scholarly journals Conflicts, cooperation and experimentation: Analysing the politics of urban water through Accra’s heterogeneous water supply infrastructure

2020 ◽  
pp. 251484862097534
Author(s):  
Rossella Alba ◽  
Michelle Kooy ◽  
Antje Bruns
Keyword(s):  
Water Supply ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Bulk Water ◽  
Urban Water ◽  
The Social ◽  
Access To Water ◽  
Water Filling ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
The City

In this paper, we analyse the heterogeneity of water supply infrastructure in Accra, Ghana, to understand the politics of water in cities where infrastructural diversity has always been the norm. We do this by extending the use of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations as a heuristic device, shifting the focus and scale of urban political ecological analyses of infrastructural diversity from users and access to water distributions at city scale. To explain the impacts of three experiments in the distribution of water across the city, we analyse how changes in the technical and operational arrangements of Accra’s bulk water filling points reflect changes in the social relations of cooperation or conflict between the diversity of actors and infrastructure supplying water across the city. We find the uneven waterscape of the city is shaped by a plurality of actors whose practices are informed by a range of motives. These motives exceed profit-making, political legitimacy, patronage and petty corruption including also solidarity, religious beliefs and pragmatic choices. We show that distributions of water, risks and responsibilities among different actors involved in operating the water filling points are constantly contested with ambiguous and unforeseen outcomes foreclosing but also opening new possibilities for progressive experimentation. Documenting how relations between actors and technologies of water provisioning are dynamic, and open to incremental improvements towards progressive (re)distributions of water, our analysis at the city scale calls for further focus on how practices and policies of solidarity can be extended across heterogeneous provisioning systems.

Rural migrants in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China: Multi-positionality and negotiated living strategies

Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (10) ◽  
pp. 2245-2260 ◽  
Author(s):  
H Chung
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Rural Migrants ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

This paper investigates rural Chinese migrants’ agency through their multi-positionality and negotiated living strategies. The idea of ‘multi-positionality’ conceptualises a migrant’s mobility between physical locations and shifting social positions. Through individual migrants’ multi-positionality, this study discusses their place-specific social relations and thereby the diverse way to negotiate a living in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China. These strategies include simple approaches such as facilitating physical movements between different locations and more sophisticated ones which develop multiple roles with outsiders and native villagers in different localities. While the former allows individual migrants to use their local knowledge to make a living in the context of institutional exclusion and discrimination, the latter further cultivates changes and an upgrade in social relations. Rural migrants' everyday stories are used to unfold an individual’s particular people–place relationship and how he/she has tapped into a place-specific resource to make a living. It does not aim to generalise rural migrants’ experience; rather it seeks to show diversity and complexity. Migrants’ stories are collected through extensive research in a village-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China. Through these stories, not only does this paper articulate the social relations which underlie individual migrants’ shifting positions, but also extends translocal studies on migrants beyond the narrative of physical locations.

scholarly journals Neighbourhood open spaces for social cohesion

2020 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 06019
Author(s):  
Rukhsana Badar ◽  
Sarika Bahadure
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Unitary Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Neighbourhood Level ◽  
The City

The global cities of the world are witnessing a visible disconnection of everyday life. In India the Smart City guidelines acknowledge the need to counter the growing social detachment and intolerance by encouraging interactions. They go further in identifying that preserving and creating of open spaces must be a key feature of comprehensive urban development. Most social relations are cemented within open spaces at the neighbourhood level. Previous studies examine the association between the attributes of neighbourhood open spaces and social activity but neglect to view the issue comprehensively. The present study turns to Lefebvre’s Unitary Theory which states that open space is a result of three forces; 1) perceived space which is the physical dimension and material quality identifiable by the senses; 2) conceived space created by planners and other agents as plans and documents; and 3) lived space which is shaped by the values attached and images generated through user experience. For open space conducive to social interactions these three aspects must work in tandem. With this consideration a framework of criteria and indicators is developed and used to measure and compare the open spaces in select neighbourhoods in Europe and India. The investigation thus reveals differences in all three aspects of neighbourhood spaces. It also reveals a discrepancy between the planning standards formulated and employed by the city authorities in providing the spaces and the actual needs of the community. The research aims to address this gap. The study of the Indian cases lays foundation for the use of the framework to measure open spaces in association with social cohesion and thereby contribute to the enhancement of the social infrastructure of the City.

