Jeffrey M. Banister

The Dilemma of Water Management 'Regionalization' in Mexico under Centralized Resource Allocation

Mexicos evolving water management framework is predicated on: (1) integration of water resources planning and management; (2) decentralization from federal to ‘regional’ (river basin) levels; and (3) privatization of service provision. This paper focuses on Mexicos recurring federal-regional tensions, highlighting the historical case of the Yaqui River, and analyzing the current decentralization impasse. Although important advances have been made with irrigation management transfer, river basin councils, nascent user participation in groundwater management, and water and energy legislation, integrated water resources management (IWRM) remains an elusive goal, principally due to inherent institutional and procedural contradictions in water resource allocation. The next steps in the Mexican model—to open decision making to public scrutiny and devolve allocation of water and financial resources—will prove the most difficult, more because of entrenched interests than for lack of an ‘IWRM roadmap’.

Illicit Economies and State(less) Geographies: The Politics of Illegality

This special issue of Territory, Politics, Governance brings together emerging scholarship that explores relationships between clandestine economies and the political geographies of law enforcement. Such relationships demand greater critical attention by scholars. To give just one example, the 2011 United Nations’ World Drug Report estimated that the global illegal drug market is worth between US

The Shifting Geopolitics of Water in the Anthropocene

300 and US

Building Cities, Constructing Citizens: Sustainable Rural Cities in Chiapas, Mexico

500 billion every year. Given this volume and scope, the drug trade and the prohibitions that structure it have come to dramatically influence the behaviour of states and national economies. Yet, figures like those of the United Nations are little more than conjecture, for there are no reliable sources or metrics by which to gauge the scale of illicit economies. The figures are thus consistently disputed, and the study of illicit phenomena continues to present profound challenges. By their very nature, the drug trade and other illicit activities evade monitoring and documentation; they operate beyond the reach of the typical information-gathering methods of researchers working within and outside of government. The drug trade and related black markets therefore present tremendous methodological and epistemological problems. We know they exist and to a certain extent we can study their effects, but we can rarely grasp them directly; often, we face considerable challenges in our attempts to do so (cf. TUNNEL, 1998; NORDSTROM, 2004). Illicit economies of course are not limited to drugs. From petroleum to ‘pirated’music to basic services like electricity, sanitation, and water, people across the planet depend upon and are tied into shadow markets of all kinds. The formal distinction between states and ‘illegal’ or ‘illicit’ activity therefore must also be troubled. This is so not only because ‘illegality’ is itself largely a state construct, but because, as HEYMAN and SMART (1999) argue, state actors actively participate in nearly every aspect of illegal markets, blurring the lines that would otherwise separate law and authority on the one hand, and criminal or illegitimate practices on the other. This participation may be authorized but secret, as in the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm’s secret trafficking of weapons into Mexico as part of an alleged intelligence-gathering operation (CONROY, 2012); it may involve complicity through lax or permissive oversight, as in the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2012 decision not to criminally prosecute administrators and executives of banks like HSBC for laundering billions of dollars in illegal drug profits (GREENWALD, 2012). Or, it may involve taking kickbacks and

Seeing Water in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico City: Henry Wellge's "Perspective Plan of the City and Valley of Mexico, D.F." 1906

ABSTRACT This forum responds to recent calls to hypothesize a geopolitics of the Anthropocene by examining how our notions of geopolitics of water may shift in the context of this new and, at times, divisive framework. The Anthropocene describes the geological epoch in which humans are the dominant actor in the global environmental system and has been a concept that is not without controversy. Taking the Anthropocene as an epistemological divergence where nature can no longer be viewed as separate from humanity, this forum asks how moving away from understanding hydraulic systems as essentially stable to understanding them as unstable and profoundly influenced by humans changes our understanding ofthe geopolitics of water. Collectively the contributions to this forum illustrate that formulating a water geopolitics of the Anthropocene requires 1) moving beyond a focus on fluvial flows to consider other forms of water; 2) broadening our understanding of the actors involved in water geopolitics; 3) examining new geopolitical tactics, particularly those grounded in law; 4) engaging critically with new and emerging forms of visualization and representation in the geopolitics of water, and; 5) examining how the notion of the Anthropocene has been used towards geopolitical ends and worked to elide different positionalities.

El panorama acuático de la ciudad de México de principios del siglo XX: El Plano en prespectiva de la ciudad y el valle de México, 1906, de Henry Wellge

This paper examines changes in socio-spatial practices that have resulted from the relocation of peasant and indigenous communities into Sustainable Rural Cities (SRCs) in Chiapas, Mexico. The SRC initiative aims to reduce poverty and inequality through the construction of housing in a “semi-urban environment” that offers services ranging from basic to complex. We analyze this initiative as an attempt to politically and materially reconstitute rural life in Chiapas in order to create governable spaces and submissive citizens. From this perspective, the government’s objectives can be seen as a move to dictate social and political practices through the construction of space and control over the means of production, resulting in an increasing dependency that reduces possibilities for self-organization. However, this process is also being contested, resulting in new patterns of semi-urban living that diverge significantly from the official vision.

