Day Zero and The Infrastructures of Climate Change: Water Governance,Inequality, and Infrastructural Politics in Cape Town's Water Crisis

From 2015 to 2018, Cape Town, South Africa, was marked by fears of a water crisis in which the city's taps threatened to run dry. We argue in this article that Cape Town's crisis of water scarcity was a product of the convergence of ongoing contradictions in South African water governance as they came into contact with shifting infrastructural priorities associated with climate change. In its response to the possibility of a financial crisis brought on by reduced water consumption, the city withdrew the universal provision of free basic water (FBW) and reconfigured existing tariff structures. Both changes meant that the city moved further into commercialization and valuation practices in the context of restricted monetary flows. Based on an understanding of contemporary governance in South Africa as reflective of an often contradictory need to balance municipal budgets while also correcting for apartheid inequities, we argue that ongoing experiences of climate change are stretching existing municipal budgets in ways that threaten to deepen existing inequalities. Ultimately, we suggest that Cape Town's crisis is critical for understanding how climate change is reconfiguring existing governance dynamics at a planetary scale, thus offering insights into what form urban climate change adaptation may take in the future.     

The Creation,Maintenance and Governance of Public Goods and Free Goods

The theory of public goods is largely irrelevant to their management and governance. It is highly normative but is unused in the policy area. It remains centred on highly idealized and dichotomized characteristics (non-rivalrousness and non-excludability) of public goods despite important theoretical progress in the last twenty years. It is suggested that public goods are as much social as technological constructions, but there is no explanation of how such goods come into existence. It is argued that they are often subject to evolution that changes the balance of their characteristics between being public or private goods. Present theory bears little relationship to the governmental budgetary processes assumed necessary to finance such goods, yet all management and maintenance costs, often high enough to deter such funding, are ignored. While there is recognition that the intensive use of a public good often imposes costs directly upon users, there is no corresponding recognition either that inappropriate and intensive usage can erode public goods as assets or that such usage is difficult to control. Free goods are described and mooted as specific and important types of public goods. Illustrative examples of public and free goods, mainly from Australia and the Pacific, are cited.     

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: Heterogeneous Governance,Claims Making and Forced Eviction in a Megacity

Residents of informal settlements worldwide face challenges defending their land tenure. In contexts with overlapping systems of governance these challenges are even more complex and claims to land tenure more precarious. How do heterogeneous systems of governance, a characteristic of some global South megacities, affect evictions? This article presents an in-depth case study of the informal Otodo Gbame waterfront settlement's struggle to defend its customary land tenure through multiple authorities in Lagos, Nigeria. The analysis reveals how a heterogeneous system of governance disempowers citizens by obscuring the locus of power and creating confusion when communities make claims on the state. Communities find themselves claiming rights to the city that receive varying degrees of recognition from the many authorities within the heterogeneous system. In Lagos, the state weaponizes this heterogeneous system in pursuit of modern development and urban growth.     

Paying for Pipes,Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery

This article interrogates the nature of political agency deployed at sites of market‐oriented water reforms. It presents a case study from Bangalore, India of a water project mandating significant ‘beneficiary’ cash contributions from lower‐middle‐class dwellers for the capital cost of extending piped water to the city's peripheries. Drawing on quantitative and ethnographic data, it illustrates why property owners who lack formal water access and land tenure — groups referred to in this article as the ‘peripheralized middle class’ — consent to paying for pipes rather than resist all together despite the high cost involved. It argues that far from reflecting an internalization of a ‘willingness to pay’ or ‘stakeholder’ ethos celebrated by development practitioners today, payment for water provides an insurgent means to bargain for greater symbolic recognition, respectability and material benefits from the state. In particular, payment for pipes enables peripheral dwellers to strengthen their claims to secure land tenure in an era of exclusionary and punitive spatial policies. Payment thus comprises a terrain of contested meaning making and political struggle, at the heart of which lie the stakes of urban citizenship. In documenting the process by which property related interests and tenure claims are advanced under a scenario of reforms, this article contributes to Gramscian political‐ecological conversations on subaltern political agency and the lived character of hegemony in urban environments.     

浅论水土保持对环境综合治理的作用

水土保持和小流域治理建设步伐的加快,符合水利管理实际,对推动水土保持和环境综合治理具有积极有效作用。     

Ponds,Power and Institutions: The Everyday Governance of Accessing Urban Water Bodies in a Small Bengali City

While researchers in the growing field of urban political ecology have given significant attention to the fragmented hydroscape that characterizes access to drinking water in the global South, so far the (re)production of other urban waters and its related power relations have been underexplored. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap by exploring the everyday negotiations over access to urban water bodies, in particular ponds. These are understood as a composite resource that is simultaneously water, land and public space. This analysis draws on a case study from a small city in West Bengal, India, and is based primarily on data from open interviews with different actors with a stake in urban ponds. The article demonstrates that in a context of ambiguity of the statutory governance regime and fragmented control, the (re)production of the pondscape is embedded within complex relationships of power whereby social marginalization can be offset at least momentarily by local institutions such as neighbourhood clubs and political parties.     

