and capital investment cycles—which not only didn’t separate nature from the city, but instead wove them together more closely into a socio-spatial continuum’. For both these writers, and also Gandy (2004) the flow of water, the flow of power and money are inextricably linked, which have the potential to encourage greater social cohesion or generate new forms of political conflict and social cleavages.

This connects with struggles over the control and ownership over water authorities, which rage across the globe. Where once water was seen as a public good, as a basic human right, with privatization, it has shifted into being seen as a source for the extraction of profit, moving from the realm of provision by national governments to the control of global financial markets and national and international banks. In this context, discourses of nature as unpredictable are mobilized as the source of the crisis and scarcity of water, thus constructing it as a valuable and precious commodity, best managed by the market economy where increases in water prices become a legitimate and inevitable response (Allon 2009).

Thames Water, the largest UK water authority, is illustrative of the debacles that have often ensued. In 2006, the Australian Macquarie bank bought the company. Between 2007 and 2010, it borrowed GBP 2 billion which was use...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. City Water Matters: Cultures, Practices and Entanglements of Urban Water—An Introduction
• 2. Public Water Features: Assembling Publics, Enlivening Spaces, Promoting Regeneration
• 3. Consuming Water: Habits, Rituals and State Interventions
• 4. River Powers: Assembling Publics, Connections and Materials in a Global City
• 5. Embodied Water Entanglements: Sex/Gender, Race/Ethnicity and Class Urban Sanitation Practices
• 6. Public Waters: The Passions, Pleasures and Politics of Bathing in the City
• 7. Differentiating Water: Cultural Practices and Contestations
• 8. Water Traces in Urban Space
• 9. Final Word