El panorama acuático de la ciudad de México de principios del siglo XX: El Plano en prespectiva de la ciudad y el valle de México: Henry Wellge’s Perspective Plan of the City and Valley of Mexico, D.F. 1906

Este estudio se enfoca en la cromolitografia de Henry Wellge de 1906, Perspective Plan of the City and Valley of Mexico, D.F., una vista panoramica que estructura la capital y sus alrededores lacustres mediante primeros planos y perspectivas distantes. La obra representa un paisaje conformado por canales, rios y lagos, y documenta el momento crucial previo a la estructuracion de la infraestructura hidraulica moderna que eliminaria del panorama la superficie acuosa. Por tanto, examinamos esta imagen como documento visual de las ideas de control hidraulico en boga alrededor de 1900, cuando en Mexico habia una politica centralizadora de recursos, que reorganizaba los espacios rural y urbano mediante la construccion de modernas plantas depuradoras de agua. El plano de Wellge nos obliga a analizar el agua como una relacion entre lo material y el paisaje representado, es decir, como una combinacion entre la politica y las practicas sociales, espaciales y visuales mediante las cuales este paisaje y geografia se han articulado y representado de manera inteligible.

A Review of “Contentious Geographies: Environmental Knowledge, Meaning, and Scale”

Este estudio se enfoca en la cromolitografia de Henry Wellge de 1906, Perspective Plan of the City and Valley of Mexico, D.F., una vista panoramica que estructura la capital y sus alrededores lacustres mediante primeros planos y perspectivas distantes. La obra representa un paisaje conformado por canales, rios y lagos, y documenta el momento crucial previo a la estructuracion de la infraestructura hidraulica moderna que eliminaria del panorama la superficie acuosa. Por tanto, examinamos esta imagen como documento visual de las ideas de control hidraulico en boga alrededor de 1900, cuando en Mexico habia una politica centralizadora de recursos, que reorganizaba los espacios rural y urbano mediante la construccion de modernas plantas depuradoras de agua. El plano de Wellge nos obliga a analizar el agua como una relacion entre lo material y el paisaje representado, es decir, como una combinacion entre la politica y las practicas sociales, espaciales y visuales mediante las cuales este paisaje y geografia se han articulado y representado de manera inteligible.

Are you Wittfogel or against him? Geophilosophy, hydro-sociality, and the state

Este estudio se enfoca en la cromolitografia de Henry Wellge de 1906, Perspective Plan of the City and Valley of Mexico, D.F., una vista panoramica que estructura la capital y sus alrededores lacustres mediante primeros planos y perspectivas distantes. La obra representa un paisaje conformado por canales, rios y lagos, y documenta el momento crucial previo a la estructuracion de la infraestructura hidraulica moderna que eliminaria del panorama la superficie acuosa. Por tanto, examinamos esta imagen como documento visual de las ideas de control hidraulico en boga alrededor de 1900, cuando en Mexico habia una politica centralizadora de recursos, que reorganizaba los espacios rural y urbano mediante la construccion de modernas plantas depuradoras de agua. El plano de Wellge nos obliga a analizar el agua como una relacion entre lo material y el paisaje representado, es decir, como una combinacion entre la politica y las practicas sociales, espaciales y visuales mediante las cuales este paisaje y geografia se han articulado y representado de manera inteligible.

Stating space in modern Mexico

mind-boggling map-cum-diagram the wave fronts for signals emanating from five local or regional broadcasting stations. Light also figures conspicuously in this postage stamp of a territory with four pairs of illuminating pages documenting “Night Sky,” “Pools of Light,” “Rhythm of the Sun,” and “The Light at Night on Cutler Street.” I must applaud with special glee the appearance of a pair of offerings informing us about the world of sound, a topic studiously ignored by virtually all geographers: “A Sound Walk” and “Wind Chimes.” Aside from giving us a glorious assemblage of fascinating glimpses into a deeply cherished place, what has been achieved? At a quite elementary level—and even though it is a genre Wood disdains—we do have here at least some sort of reference work. But what about the higher goal? Is “Everything Sings” a meaningful, logicladen step forward toward a fully armed narrative atlas, one with a real argument and a worthy destination? Has he closed the deal on neighborhoods as process or transformers? The only honest verdict must be this: not proven. Perhaps it is only in the realm of superior fiction that we approach the true essence of places and their dynamics with such famous achievements as William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and James Joyce’s Dublin. In the realm of nonfiction, where visual images do not suffice and we must also hear human voices, in some exceptional instances of participant observation, such as James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, where we penetrate into the lives of Alabama sharecroppers, or Henry Glassie’s Ballymenone, we do get at the soul of a community. Denis Wood is about halfway there. Thanks for the cartographic effort and please keep on trying.