风险社会理论与城市公共安全——基于人口流迁与社会融合视角的分析

在我国社会转型和快速城市化的背景下,城市人口发展所面临的风险呈现出多元化特征,人口流迁与社会融合逐步成为影响城市公共安全的现实因素。流动人口缺乏在城市的原始积累,生存状态不体面,对城市社会缺乏认同感和归属感,而户籍制度仍然是制约流动人口城市融合的主要障碍。在风险治理和安全保障方面,政府需要通过合理的制度安排解决农民工在城市体系中的制度化生存问题,通过扩展流动人口的社会支持网络,增强其归属感。同时,还必须加强流动人口的常态性、制度性管理和政府公共服务能力建设,提高流动人口素质和对城市社会的自适应能力。     

城市供水的二次污染原因及治理

自来水经过一定的处理工艺,然后经过配送管网输送至各户。水在配送管网中流动的过程中,往往会受到管网、供水管道及附属设备的影响,造成二次污染。因此,要切实做好城市供水二次污染的防治工作,提高人们的生活质量。基于此,本文提出了城市供水二次污染的几点原因和一般性的治理对策。     

Entanglements of Periphery and Informality in Mexico City

Mexico City is a well‐known case of urban expansion. Most of the growth has been in its peripheries, occurring during two phases of housing privatization: a predominantly self‐built urbanization by residents establishing irregular settlements (starting in the 1930s); and a relatively recent surge of mass‐produced small‐scale single‐family housing built by state‐sponsored development companies (underway since the year 2000). Informality, we argue, should not be understood as a mode of housing production setting in opposition self‐build practices against industry‐led and/or state‐sponsored processes, but rather as a dialectical urbanization logic shaped by the entanglements of in/formal processes in governance practices, land privatization and regularization, and urban infrastructure and services deficits. We are particularly interested in a dominant narrative whereby the embeddedness of informality is constantly underplayed and irregular settlements are cast as a residual category, a problem to tolerate or in need of intervention, or the inevitable combination of demographic growth and housing shortage, rather than the direct outcome of urban policies and development processes. Conversely, recent housing policy in Mexico is officially narrated as an economic stimulus, a means to control and order (irregular) urban expansion, and an impulse to democratize homeownership. Our discussion of the entanglements of informality in Mexico City is based on an extended literature review of academic articles and official reports (predominantly in English), supplemented by a series of street and neighborhood explorations (in the summers of 2012 and 2013) across the metropolis.     

Conduct of Conduits: Engineering,Desire and Government through the Enclosure and Exposure of Urban Water

This article scrutinizes the relationship between governmental reform and infrastructural change in Singapore. Focusing on the role of engineers, it is argued that neoliberal decentralization has occurred through the physical reconfiguration of drainage. Neoliberalization is conceived as a localized technical response to a public health crisis resulting from infrastructural enclosure, which is orchestrated on and through the material‐ecological environment. A closed drainage system consisting of trapezoidal canals and concrete culverts had produced an ideal breeding environment for dengue‐carrying mosquitoes, undermining the state's centralized approach to water governance. This article reorients Michel Foucault's analytics of government around engineering and the ‘milieu’ to consider how drainage infrastructure was consequently opened up to an emerging civil society to relieve pressure on the state and allow greater public participation in the surveillance and management of canals, pipes and culverts. Alongside landscape architects, engineers would increasingly turn to naturalized waterways and open catchment policy to encourage citizens to form an affective bond with water and to inculcate principles of individual ownership and responsibility through physical contact. The article contends that with the proliferation of integrated resource management systems, governmental power is increasingly exercised through the liveliness as well as the fetishization of urban infrastructure.     

IJV Partner Trustworthy Behaviour: The Role of Host Country Governance and Partner Selection Criteria

This study provides new insight into the interplay between partner‐ and institution‐level bases of trustworthy behaviour in international joint ventures (IJVs). The results of the study, based on survey and archival data collected on 144 IJVs across six Asian countries, revealed that host country governance quality directly and positively influences IJV partner trustworthy behaviour. It was also found that weak host country governance undermined the effectiveness of certain partner selection criteria in serving as a tool for establishing an IJV with a trustworthy partner. Furthermore, through distinguishing between two dimensions of trustworthiness (benevolence and competence), it was demonstrated that partner benevolence is facilitated by relationship‐oriented criteria, whereas partner competence is facilitated by task‐oriented criteria. The implications of these results for the establishment and management of IJVs are discussed.     