Ato Quayson's Oxford Street, Accra: Tracing Autobiographical Narrative in Analytical Method

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 496-504
Author(s):  
Anjali Prabhu
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
African City ◽  
Creative City ◽  
The Social ◽  
Implicit Argument ◽  
Oxford Street ◽  
The City ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

In his fascinating study of accra, ato quays0n quickly alerts his reader to the idea that one must not separate ways of knowing shakespeare from ways of knowing Accra. “Reading” the city as a literary critic, but much more, Quayson gives a discursive framework to his historical account of the material, social, and esoteric life of the city. Underlying the text is an implicit argument with other prominent accounts of African cities, which take a more utopian view and present these cities as mapping the innovative, exciting, and creative possibilities of urban space for the rest of the world. Quayson's mode of history is explicitly linked to storytelling in a number of ways beyond his disclosure that “[t]he retelling of Accra's story from a more expansive urban historical perspective is the object of Oxford Street” (4). From the start, it is also clear that his approach will utilize a broadly Marxian framework, which is to see (city) space in terms of the built environment as well as the social relations in and beyond it: “space becomes both symptom and producer of social relations” (5). But ultimately Quayson's apprehension of his city is Marxian because it recuperates ideas, desires, and creativity from the realm of the unique or inexplicable, of “genius,” to effectively insert them into various systems of production or into spaces that lack them. In so doing Quayson enhances, not hinders, our appreciation of those forms of innovation. Also Marxian is his employment of the “negative,” which refers to the way he splits apart many of the accepted relations between things in the scholarship on the development of the city, the postcolonial African city in particular, and pushes beyond the evidence of the “booming” or “creative” city. Quayson thus binds a more philosophical method of reasoning to his analysis of urban social relations while he straddles different disciplines. His work is illuminated when we locate a personal impulse, which we will track through the autobiographical narrative, to intervene not just in the ways the city is understood but also in the ways it is actually developing.

scholarly journals Filmic witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder

Urban History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 642-642
Author(s):  
CARRIE RENTSCHLER
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Male Violence ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
High Rise ◽  
The Past ◽  
City Street ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTThis essay examines a body of films that represent and re-enact the infamous 1964 Catherine Genovese rape and murder, helping to define the crime as a problem of bystander non-intervention exacerbated by urban living conditions and the ‘high rise anxieties’ of apartment dwellers. The moving image culture around the Genovese case tells a story about male violence against women in the city through the perspective of urban apartment dwellers, who are portrayed as bystander witnesses to both the city and to the social relations of stranger sociability in the city. Films depict the killing of Kitty Genovese, sometimes through fictional analogues to her and the crime, as an outcome of failed witnessing, explicating those failures around changing ideas about urban social relations between strangers, and ways of surveilling the city street from apartment windows. By portraying urban bystanders as primarily non-interventionist spectators of the Genovese rape and murder, films locate the conditions of femicide and responsibility for it in detached modes of seeing and encountering strangers. By analysing film as forms of historic documentation and imagination, as artifacts of historically and contextually different ways of telling and revising the story of the Genovese murder as one of bystander non-intervention in gender violence in the city, the essay conceptualizes film and filmic re-enactments as a mode of paying witness to the past.

Improving access to water supply and sanitation in urban India: microfinance for water and sanitation infrastructure development

2008 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 887-891 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenna Davis ◽  
Gary White ◽  
Said Damodaron ◽  
Rich Thorsten
Keyword(s):  
Water Supply ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Infrastructure Development ◽  
Sanitation Services ◽  
Poor Households ◽  
Access To Water ◽  
Water And Sanitation Infrastructure ◽  
Sanitation Infrastructure ◽  
The City ◽  
Water Supply And Sanitation

This article summarises initial findings of a study to explore the potential of providing micro-financing for low-income households wishing to invest in improved water supply and sanitation services. Through in-depth interviews with more than 800 households in the city of Hyderabad in India, we conclude that, even if provided with market (not concessional) rates of financing, a substantial proportion of poor households would invest in water and sewer network connections.

scholarly journals A DISPERSÃO URBANA NO ESPAÇO METROPOLITANO DE BELÉM-PA: uma análise a partir dos assentamentos residenciais na Ilha de Mosqueiro

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (18) ◽  
pp. 15788
Author(s):  
Sandro Brito Ferreira ◽  
José Queiroz de Miranda Neto
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Urban Dispersion ◽  
Administrative District ◽  
Geographic Scale ◽  
The Real Estate ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Agents ◽  
The City

