Anke Schwarz

In the essentially water-rich basin of Mexico City, water taps are now installed in most homes. Yet in many of the city’s poorer neighborhoods in particular, water is supplied intermittently and taps often remain dry. How does such a socially constructed water scarcity affect water-related everyday practices in the home? And, more in general, what is the relation between urban space and domestic practices of water use? In accordance with these questions, the present study aims to explore how people’s everyday practices are linked to urban space, understood as a social product always in the making. A sociospatial approach is employed, setting Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice in conversation with a relational understanding of space. Rather than identifying a ‘habitus of water use’, this involves a reflection on the implications of Bourdieu’s famous statement that the habitus makes the habitat. The research design is based on empirical fieldwork involving a set of qualitative methods. As it is assumed that both past and current water supply conditions in the home are key parameters for domestic practices of water use, the sphere of the dwelling lies in the focus. Taking subjective experiences and everyday practices as a starting point, it primarily draws upon in-depth interviews, conducted at the interviewee’s home to allow for a simultaneous participatory observation. A total of 53 residents from several neighborhoods in two different boroughs within the jurisdiction of the Federal District, Mexico City, were interviewed to provide a range of different urban living conditions. Through the newly developed tool of habitat biographies capturing people’s past dwelling experiences, the interviews also adopt a historical perspective. Focus group discussions and other empirical methods complete the picture, tackling practices of water use with respect to questions of materiality, knowledge and meaning.
This book demonstrates how using water can turn into a demanding everyday task even in cities where virtually all dwellings do have water taps. It sheds a light on everyday practices of water use in Mexico City in the realms of drinking, personal hygiene, and domestic storage, and their relation to past and current supply conditions. Across all these sets of practices, influential urban imaginations with respect to the logic of urban water supply and a widespread mistrust in the potability of tap water are at play, and marked differences arise between waters used for body-related and more technical purposes. Other than expected, current water supply conditions seem to influence much stronger on domestic practices of water use than people’s past experiences. Keeping water in domestic storage tanks, waiting for water provision to resume, reusing domestic grey water, and the ubiquitous consumption of bottled water have all become essential everyday practices in Mexico City amidst unequal and often unreliable patterns of water supply reinforced by processes of neoliberal urbanization and infrastructural unbundling. Women in poorer parts of the metropolis are the ones bearing the brunt of such exclusionary configurations of urban space. Serving as a reminder that a water tap in the home alone does not guarantee proper access to water, the present book develops a sociospatial, subject-based approach to explore everyday practices and experiences in the realm of water. Such an approach is relevant beyond the example of Mexico City presented here, as a permanent water supply of a potable quality remains the exception rather than the rule in many cities around the world.

Political subjectivity and territorialization often appear somewhat disconnected in recent debates. We propose a fresh approach based on Latin American scholarship to understand subjects and territories as relational: Subjects are (de)stabilized in processes of territorialization, while territories are (de)stabilized in processes of subject formation. We introduce the concept of territorial subjectivities and use examples from the literature to show how these emerge in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Dresden. Placing an analytical focus on becoming rather than being, the contingency of territorial subjectivities is key to this novel conceptual link that supports a differentiated reading of socio-territorial struggles in diverse geographical contexts.

In the absence of a coherent and convincing narrative of hope, new protagonists and their solidly responsible forms of imagining and struggling for livable futures enter the stages of parliaments, social media platforms and public spaces in cities around the world. It is precisely such spirit of collective solidarity, facing multiple crises at once, that links indigenous struggles over land and environment with the young people of the climate strike movement, as Brum has it, the "first generation without hope." This leads to the overarching question of this theme issue: Who are the protagonists of Latin American futures? Who is imagining, writing, narrating such futures – how, when and where? In this CROLAR theme issue, we map protagonists of Latin American futures, both human and non-human, looking at the ways in which they act, create, and think futures.

