Hug March

Smart contradictions: The politics of making Barcelona a Self-sufficient city:

In recent years, the Smart City has become a very popular concept amongst policy makers and urban planners. In a nutshell, the Smart City refers to projects and planning strategies that aim to join up new forms of inclusive and low-carbon economic growth based on the knowledge economy through the deployment of information and communication technologies. However, at the same time as new urban Smart interventions are being designed and applied, insufficient attention has been paid to how these strategies are inserted into the wider political economy and, in particular, the political ecology of urban transformation. Therefore, in this paper we critically explore the implementation of the Smart City, tracing how the ‘environment’ and environmental concerns have become an organising principle in Barcelona’s Smart City strategy. Through an urban political ecology prism we aim to critically reflect upon the contradictions of the actually existing Smart City in Barcelona and how Smart discourses and practices might be intentionally or unintentionally mobilised in ways that serve to depoliticise urban redevelopment and environmental management. The paper stresses the need to repoliticise the debates on the Smart City and put citizens back at the centre of the urban debate.

The Suburbanization of Water Scarcity in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region: Sociodemographic and Urban Changes Influencing Domestic Water Consumption

The metropolitan region of Barcelona is facing change in urban development patterns, sociodemographic structures, and domestic water use and management. In recent years, several drought alerts have been enacted and water restrictions applied, uncovering the fragile equilibrium between the demand and the supply of this resource. We find the literature on determinants of domestic water consumption to be strongly biased toward the effects of economic instruments in the suburban Anglo-American world. Therefore, we widen the scope of determinants by including sociodemographic and territorial variables for the mixed urban model of the metropolitan region of Barcelona. Our results show the relevance of residential land uses for water consumption and can be taken as a guide for developing different urban water policies for different urban forms.

Water conservation campaigns and citizen perceptions: the drought of 2007–2008 in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona

Droughts are expected to become more common in Mediterranean urban contexts during the next decades. Water conservation campaigns are a crucial part of drought management actions but doubts remain regarding their effectiveness once the drought period has finished. In this paper and taking the example of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, we present the results of a survey on drought perception and behaviour undertaken for 437 households of this area. Conservation messages were compared with household perception and conservation behaviours. Results indicate that conservation campaigns were successful in raising awareness about the drought, but messages failed to target specific uses (indoor/outdoor). Against a backdrop of decreasing consumption per capita in the compact urban areas, future conservation campaigns must be aware of these factors if the conservation burden is not to fall on those already consuming very little water.

Imaginaries of Hope: The Utopianism of Degrowth

This article analyzes degrowth, a project of radical socioecological transformation calling for decolonizing the social imaginary from capitalisms pursuit of endless growth. Degrowth is an advanced reincarnation of the radical environmentalism of the 1970s and speaks to pertinent debates within geography. This article benefits from Ursula Le Guins fantasy world to advance the theory of degrowth and respond to criticisms that degrowth offers an unappealing imaginary, which is retrogressive, Malthusian, and politically simplistic. We argue instead that degrowth is on purpose subversive; it brings the past into the future and into the production of the present; it makes a novel case for limits without denying that scarcity is socially produced; and it embraces conflict as its constitutive element. We discuss the politics of scale of the incipient degrowth movement, which we find theoretically wanting, yet creative in practice.

Taming, controlling and metabolizing flows: Water and the urbanization process of Barcelona and Madrid (1850–2012)

This paper aims to provide a historical reading of the urbanization of the water cycle in Madrid and Barcelona. Starting from an urban political ecology view, the urbanization of the water cycle is understood as the mobilization of water resources to keep pace with and sustain urban growth. This process could not be understood without inquiring into the evolution of the urban fabric in both cities. At the same time an understanding of the power choreographies over the water cycle needs to be brought to the fore. In Barcelona, disputes between the municipality and private capital over the water monopoly deeply shaped the trajectory of the urban supply from the mid-19th century until the early 20th century. Later on, under private monopoly, the search for water resources beyond the urban limits required the development of infrastructures such as dams and channels to keep pace with the intense urbanization of the postwar period. On the other hand, the fully public nature of the supplier in Madrid may help to explain the impressive magnitude of the waterworks, which belittle the urbanization of water of the Catalan city, while showing that ‘modernity’ in the form of ample supplies of good-quality water arrived in Madrid almost 100 years before Barcelona. Recent environmental and economic crises bring to light the hidden, complex and fragile entanglements that permit the flowing of water into the urban and suburban fabrics.

