Unpacking everyday urbanism: Practices and the making of (un)even urban waterscapes

Abstract

Inequalities in conditions of access to water are emblematic of contemporary urban life and have long been at the center of urban scholarship. This paper considers the theoretical and empirical potential of a focus on the everyday as a contribution to critical urban water studies. Drawing on research in Political Ecology and Critical Institutionalism, we focus on the intersection of everyday urbanism and water to reflect on whether such perspectives can further understandings of socio-natural inequalities and "real" governance challenges in the urban waterscape. We suggest that a focus on the everyday brings attention to the hybrid arrangements that constitute urban waterscapes and offers new insights to the polycentric nature of water governance, agency, and everyday urban struggles. However, we also outline limitations of these studies in unpacking the concept of the everyday and in capturing the practices through which everyday life is constituted. We explore the potential of an engagement with Practice Theory as a sensitizing lens for developing grounded understandings of everyday life, its constituent practices, and how these change over time. Concurrently, we argue that Practice Theory could be strengthened by drawing on critical approaches that explain everyday urban governance through:(1) the linking of practices to broader patterns of inequality; (2) the multiple social identities of practitioners and the variability in their exercise of agency; (3) the role of institutions as crucial mediating mechanisms and the processes through which practices become enduring institutional arrangements. We, thus, conclude that these approaches are complementary rather than competing.

Adaptive governance as bricolage

“…Power imbalances exposed in this processual analysis allow for a more profound engagement with matters of justice in water governance because they shed light on and engage with less influential imaginaries more explicitly (Frick-Trzebitzky, 2017; see also Cleaver and Whaley, 2018). Here, the bricolage lens provides a complementary understanding to that of (urban) political ecology studies of water gov-ernance: while the latter is interested in practice-based approaches to understand how (urban) socio-spatial inequalities are reproduced and in exploring the structures and patterns of injustices arising due to (adaptive) water governance (see Rusca and Cleaver, 2022;Alba et al, 2022), the former provides insights into how water governance works as a process. We see potential in expanding the analysis of water bricolage beyond municipal water supply, focusing, for instance, on regional and global water governance arrangements (i.e.…”

“People are no longer quiet”: Ordinary environmental citizenship in Lago Agrio, Ecuador

“…Ordinary environmental citizenship diverges from discrete, responsibility-based interpretations of citizenship, and emphasizes how social, rather than individual, actions are levers of change for socio-ecological improvement. The everyday is increasingly observed as a site of transformation, resistance, and as a platform for new notions of citizenship within urban contexts (Rusca and Cleaver, 2022). Citizenship is linked to ordinary actions like filing petitions, attending meetings, and general interaction within communities to develop social demands, what Staeheli et al (2012) call ‘micropolitics.’ Additionally, micropolitics allow for a broader understanding of what political participation can be, especially when positioned alongside correlative historical examples of large-scale, ‘extraordinary’ demonstrations of environmental citizenship.…”

Las desigualdades de acceso al agua en ciudades del Sur Global desde el enfoque de la Ecología Política Urbana

“…De hecho, pocos estudios desde la EPU han abordado el papel de las micronormativas en el análisis de las desigualdades de acceso al suministro de agua en áreas periurbanas y cómo estas micronormativas moldean la vida urbana. Las micronormativas, en general, en torno al agua pueden seguir distintos propósitos (que pueden estar relacionados con la solidaridad u otras finalidades, como la comercialización y la ampliación de la mercantilización del recurso), lo que puede resultar tanto en aumentos de la accesibilidad como, contrariamente, en crear procesos de exclusión, lo que puede ampliar las inequidades existentes (Llano-Arias, 2015;Rusca y Cleaver, 2022;Truelove, 2019). El estudio de Acey (2019) en Nigeria, por ejemplo, muestra la forma según la cual las micronormativas basadas en negociaciones comerciales (mercantilización del recurso) y no comerciales del agua (provisión de agua gratuita) definen diferentes formas de acceso y prácticas de vida cotidiana en torno al agua.…”