THE URBAN DISPERSION IN THE METROPOLITAN AREA OF BELÉM-PA: an analysis from the residential settlements on Mosqueiro IslandLA DISPERSIÓN URBANA EN EL ÁREA METROPOLITANA DE BELÉM-PA: un análisis de los asentamientos residenciales en la isla del MosqueiroRESUMOEste artigo tem como objetivo analisar a dispersão metropolitana de Belém, tendo como recorte empírico o distrito administrativo de Mosqueiro, espaço suburbano tradicionalmente utilizado como espaço de lazer. A Ilha de Mosqueiro, como também é conhecida, passa por importantes redefinições ligadas à influência metropolitana, sobretudo a partir da instalação de novos assentamentos residenciais. No presente trabalho, parte-se da ideia de que a dispersão metropolitana é produto e condição da reprodução das relações sociais de produção do capital em uma escala geográfica mais ampla, pois é na metrópole que se encontra boa parte das condições objetivas de realização do trabalho. Como resultados, entende-se que a dispersão da metrópole de Belém ocorre por razões outras que não se explicam, em princípio, apenas pela lógica formal de acumulação do capital imobiliário. Para tanto, o recorte espacial considerado é Mosqueiro que, embora faça parte da área de expansão do município de Belém, não foi afetado pela ação direta das empresas imobiliárias que atuam nos municípios da RMB e pelas políticas habitacionais do Estado, agentes responsáveis pela expansão da fronteira urbano-imobiliária. Há, portanto, uma expansão que ocorre por meio de formas não integralmente capitalistas de produção imobiliária.Palavras-chave: Dispersão Metropolita; Belém; Ilha de Mosqueiro.ABSTRACTThis article aims to analyze the metropolitan dispersion of Belém, having as empirical cut the administrative district of Mosqueiro, a suburban space traditionally used as leisure space. Mosqueiro Island, as it is also known, undergoes important redefinitions linked to the metropolitan influence, especially since the installation of new residential settlements. In the present work, one starts from the idea that the metropolitan dispersion is product and condition of the reproduction of the social relations of production of the capital in a wider geographic scale, since in the metropolis one finds a good part of the objective conditions of accomplishment of the work. As results, it is understood that the dispersion of the metropolis of Bethlehem occurs for other reasons that are not explained, in principle, only by the formal logic of accumulation of real estate capital. To do so, the spatial reduction considered is Mosqueiro, which, although it is part of the expansion area of the city of Belém, was not affected by the direct action of the real estate companies operating in the municipalities of the RMB and by the housing policies of the State, agents responsible for the expansion of urban-real estate frontier. There is, therefore, an expansion that takes place through non-integrally capitalist forms of real estate production.Keywords: Metropolitan Dispersion; Belém; Mosqueiro Island.RESUMENEste artículo tiene como objetivo analizar la dispersión metropolitana de Belém, teniendo como recorte empírico el distrito administrativo de Mosqueiro, espacio suburbano tradicionalmente utilizado como espacio de ocio. La Isla de Mosqueiro, como también es conocida, pasa por importantes redefiniciones ligadas a la influencia metropolitana, sobre todo a partir de la instalación de nuevos asentamientos residenciales. En el presente trabajo, se parte de la idea de que la dispersión metropolitana es producto y condición de la reproducción de las relaciones sociales de producción del capital en una escala geográfica más amplia, pues es en la metrópoli que se encuentra buena parte de las condiciones objetivas de realización del trabajo. Como resultados, se entiende que la dispersión de la metrópoli de Belém, ocurre por razones otras que no se explican, en principio, sólo por la lógica formal de acumulación del capital inmobiliario. Para ello, el recorte espacial considerado es Mosqueiro que, aunque forma parte del área de expansión del municipio de Belém, no fue afectado por la acción directa de las empresas inmobiliarias que actúan en los municipios de la RMB y por las políticas habitacionales del Estado, agentes responsables por la expansión de la vivienda fronteras urbanas-inmobiliarias. Hay, por lo tanto, una expansión que ocurre por medio de formas no integralmente capitalistas de producción inmobiliaria.Palabras clave: Dispersión Metropolitana; Belém; Isla de Mosqueiro.

scholarly journals Kontestasi antar orang asli Papua terhadap hak pertuanan di Kaimana

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Cahyo Pamungkas
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
The Political ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Social ◽  
Customary Rights ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The City

