The Urban Conquest of Water in Guayaquil, 1880–1945: Cocoa and the Urban Water Dream

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Swyngedouw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Water System ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urbanization Process ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The City

The problems outlined in the previous chapter evolve from particular historical political ecological processes. As the urbanization process is predicated upon the mastering and engineering of nature’s water, the ecological conquest of water is an integral part of the expansion and growth of the city. At the same time, the capital required to build and expand the urban landscape is itself, at least in the case of Guayaquil, generated through the political ecological transformation of the city’s hinterland. In this and the following chapters, we shall explore the historical dynamics of the urbanization process through the lens of this double ecological conquest. The city’s growth created the need for water systems, which stretched further and further from the city in order to tap additional water resources. Foreign capital had to be generated to finance the imported technology of these projects. This necessitated a sound export-based economy, initially driven by cocoa (until the early twentieth century), bananas (from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s), and oil (from 1973 onwards). The urban process was consequently embedded in a double ecological conquest: ever greater flows of water became urbanized, while the city’s hinterland was socially and ecologically transformed. The latter conquest, in turn, plugged the Ecuadorean economy into the international division of labour. Guayaquil was the arena and medium through which those circuits of transformed nature and money were organized. The contemporary social struggle around water is evidently the result of the deeply exclusive and marginalizing ways in which political, economic, and ecological power have been worked out. The current water system and water politics exemplify the wider socio-economic and political processes that characterized Guayaquil’s urbanization process. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Guayaquil was just a large port village on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, surviving in the shadow of the political and former colonial centre of Quito and the economically dominant Sierra (Andean highland) hacienderos. In 1780, Quito had a population of 28,500 compared to 6,600 in Guayaquil, and by the mid-nineteenth century these figures had risen to 36,000 and 25,000 respectively.

The City in a Glass of Water: Circulating Water, Circulating Power

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Swyngedouw
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Hydrological Cycle ◽  
Urban Sustainability ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Water ◽  
Urbanization Process ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Ecological Criteria ◽  
The City

In recent years, an impressive body of work has emerged in the wake of the resurgence of the environmental question on the political agenda, addressing the environmental implications of urban change or issues related to urban sustainability (Haughton and Hunter 1994; Satterthwaite 1999). In many, if not all, of these cases, the environment is defined in terms of a set of ecological criteria pertaining to the physical milieu. Both urban sustainability and the environmental impacts of the urban process are primarily understood in terms of physical environmental conditions and characteristics. We start from a different position. As explored in Chapter 1, urban water circulation and the urban hydrosocial cycle are the vantage points from which the urbanization process will be analysed in this book. In this Chapter, a glass of water will be my symbolic and material entry point into an—admittedly somewhat sketchy—attempt to excavate the political ecology of the urbanization process. If I were to capture some urban water in a glass, retrace the networks that brought it there and follow Ariadne’s thread through the water, ‘I would pass with continuity from the local to the global, from the human to the nonhuman’ (Latour 1993: 121). These flows would narrate many interrelated tales: of social and political actors and the powerful socio-ecological processes that produce urban and regional spaces; of participation and exclusion; of rats and bankers; of water-borne disease and speculation in water industry related futures and options; of chemical, physical, and biological reactions and transformations; of the global hydrological cycle and global warming; of uneven geographical development; of the political lobbying and investment strategies of dam builders; of urban land developers; of the knowledge of engineers; of the passage from river to urban reservoir. In sum, my glass of water embodies multiple tales of the ‘city as a hybrid’. The rhizome of underground and surface water flows, of streams, pipes and networks is a powerful metaphor for processes that are both social and ecological (Kaïka and Swyngedouw 2000). Water is a ‘hybrid’ thing that captures and embodies processes that are simultaneously material, discursive, and symbolic.

scholarly journals Power, Nature, and the City. The Conquest of Water and the Political Ecology of Urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador: 1880–1990

1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
E Swyngedouw
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Water Control ◽  
Urbanization Process ◽  
Supply Condition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
The City

