Sasha on water

Water, Capital, and the Space of Flows

Swyngedouw’s case study on the provisioning of water for the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, is the most striking example I have read of the way in which flows of capital are intertwined with changes in both natural and social landscapes. One might say that in the case of Guayaquil, flows of capital and flows of water co-evolved mutually: when capital moved more fluidly in the international markets for commodities like bananas, cocoa and petroleum, so too did the liquid flows to the metropolis increase. Even Swyngedouw’s vocabulary reflects this inseparable association – when export production weakened in certain periods, he describes the decrease in economic rents as a “stagnation”; as rivers stagnate when their velocity slows, so does the economic backbone of Guayaquil. And the city did literally stagnate, with rising cases of Yellow Fever in times when water was less plentiful, and on the other hand, increased cleanliness, well being and aesthetic value when the city was “watered” more effectively. One is reminded, throughout the article, of the physical characteristics and properties of water itself – a substance that works miracles even buried and channeled beneath the concrete mass of a growing city. Perhaps a better way to describe the relationship between water and capital in Ecuador is with Swyngedouw’s phrase “parasitic unity;”

Embedded in this parasitic relationship between water and money in Ecuador is the physical environment itself. The ecology of the Ecuadorian coastline is a particularly salient actor – it is only through the active capitalization on the region’s existing climatic conditions and biodiversity that the rents are able to flow. The trilogy of cocoa, bananas and petroleum are, of course, no accident, but rather like three winning cards in a deck whose probabilities depend on the environmental, social and economic rules of the game. This is also a major theme in Scott Prudham’s case study of the poisoning of water in Walkerton, Ontario. Prudham details how the Walkerton region’s Karst geomorphology was unusually important in allowing bacteria to flood underground aquifers. Of course neo-liberal reforms in government oversight and laissez-faire re-regulation of the environment all helped to create the conditions of a “perfect storm.” But it was also the geomorphic and ecological conditions of Walkerton, Ontario, combined with changes in the surface landscape of the region (mainly as a result of industrial livestock production) that underwrote the well poisoning disaster.

The case studies we read this last week were certainly not the first examples of the way flows of capital are implicated in specific ecologies and geographies. However I think that when one selectively considers cases of water and waste, the real or formal subsumption of nature to capital becomes even more transparent (not to overuse the metaphor!). Water, waste and capital travel in surprisingly similar ways – all three are often described as “flows,” or “liquid” and “fluid.” The biggest difference, perhaps, is that capital finds its channels in virtual space, while water and waste are somewhat limited to the Cartesian space of a landscape or a map. I am reminded of Manuel Castel’s essay, “The Space of Flows,” in which he characterizes contemporary society as increasingly based on modes of production linked to virtual “flows” of money and information. He argues that a rising class of rich people live their lives in reflection of the virtual systems they harness for their wealth; since the world is increasingly organized by the exchange of money and data in virtual spaces, the spaces we occupy increasingly reflect this shift. I am interested in how one might apply Gilles Deleuze’s theory of le pli or the fold to examining the political ecology of water systems in the twenty first century. I think one could argue that capital and water are folded into each other – not exactly in a dualism, but in a sort of amorphous reflection, which also is based on a mutual dependency.

Works Cited:

Castells, Manuel. “The Space of Flows.” The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory. Ed. Ida Susser. MA: Blackwell, [1996] 2002.

DeLanda, Manuel. “Space: Extensive and Intensive, Actual and Virtual.” Deleuze and Space. Ed. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Ed. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1993.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell Publishing, MA: 1984.

Prudham, S. 2004. Poisoning the well: neoliberalism and the contamination of municipal water in Walkerton, Ontario. Geoforum 35 (3):343-359.

Swyngedouw, E. 1997. Power, nature, and the city. The conquest of water and the political ecology of urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador: 1880-1990. Environment and Planning a 29:311-332