Financializing Desalination: Rethinking the Returns of Big Infrastructure

Against the trend prevalent during the 1990s and 2000s, large-scale infrastructural projects have made a comeback in the water sector. Although sometimes framed as part of a broader sustainable transition, the return of big infrastructure is a much more complicated story in which finance has played a crucial role. In the following article, we explore this encounter between finance and water infrastructure using the case of Britains first experiment in desalination technologies, the Thames Water Desalination Plant (TWDP). On the surface, the plant appears to be a classic example of the successes of normative industrial ecology, in which sustainability challenges have been met with forward-thinking green innovations. However, the TWDP is utterly dependent on a byzantine financial model, which has shaped Thames Waters investment strategy over the last decade. This article returns to the fundamental question of whether London ever needed a desalination plant in the first place. Deploying an urban political ecology approach, we demonstrate how the plant is simultaneously an iconic illustration of ecological modernization and a fragile example of an infrastructure-heavy solution to the demands of financialization. Understanding the development of the TWDP requires a focus on the scalar interactions between flows of finance, waste, energy and water that are woven through the hydrosocial cycle of London.

The Unintended Consequences of Ecological Modernization: Debt-Induced Reconfiguration of the Water Cycle in Barcelona

In the context of the European debt crisis, neoliberal reforms question the legitimacy of the state in the direct provision of basic services. Water governance mirrors such issues. In Metropolitan Barcelona (northeast Spain) the water cycle is being redrawn with the leasing to private hands of the regional public bulk water supplier. The unbearable debt accumulated by the Catalan Water Agency is used as the discursive justification of the ‘inevitability’ of granting to private capital the control over the water cycle. We attempt to demonstrate that this debt is the result of large investments, required by European directives (Wastewater Directive, Drinking Water Directive, and European Water Framework Directive) to improve the quality of rivers and water bodies. These directives, combined with the restrictions imposed on budget deficits by the European Union and the inadequate regional financing model of water have put the Catalan Water Agency against the wall. The financial crisis, wreaking havoc in Spain and Catalonia, has finally exacerbated the tensions around the water cycle as the Catalan administration has observed how international markets turned off the credit tap. In the paper we wish to elucidate pervasive processes of private participation in Metropolitan Barcelona and analyze the intricate relationship between the emergence and deepening of the recent crisis, scalar processes of ecological modernization, and the production of neoliberal natures.

Perception of the effects of climate change in winter and summer tourist areas: the Pyrenees and the Catalan and Balearic coasts, Spain

Abstract In this study, we compare the perception of climate change in two different tourist settings of northeastern Spain: the Catalan Pyrenees and the Catalan Mediterranean coast and the Balearic Islands. We carried out a survey of 906 cases (506 in the coastal areas of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands and 400 in the Catalan Pyrenees) asking residents on those areas to assess the possible effects of climate change on tourist-related activities. While the existence of climate change and of its estimated impacts is widely accepted, we observe statistically significant differences in most of the questions between residents in the coastal areas and residents in the Pyrenees. In general terms, respondents from the Pyrenees display a much higher concern regarding the economic impacts of climate change on tourism. On the other hand, the results also show that some demographic groups, such as women, members of large households, or unemployed, tend to present higher levels of concern. This study may give new hints on which tourist modalities and which groups are more concerned for the impacts of climate change in Mediterranean tourist environments and could translate into more targeted adaptive and mitigation practices.

Rising temperatures and dwindling water supplies? Perception of climate change among residents of the Spanish Mediterranean tourist coastal areas.

In this article, we discuss the results of a survey on the perception of climate change in the 14 “tourist zones” (as defined by the Spanish Statistical Institute, INE) that stretch from the French border to Gibraltar alongside the Spanish Mediterranean coast, including the Balearic Islands. Our sample consisted of 1,014 telephone interviews stratified according to the number of tourists staying in each zone. Respondents showed concern for the likely impacts of climate change on jobs and thought that climate change would reduce the economic activity of their areas. Responses were also pessimistic regarding future water availability but agreed with the development of alternative sources such as desalination and water re-use. Household size, educational levels, and employment tended to be the most significant statistical explanatory factors regarding attitudes toward climate change. Respondents in larger households (a variable not tested in the literature as far as we know), respondents with higher education, and respondents working for a wage tended to express more concerns than the rest.

When sustainable may not mean just: a critical interpretation of urban water consumption decline in Barcelona

ABSTRACT In this paper, we document and analyse the recent decline (2007–2013) in domestic water consumption in Barcelona. The postulates of ecological modernisation and market environmentalism celebrate these declines as an example of sustainable development, thanks to the combination of more efficient technologies and economic incentives. However, these interpretations ignore the new framework of social relations introduced by technologies and markets and take environmental improvements as homogeneous and universal regardless of distributional issues. Therefore, it would be perfectly possible to achieve optimal environmental situations in the context of deteriorating social conditions, particularly in terms of access to basic resources by the most disadvantaged. We explored the relationships between declining domestic water consumption and the uneven impact of the economic crisis on Barcelona’s urban geography. We found that the alleged increase in environmental sustainability that follows decline in resource use translates into highly uneven social impacts in terms of both accessibility and consumption. These results show that water flows have profound political dimensions and that water justice in terms of distributional costs and benefits but also in terms of recognition and participation of the less well-off should be a fundamental component of future urban water policies in this area.