In this paper, I seek to explore how the circulation of water is embedded in the political ecology of power, through which the urbanization process unfolds. I attempt to reconstruct the urbanization process as simultaneously a political-economic and ecological process. This will be discussed through the exploration of the history of the urbanization of water in Guayaquil, Ecuador. As approximately 36% of its two million inhabitants has no access to piped potable water, water becomes subject to an intense social struggle for control and/or access. Mechanisms of exclusion from and access to water, particularly in cities which have a problematic water-supply condition, lay bare how both the transformation of nature and the urbanization process are organized in and through mechanisms of social power. In order to unravel the relations of power that are inscribed in the way the urbanization of nature unfolded I document and analyze the historical geography of water control in the context of the political ecology of Guayaquil's urbanization. In short, Guayaquil's urbanization process is written from the perspective of the drive to urbanize and domesticate nature's water and the parallel necessity to push the ecological frontier outward as the city expands. I show how this political ecology of urbanization takes place through deeply exclusive and marginalizing processes that structure relations of access to and exclusion from access to nature's water.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

From Hospitality to Hostility: Ibadan and Strangers, 1830–1904

1985 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toyin Falola
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Open Door ◽  
Equal Opportunities ◽  
Open Door Policy ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
City State ◽  
The City

The view that Ibadan society in the nineteenth century did not discriminate against strangers, irrespective of their origins in Yorubaland, is now firmly entrenched in the literature. To be sure, Ibadan, a new nineteenth-century Yoruba city-state, founded as a consequence of the political crises of the early decades of the century, did maintain an ‘open door’ policy to strangers, many of whom went there as adventurers, craftsmen and traders, hoping to acquire wealth and fame. This article, however, controverts the view that Ibadan society gave the strangers and the indigenes equal opportunities to wealth and power. It argues that all the key political offices went only to the Oyo-Ibadan group which dominated the city-state. Strangers were also not allowed to participate fully in the leading heights of the economy, with the result that most of the wealthy citizens were also of Oyo-Yoruba origin.In the 1890s discrimination against strangers was such that a number of moves were made to expel them. However, the British, who imposed colonial rule on Ibadan in 1893, were against the expulsion of strangers.

Application of Low-Carbon Concept in Urban Landscape Design

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-9
Author(s):  
An Li ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Landscape Design ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Urbanization Process ◽  
Healthy Development ◽  
Urban Construction ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Day By Day

In recent years, China’s urbanization process is accelerating day by day, as a part of urban construction, urban landscape design is of great significance to promote the healthy development of the city, especially the application of low-carbon concept to landscape design can highlight the era theme of green and environmental protection. This paper mainly discusses the relationship between low-carbon and urban landscape, the specific embodiment of low-carbon concept in landscape design and the application of low-carbon concept in urban landscape design for reference.

The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

2018 ◽  
pp. 538-556
Author(s):  
Erik Swyngedouw
Keyword(s):  
Class Struggle ◽  
Creative Destruction ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Urbanization Process ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Organization And Management ◽  
Strategic Position ◽  
Political Economic

In the corpus of Marxist thought as well as in mainstream socialist strategies and politics, the theoretical and politically strategic position and role of space, nature, and the urbanization process in the expanded production and reproduction of capitalism, and in the transformation to socialism, remains—with a few notable exceptions—largely marginal and residual. Nonetheless, cities are hotbeds of anti-capitalist struggles and socio-ecological conflict, offer experimental spaces for emancipatory socio-ecological transformation and action, and remain pivotal for the organization and management of the creative destruction that animates a continuously revolutionizing capital circulation process. This chapter explores how emancipatory-egalitarian political movements, in conjunction with urban political-economic and political-ecological transformation, demonstrate the vital role of space, urbanization, and socio-ecological processes both in sustaining the expanded reproduction of capitalism and in choreographing the dynamics and configuration of class struggle.

scholarly journals Toponymy, Pioneership, and the Politics of Ethnic Hierarchies in the Spatial Organization of British Colonial Nairobi

Urban Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Wanjiru-Mwita ◽  
Frédéric Giraut
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Organization ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The Political ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Ethnic Affiliation ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
British Asians ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
The City

Toponyms, along with other urban symbols, were used as a tool of control over space in many African countries during the colonial period. This strategy was epitomized by the British, who applied it in Nairobi and other parts of Kenya from the late 1800s. This paper shows that toponymy in colonial Nairobi was an imposition of British political references, urban nomenclature, as well as the replication of a British spatial idyll on the urban landscape of Nairobi. In early colonial Nairobi, the population was mainly composed of three main groups: British, Asians, and Africans. Although the Africans formed the bulk of the population, they were the least represented, socially, economically and politically. Ironically, he British, who were the least in population held the political and economic power, and they applied it vigorously in shaping the identity of the city. The Asians were neither as powerful as the British, nor were they considered to be at the low level of the native Africans. This was the deliberate hierarchical structure that was instituted by the colonial government, where the level of urban citizenship depended on ethnic affiliation. Consequently, this structure was reflected in the toponymy and spatial organization of the newly founded city with little consideration to its pre-colonial status. Streets, buildings and other spaces such as parks were predominantly named after the British monarchy, colonial administrators, settler farmers, and businessmen, as well as prominent Asian personalities. In this paper, historical references such as maps, letter correspondences, monographs, and newspaper archives have been used as evidence to prove that toponyms in colonial Nairobi were the spatial signifiers that reflected the political, ideological and ethnic hierarchies and inequalities of the time.