In the absence of a coherent and convincing narrative of hope, new protagonists and their solidly responsible forms of imagining and struggling for livable futures enter the stages of parliaments, social media platforms and public spaces in cities around the world. It is precisely such spirit of collective solidarity, facing multiple crises at once, that links indigenous struggles over land and environment with the young people of the climate strike movement, as Brum has it, the “first generation without hope.” This leads to the overarching question of this theme issue: Who are the protagonists of Latin American futures? Who is imagining, writing, narrating such futures – how, when, and where? In this CROLAR theme issue, we map protagonists of Latin American futures, both human and non-human, looking at the ways in which they act, create, and think futures.

In this article, we discuss the concept of territory from a decolonized perspective. We engage with the ongoing debate on decentralizing urban studies to outline the potential drawbacks of essentializing, generalizing or objectifying the urban. Through the socio-territorial approach utilized here we seek to address these issues by shifting attention, first, to the social production of territory, and secondly, from an analysis of state strategies to the urban scale. We understand territory as being produced when subjects struggle over the practices, meanings and tenures of urban space. An example from Mexico City is employed to illustrate how territory becomes both the site and stake of social struggle. By focusing on the subjects involved in the production of territory, and on the way different subjects produce and reproduce hegemonic spaces and counter-spaces, we emphasize three aspects in particular: first, a territory's specific material conditions; secondly, the imaginarios (social imaginaries) various actors inscribe into it; and thirdly, the communal land use form of the ejido as a unique territorial regulation. Finally, we argue for the empirical groundedness of the concept of territory with the aim of further pluralizing the field of urban studies. The socio-territorial approach we propose explicitly focuses on power relations in the production of both urban space and knowledge.

Dauernd unterwegs oder immer daheim Mobilitätsmuster in Armenvierteln von Mexiko-Stadt In Mexiko-Stadt leben heutzutage mehr als die Hälfte der Bewohner_innen in ehemals irregulären bzw. informellen Siedlungen. Da der Zugang zum Wohnungsmarkt für Haushalte mit geringem sozio-ökonomischen Status begrenzt war (und es bis heute ist), stellte der informelle Landerwerb die einzige Möglichkeit zur Befriedigung des Bedürfnisses nach einer Unterkunft. Das Ergebnis dieses Prozesses, die so genannten colonias populares, zeichnen sich u.a. durch ihre sehr geringe Ausstattung mit öffentlicher Verkehrsinfrastruktur und ein stark eingeschränktes Mobilitätsangebot aus. Aber auch die spezifische Situation der Bewohner_innen, ein sehr geringes Einkommen sowie die hohe Eigentumsquote wirken sich einschränkend auf alltägliche und auch längerfristige Mobilitätsentscheidungen aus. Die Autorin beschreibt in ihrem Beitrag auf der Basis von Interviews, wie der sozioökonomische Status die täglichen Mobilitä...

O n the cover of Nikhil Anand’s new book, a thick bundle of blue plastic pipes meanders along a street. ‘In Mumbai,’ the author writes, ‘you need to create pressure to make water flow’ (186). What may sound rather obvious from a technical point of view is in fact the baseline for a more sophisticated relational approach which favors a careful reading of urban water networks—and hence those blue pipes—as conduits not only of water but also of social relations, power and meaning. In this review, I reflect upon the contribution of Hydraulic City to the evergrowing field of urban water research, and the relevance of some of the concepts developed in the book with respect to my own research in Mexico City (Schwarz 2017). Thinking of urban infrastructures not (only) as material networks but as social processes, as always in the making, as Anand does, calls attention to the manner in which the production of urban water in different qualities and quantities involves not only material practices but is also a product of political pressure, and productive of power and meaning. Using a rich, empirically grounded approach, Anand makes a major contribution to the existing literature on water services, citizenship and difference, represented most prominently by the work of Farhana Sultana, Karen Bakker and Kathryn Furlong. Hydraulic City evolves around the idea that urban infrastructures are both linked to and productive of social difference. While this argument is well known and has been extensively treated in the socio-ecological literature on urban water and the transformation of nature (by the likes of José E. Castro, Maria Kaika, Matthew Gandy and Erik Swyngedouw), and in the debate spawned by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin’s 2001 book Splintering Urbanism, Anand provides fresh insights by shifting scales. By taking water in the everyday life of ordinary citizens of Mumbai into focus, Hydraulic City is one in a line of publications which respond to recent calls for a downscaling of water research (Fam, Lahiri-Dutt, and Sofoulis 2015). Through extensive fieldwork, Anand has captured the perspectives of a range of actors involved in the production and distribution of Mumbai’s water on the local scale: From the women who are the city’s everyday water managers (and users), via the municipal water utility’s engineers, and private plumbers who serve as middlemen between the water authority and settlers, to the social work of community organizations and NGOs negotiating water with councilors and political officials. Feeding on this multiplicity of testimonies, the book explores the relation between a constant making and remaking of urban water and its infrastructures, and the city’s subjects. Crucially, that relation is dialectical: ‘It is not just persons,

