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"Alex Loftus"
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Everyday Environmentalism
Everyday Environmentalism develops a conversation between marxist theories of everyday life and recent work in urban political ecology, arguing for a philosophy of praxis in relation to the politics of urban environments. Alex Loftus reformulates—with the assistance of Lukács, Gramsci, Lefebvre, and others—a politics of the environment in which everyday subjectivity is at the heart of a revolutionary politics.
eBook
Water politics : governance, justice, and the right to water
\"Scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways in recent years. This book broadens existing discussions on the right to water in order to shed critical light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and water justice. The book shows how both discourses and struggles around the right to water have opened new perspectives and possibilities in water governance, fostering new collective and moral claims for water justice, while effecting changes in laws and policies around the world. In light of the 2010 UN ratification on the human right to water and sanitation, shifts have taken place in policy, legal frameworks, local implementation, as well as in national dialogues. Chapters in the book illustrate the novel ways in which the right to water has been taken up in locations drawn globally, highlighting the material politics that are enabled and negotiated through this framework in order to address ongoing water insecurities. This book reflects the urgent need to take stock of debates in light of new concerns around post-neoliberal political developments, the challenges of the Anthropocene and climate change, the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as the mobilizations around the right to water in the global North. This textbook is essential reading for students of water governance, environmental policy, politics, geography, and law. It will be of great interest to policymakers and practitioners working in water governance and the human right to water and sanitation\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Water infrastructure and the making of financial subjects in the south east of England
Over the last four decades the locus of economic power has shifted from industry to finance. As part of this trend, the 'financialisation' of the water sector has added a new layer of complexity to the hydrosocial cycle, witnessed in the emergence of new financial actors, logics and financing instruments. Such a shift has profoundly reshaped the relationship between water utilities and consumers in the South East of England, where the household has become, in the words of Allen and Pryke (2013), a human revenue stream for financialised utilities. In this paper, we make an argument that the water meter is one of the crucial mediators through which finance will touch the lives of individual subjects. In the South East of England, after initial opposition to universal metering - in part shaped by fears over fluctuating revenues - water companies are now embedding a metering programme within a billing and tariff structure that aims to ensure governable and predictable subjects. Drawing on Urban Political Ecology, we argue that the financialisation of the water sector in England shapes the emergence of new financial subjectivities while enabling new forms of political rule that operate at a range of spatial scales.
Journal Article
Water (in)security: securing the right to water
This paper rereads debates over water security and insecurity through the tools of critical geographical scholarship. It seeks to demonstrate the value of such a critical perspective in achieving access to water for all. While rejecting a simplistic dismissal of mainstream discourses on water security, the paper notes the failure to adequately politicise the processes and relationships that reproduce water inequalities. Finding lessons in recent writings on political ecology, the hydro-social cycle and on the right to water, the paper concludes with a Gramscian claim to build from the fragmented but situated knowledges implicit in struggles to achieve democratic access to water.
Journal Article
Rethinking Political Ecologies of Water
The failure to provide a safe supply of clean drinking water to over one billion people in the world remains one of the most telling indictments of development policy and practice. A series of studies within political ecology has taken this dramatic failure as an entry point into broader questions around the operation of power in the contemporary world. From basic questions around who is to blame for this catastrophic failure, to broader questions around the consolidation of forms of rule, this work provides a crucial lens on broader social and environmental questions. This paper provides an overview of recent work on the political ecology of water as well as mobilising a series of case studies from the author's own research in Durban, South Africa.
Journal Article
Reworking hegemony in the urban waterscape
In this paper, we argue that ideology is fought over through lived environments. In making this argument, we build on Antonio Gramsci's writings on hegemony. In particular, we extend the analysis of the terrain over which hegemony operates from civil society to urban environments. Here, we argue that the socio-natural relations established through everyday activities are crucial to the consolidation (and contestation) of particular worldviews. Overall, we seek to put Gramsci to work in understanding the politics and the possibilities in the informal settlement of Inanda and more generally within post-apartheid South Africa.