scholarly journals ‘The radicals in these Reform times’: Politics, Grand juries, and Ireland’s Unbuilt Assize Courthouses, 1800–50

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 109-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Butler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
Architectural Development ◽  
Irish Case ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Do So

It is the aim, in this article, to identify the reasons why certain designs for courthouses in early-nineteenth-century Ireland remained unexecuted, and to do so by analysing surviving drawings and placing them in the political context at this time of Irish local government and of the efforts of Westminster politicians to institute reform. The funding and erection of courthouses were managed by grand juries, an archaic form of local government which gave few rights to smaller taxpayers and was widely perceived as an unaccountable institution associated with theancien régime. In addition to hosting court sittings, courthouses were used by these grand juries for their private meetings and functions. By exploring the agendas and pretensions of these bodies, and by looking at the fluctuating availability of funding sources that were needed to initiate building work, I will argue through a series of Irish case studies that a renewed focus on elite patronage and its associated politics allows a new insight into courthouse building, which places less emphasis than is often the case on, for example, the role played by the changing legal profession in the architectural development of the courthouse.In nineteenth-century Ireland, courthouses demarcated the visible and tangible presence in the urban landscape of the law and state-sanctioned justice. Laws passed by the Irish parliament and then, after its abolition in 1800, by the Westminster government, were enforced in assize courthouses by travelling judges on established ‘circuits’, visiting each city or county town twice a year (in the spring and summer). These judges travelled with great splendour through the countryside, and were welcomed by a high sheriff at the county border and escorted with military pageantry, ritual, and procession to their destination.

scholarly journals A POLÍTICA DE CARIDADE, ASSISTÊNCIA E PROTEÇÃO À INFÂNCIA DESVALIDA EM BELÉM DO PARÁ: DO IMPÉRIO À REPÚBLICA

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Laura Maria Silva Araújo Alves
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Protection Policy ◽  
Childhood Care ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The City

<p>O objetivo deste artigo é trazer a lume a política de caridade, assistência e proteção à infância desvalida em Belém do Pará, do período que se estende do Império à República. No século XIX, a infância deveria ser assistida na capital do Pará em decorrência da política idealizada e implementada pela elite paraense. Assim, a infância que precisava ser assistida era designada de “órfã” e “exposta”. A primeira, dizia respeito, também, à criança que tinha perdido um dos pais, e a segunda, chamada, também, “enjeitada” ou “desvalida”, correspondia à criança que alguém não quis cuidar ou receber. Este artigo está divido em três partes. Na primeira, situo a cidade de Belém do Pará, em termos políticos, econômicos e sociais, no cenário do Brasil República, em interface com a infância. Na segunda parte, destaco as políticas assistenciais e filantrópicas no atendimento à infância no Pará e o ideário higienista. E, por fim, na terceira, trago à cena algumas instituições que foram criadas em Belém do Pará, no período do Império à República, para abrigar a criança órfã e desvalida.</p><p> </p><p><strong>ABSTRACT</strong></p><p>The objective of this article is to bring to light the charity, assistance and protection policy for disfavored childhood in Belém-PA, from the period of the Empire to the Brazilian Republic. In the 19th century, children should be assisted in the capital of the state of  Pará as a result of the political idealization implemented by this state’s elite. Therefore, the ones who needed to be assisted were designated as “orphans” or “exposed”. The former ones, not exclusively, were the children who had lost one of their parents; the latter ones, also referred to as “rejected” or “disfavored”, corresponded to the children none would look after or welcome. This article is divided into three parts. In the first, the city of  Belém is situated in political, economic and social terms, interfaced with childhood, in the scenario of the Brazilian Republic. In the second, the assistance and philanthropic policies for childhood care, as well as the hygienist ideas, are highlighted. Finally, institutions created to shelter orphan and disfavored children in Belém, from the period of the Empire to the Republic, are brought to centre stage.</p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Grão Pará. Childhood. Disfavored Children. Hygienism. Welfarism. Philantropy.</p>

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