Even in cities where taps are installed in virtually all homes, this is no guarantee of water. The transient character of hydrological landscapes is evident in Mexico City, where water provision is non-permanent in one third of all dwellings. This article investigates hydraulic standby as a form of organizing, exploring modes of standby for water through the lens of anticipation. Sensing and buffering – terms borrowed from cybernetics – are identified as key practices and modes of hydraulic standby that are guided by a logic of precaution and preparedness. While sensing organizes the relation between sensory input and response, buffering refers to the collection of water in anticipation of future shortages. The article draws on 53 individual interviews and other empirical fieldwork conducted in two boroughs of Mexico City. It argues that futures are rendered present in a disparate manner across diverse urban settings, with standby taking on a classed and gendered character.

Wireless community networks have been around for a while and are regaining some attention these days as means of strengthening local interaction and community organizing. In Genoa, a group of people, some of them members of the FabLab at the Laboratorio Sociale Occupato Autogestito Buridda squat, established the Tapullo project in 2016. Their aim was to set up a DIY wireless community network. The name is reflective of their approach: in Genoese dialect, tapullo roughly refers to a quick and simple improvision (such as repairing a broken frame with Gaffa tape). Rather than providing internet access, Tapullo was designed as a purely local mesh network from the very beginning, hosting a local service in the form of a publicly accessible community forum.

Read my 2017 interview with members of the Tapullo collective plus a short essay, published in the Journal of Peer Production:
http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-11-city/experimental-format/the-tapullo-collective-genoa/
(Article is open access, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)

The literature reveals that marginalized groups are more exposed to hazards at their place of residence than other groups. Given the patterns of profound social inequality in Santiago de Chile and ongoing processes of socio-spatial differentiation, it could be assumed that the residents most exposed to hazards associated with climate change belong to the lower socio-economic strata. The research analysis of city-dweller exposure to flood and heat hazard, using innovative distributional indices, provides empirical evidence that in the case of Santiago residents from all social strata are exposed in one way or another. The present study shows the overall hazard exposure for the Metropolitan Region of Santiago de Chile (MRS), highlights the population groups most exposed to hazards and depicts inequalities in residential patterns with respect to socio-economic status and physical housing conditions. Finally, adaptive measures customized to suit existing legal and institutional frameworks are proposed and discussed in the pursuit of hazard exposure reduction.

In the absence of a coherent and convincing narrative of hope, new protagonists and their solidly responsible forms of imagining and struggling for livable futures enter the stages of parliaments, social media platforms and public spaces in cities around the world. It is precisely such spirit of collective solidarity, facing multiple crises at once, that links indigenous struggles over land and environment with the young people of the climate strike movement, as Brum has it, the “first generation without hope.” This leads to the overarching question of this theme issue: Who are the protagonists of Latin American futures? Who is imagining, writing, narrating such futures – how, when and where? In this CROLAR theme issue, we map protagonists of Latin American futures, both human and non-human, looking at the ways in which they act, create, and think futures.