Course: Water and the Politics of Infrastructures

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Water and the Politics of Infrastructures

Course Features

Duration: 5 weeks

Intensity: 3-4 hours/week

Skill level: All level

Language: English

Quizzes: 7

Hands-on assignments 2

Certificate: Yes

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Course Description

This course introduces Urban Political Ecology (UPE) as an analytical tool to explore how cities are governed, contested and shaped through access and control over resources and infrastructures. By looking at the intersections between globalization and urbanization processes, UPE provides means to evaluate social power relations underlying injustices and inequalities in cities.

UPE is concerned with the implications of neoliberalism and market-oriented principles on access and the sustainability of resource provision, as well as social struggles that take root at sites of policy change. The course pays particularly attention at how different social actors, contemporary debates and material artifacts (e.g., large-scale infrastructures, small devices) come to codify uneven geographies, and how environmental injustices are shaped by factors such as caste, race, class, gender and ethnicity.

The aim of the course is to develop a critical perspective to analyze the complex socio-ecological interactions that constitute cities. It will do so by examining a series of case studies that involve the uneven and unjust distribution of water, sanitation, waste disposal and electricity supply services.

The course is structured in the following five modules:

MODULE I) Environment

Key theoretical perspectives and arguments in the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) and Environmental Justice (EJ).

MODULE II) Politics

Commodification of basic services and its consequences.

MODULE III) Urban Infrastructures

Historical models of urban infrastructure provision from colonial times to the present.

MODULE IV) Small devices

Access to basic services through prepaid technologies.

MODULE V) Water/Energyscapes

Contestations around access to water and electricity in cities

The following research questions are addressed:

Who are the main actors involve in the control and distribution of resources (e.g., water, sanitation, waste disposal and electricity), and infrastructures in a city?
What kinds of strategies and practices (e.g., laws, discourses, technologies) do they deploy to transform resources into commodities?
Who are the winners and losers of this socio-ecological transformation?

What you'll learn

Move beyond the city as a container and analyze the multi-scale nature of environmental and social problems.

Explore the connections between growing consumption in cities and geographies of resource extraction and waste disposal.

Understand inequalities of access to resources and infrastructures not just as a techno-managerial problem, but a political one.

Have a better sense of the complex and interconnected social-ecological, historical, economic and political processes that contribute to the uneven distribution of resources and infrastructures in cities.

Apply a historical and multi-scalar perspective to understand the uneven distribution of resources and infrastructures.

Requirements

Students need to be prepared to spend several hours each week with the assigned readings and documentaries.

In this course there are not right or wrong answers, critical debate is highly welcomed.

Students are expected to submit at the end of each module a product (five products in total). Some basic knowledge with design tools is required.

The course requires that students have a great interest in understanding why inequalities persist in many parts of the world despite technical and managerial efforts. Critical views are encouraged.

Who is this course for ?

Experts from the fields of engineering, urban planning and architecture interested in exploring concepts widely used in the social disciplines to research key urban problems, concerns and questions.

Policy makers and civil society organizations interested in critical debates around major water/sanitation/waste/electricity issues, and new ways of understanding why inequalities still persist in many cities despite a range of technical and managerial responses.

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