This article is addressed to describe the social relations within the Papuan ethnic groups and between Papua native and migrants concerning some customary rights in Kaimana district. This research describes the struggle of inland and beach tribes in fighting for customary rights of land in Kaimana. Moreover, it captures the respond of migrants in dealing with the customary right. This study shows the recognition of the the eldest ethnic in Kaimana is a strategy and discourse constructed by Papua ethnic groups that have felt marginalized while migrants have taken their resources. This right could be understood as the need for recognition of Papua ethnic groups. The most important issue is not who the native of Kaimana is, but what the proper ways to give recognition to Papua ethnic groups which had been left behind in development are. The relation between the Papua natives and migrants in Kaimana is not complicated as the migrants have no privileges in the political contestation. However, these relationship are affected by the differences in religious affiliations. The Muslim Papua ethnic groups generally have a closer relationship with the Muslim migrants. The analytical framework of this study using the theoretical framework of identity and ethnicity to look at the issue. Does the definition of identity and ethnicity according to sociological theories are still relevant to understanding the issue of claims of ethnic identity in the city of Kaimana.

scholarly journals Drivers of change in urban water and wastewater tariffs

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 355-372
Author(s):  
Simon Damkjaer
Keyword(s):  
Urban Water ◽  
Drivers Of Change ◽  
Water And Sanitation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
Access To Water ◽  
Water And Wastewater ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Global Access ◽  
Alternative Water

Abstract Water and wastewater tariffs constitute a primary avenue for utilities to generate revenue towards covering the costs associated with water and wastewater service provisions. In the pursuit of achieving global access to safe and affordable water and sanitation, utilities and governments play an important role in regulating and setting combined tariffs, so that they are able to fund the necessary infrastructure while at the same time ensuring that tariffs do not impede on the ability of consumers to access these services. From a survey of 568 cities across 192 countries, this paper examines the main economic and financial drivers of change to regional urban water and wastewater tariffs from 2018 to 2019. Historically, the average global price for water and wastewater services increased from US$ 1.70/m3 in 2011 to US$ 2.16/m3 in 2019, equating to an annual rise in the mean global combined water tariff of ∼3.4%. The analysis indicates that for the studied regions, the financial and economic costs associated with recurring droughts, old infrastructure, subsidy cuts, increasing energy costs and a shift to alternative water resources such as desalination all contribute to changes in tariffs. Further research on the social and political drivers of change in tariffs is needed, in order to provide a holistic understanding of the balance required to be struck between the objectives of affordability and cost-recovery for achieving global access to water and sanitation.

Life in the city shadows: Work, identity and social status

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Briggs ◽  
Rubén Monge Gamero
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Work Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The City

Valdemingómez, however, revolves around its own norms and codes which defy and violate conventional everyday conceptions of normative behaviour. This congregation of crime, violence and victimization in a spatial and legal no-mans land like Valdemingómez means that grave misdemeanours occur without consequences and violence is normalized part of the everyday fabric of social life. For this reason, in Valdemingómez almost anything goes and this produces a series of tensions in the social hierarchies that are attached to cultural interactions in the area which permeate elements of work and labour, the moral economy, daily life and social relations. In this chapter, we take a detailed look at the cultural milieu of Valdemingómez and its operations, and show how people survive there and how the various players attempt to foster some self-respect from these harsh realities.

Issues of water supply and contemporary urban society: the case of Greater Amman, Jordan

2010 ◽  
Vol 368 (1931) ◽  
pp. 5299-5313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Potter ◽  
Khadija Darmame ◽  
Stephen Nortcliff
Keyword(s):  
Water Supply ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Empirical Evaluation ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Economic Costs ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Water Scarce ◽  
The City

Over the last two decades, Jordan has suffered a chronic water crisis, and is the tenth most water-scarce nation on Earth. Such water stress has been well illustrated in the case of Greater Amman, the capital, which has grown dramatically from a population of around 2000 in the 1920s, to 2.17 million today. One of the distinctive characteristics of the water supply regime of Greater Amman is that since 1987 it has been based on a system of rationing, with households receiving water once a week for various durations. Amman is highly polarized socio-economically, and by means of household surveys, both quantitative and qualitative, conducted in high- and low-income divisions of the city, a detailed empirical evaluation of the storage and use of water, the strategies used by households to manage water and overall satisfaction with water supply issues is provided in this paper, looking specifically at issues of social equity. The analysis demonstrates the social and economic costs of water rationing and consequent management to be high, as well as emphasizing that issues of water quality are of central importance to all consumers regardless of their socio-economic status within the city.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document