Recovering Sociology from the Trash Heap: Of Waste Politics and the Spatialization of Local Representation in Lagos

This article excavates the debate that unfolded during the 1980s between Jacques Rancière and Pierre Bourdieu to shed light on the theoretical divide that still cuts across the field of urban studies today. Looking at contemporary Rancièrian scholarship through a Bourdieusian lens, it points to their main theoretical shortcomings and reasserts the value of relational, field‐based and empirically grounded approaches to urban politics. At the same time, this article engages seriously Rancière's critique of Bourdieu's failure to account for space in order to question the territoriality inherent to the notion of field. We put this theoretical discussion to the test of Lagos's garbage. Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in Lagos from 2015 to 2016, we propose analyzing the process of spatialization of the field of local representation by looking at the ways solid waste—here conceived as a political opportunity—is mobilized by different actors. We argue that the deployment of a waste infrastructure in Lagos is congruent with a relative disinvestment in practices of territorial control that reshapes the structure of local representation, reconfiguring the ‘stage’ on which politics is played out in the Nigerian metropolis.     

Writing Across Contexts: Urban Informality and the State in Tallinn,Bafatá and Berlin

Urban research has long related informality to a lack of state capacity or a failure of institutions. This assumption not only fails to account for the heterogeneous institutional relations in which informality is embedded, but has also created a dividing line between states. Whereas some states are understood to manage urban development through functioning institutions, others, in this view, fail to regulate. To deconstruct such understandings, this article explores informal practices through a multi‐sited individualizing comparison between three case studies of water governance, parking regulation and dwelling regimes in Bafatá (Guinea‐Bissau), Tallinn (Estonia) and Berlin (Germany), respectively. Our approach to understanding informality starts from the negotiation and contestation of order between differently positioned actors in the continuous making of states. From this point of view, informality is inherent in the architecture of states––emerging through legal systems, embedded in negotiations between and within institutions, and based on conflicts between state regulations and prevailing norms. Tracing how order takes shape though negotiation, improvisation, co‐production and translation not only highlights how informality constitutes a modus operandi in the everyday workings of the state in all three cases, but also provides a way to talk across these cases, i.e. to bring them together in one frame of analysis and overcome their presumed incommensurability.     

Urbanization as A Process of State Building: Local Governance Reforms in China

Existing scholarship suggests that local transformation in reform‐era China has been a process of decentralization of state power driving extractive local governments to pursue economic growth through rapacious land appropriation and producing many miserable landless villagers. This study puts forward an alternative perspective by arguing that local governance reforms in China to advance urban development should also be interpreted as a process of state building, whereby local government reshaped its governance strategy so as to mitigate potential social unrest and strengthen its political legitimacy in governing rapidly urbanizing areas. Based on intensive fieldwork in a periurban district in southern China, this research examines how the local state has heightened its control over urbanizing villages through its day‐to‐day governance practices and the pursuit of a complex policy agenda comprising social welfare provision, shareholding reforms and intervention in grassroots politics. The findings of this study shed new light on understanding local state transformation in periurban China and on explaining why the country still maintains tremendous urban growth despite incessant land disputes and numerous social tensions at different localities.     

创新驱动下常州新型研发机构协同治理优化路径研究

论文对创新驱动下常州新型研发机构的发展现状进行了调研,分析常州新型研发机构协同治理中存在的困境,进而从各个维度提出创新驱动下常州新型研发机构协同治理的优化路径,以期为常州新型研发机构的健康发展提供可行性建议。     

Remaking Equality: Community Governance and the Politics of Exclusion in Bogota's Public Spaces

Bogota's public space policy is often credited with promoting inclusionary principles. In this article, I explore critically the content of Bogota's articulation of equality in public space policy. In so doing, I present a critical view of the work Bogota's insistence on equality does to mediate class relations in the city, relying on deeply held conceptions of both social extremes. This results in the construction of a version of social harmony in public space that at once depoliticizes the claims to public space of subjects such as street vendors and the homeless and claims a new role for the middle class in the city. The analysis focuses on two examples of community governance schemes, documenting the logics and methods used by communities to implement official visions of equality and justify the exclusion of street vendors and homeless people from the area. By looking at the articulation of these exclusions in local class politics through seemingly inclusionary rhetoric, the article accounts for ‘post‐revanchist’ turns in contemporary urban policy, while anchoring its production in local processes of community governance.