Journal Article
Integrating what and for whom? Financialisation and the Thames Tideway Tunnel
The Thames Tideway Tunnel (TTT), often referred to as the Thames super sewer, is currently one of the largest infrastructure projects underway in any European city. Costing an estimated £4.2 billion, the sewer connects London’s Victorian sewerage network with the Thames Wastewater Treatment Works at Beckton. The latter facility has been described as the UK’s Water–Energy–Food nexus poster child, for its combination of desalination facilities, green energy generation and wastewater treatment. While physically connected to the Beckton plant, the TTT is, paradoxically, designed with an apparent disregard for the water–energy nexus. If the Beckton plant represents a nexus-based vision of integration – what Macrorie and Marvin (2016) refer to as Mode 2 Urban Integration – the TTT harks back to a view of urban integration carried from the Victorian era through to the present moment. What unites the two projects, and what undergirds the transformation of the hydrosocial cycle, is a financial model more focused on the extraction of rents from Thames Water’s consumers. Thames Water’s dismissal of genuinely integrated alternatives appears guided more by the financialisation of the urban integrated ideal than by what is needed to respond to London’s broader environmental needs. Contesting the project, therefore, will involve slicing through the various claims to integration, going beyond the many proposals for evidence-based alternatives, and capturing the transformations being wrought by finance’s entry into infrastructure provision.
通常被称为泰晤士河超级下水道的泰晤士泰德韦隧道 (TTT) 是目前欧洲最大的城市基础设施项目之一。该下水系统成本预计为 42 亿英镑，连接了伦敦的维多利亚式污水处理网络和贝克顿的泰晤士污水处理厂。后者的设施将海水淡化设施、绿色能源发电和废水处理相结合，被称为英国“水-能源-食品”之间联系的代表。TTT 在物理上连接到贝克顿工厂的同时，在设计中又悖论式地未考虑这种“水-能源”联系。如果说贝克顿工厂代表了以联系为基础的一体化愿景——Macrorie 和 Marvin (2016) 称之为“城市一体化模式二”——，那么 TTT 代表了从维多利亚时代至今的那种城市一体化模式。将两个项目联接起来、支撑水-社会循环转型的，是一个更关注从泰晤士水务公司消费者中抽租的金融模式。泰晤士水务公司放弃了真正的一体化方案，看来所受的引导更多是城市一体化理想的金融化，而不是应对伦敦更大范围的环境需求。因此，质疑这一项目，将涉及梳理各种一体化主张，超越众多主张而找到基于证据的替代性方案，并且捕捉到金融进入基础设施供给所带来的变革。
Journal Article
Africa's passive revolution: crisis in Malawi
Recent protest movements in sub-Saharan Africa have generally failed to effect progressive transformations. Efforts to achieve social change have been frustrated by governing elites that continue to utilise their vacillating and unequal relationships with the external environment to sustain power. Although the leading figures may change, the dominant African class can re-establish leadership through new alliances with domestic and international networks of capital. To understand such 'change-without-change', this paper contributes to the growing body of literature on Antonio Gramsci's development of 'passive revolution'. The comparative character of Gramscian analysis enables his philosophy of praxis to be translated into very different historical and geographical settings. With this in mind we draw together recent engagements with passive revolution from Geography, Politics and African Studies. In particular we develop Jean-François Bayart's notion of extraversion, while considering it in relation to more recent philological engagements with Gramsci. Our empirical focus is the politics of transition in Malawi. In his second term in office, the autocratic and unpopular president, Bingu wa Mutharika, implemented economic policies that ran against neoliberal orthodoxy and suppressed protest during a period of crisis. Mutharika was replaced, following his death in 2012, by Joyce Banda, a previously marginalised vice-president, who nurtured a re-engagement with transnational capital. Working through the state, Banda led a transformation from on high and moved to impose new economically liberal policies, including a major currency devaluation, which reduced living standards for many. We draw our empirical material from Chancellor College, a major site of protest against Mutharika in 2011. Evidence from interviews with staff and students demonstrates how two episodes of revolution/restoration in Malawi, a country distant from the western historical experience, can be interpreted through Gramsci's socially differentiated understanding of politics.
Journal Article
