Topic/
Question: In 3000 words, answer the question:
Flooding
in Accra, Ghana: examining the impacts of flooding on residents through the
dimensions of class and environmental racism, and how capitalism as a
structural force (political ecology), drives flooding. How can the theories of informality
and infrastructure be informed, as coping mechanisms? See document for all instructions.
Progress report
Geographies of race and
ethnicity II: Environmental
racism, racial capitalism and
state-sanctioned violence
Laura Pulido
University of Southern California, USA
Abstract
In this report I argue that environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism. While the environmental
justice movement has been a success on many levels, there is compelling evidence that it has not succeeded in
actually improving the environments of vulnerable communities. One reason for this is because we are not
conceptualizing the problem correctly. I build my argument by first emphasizing the centrality of the pro-
duction of social difference in creating value. Second, I review how the devaluation of nonwhite bodies has
been incorporated into economic processes and advocate for extending such frameworks to include pol-
lution. And lastly, I turn to the state. If, in fact, environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism, then
this suggests that activists and researchers should view the state as a site of contestation, rather than as an ally
or neutral force.
Keywords
environmental racism, racial capitalism, state violence
I Introduction
We need to rethink environmental racism. The
environmental justice (EJ) movement arose in
the early 1980s and over the last 35 years acti-
vists have succeeded at blocking both new proj-
ects and the expansion of existing ones.
However, it is questionable if the environments
of vulnerable communities have actually
improved through EJ. There is compelling evi-
dence that environmental disparities between
white and nonwhite communities, what I call
the environmental racism gap, have not dimin-
ished and that the situation may have worsened
(Bullard et al., 2007). EJ scholars have hinted
at why the movement has failed to achieve
substantive results, including industry capture
of the state (Faber, 2008; Lievanos, 2012; Holi-
field, 2007); state co-optation of EJ activists
(Harrison, 2015); and a less oppositional EJ
movement (Carter, 2014; Benford, 2005). Yet,
I argue a fundamental problem characterizing
both EJ activism and research is the failure to
theorize environmental racism as a constituent
element of racial capitalism. Numerous prob-
lems stem from not conceptualizing the problem
accurately, including not giving sufficient
weight to the ballast of past racial violence, and
Corresponding author:
Laura Pulido, University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, CA, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Progress in Human Geography
2017, Vol. 41(4) 524–533
ª The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permission:
<
1
Urban political ecology
Politicizing the production of urban natures
Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw
It is in practice, hard to see where “society†begins and
“nature†ends… [I]n a fundamental sense, there is in the
final analysis nothing unnatural about New York City.
(Harvey 1993:31, 28)
Urbanization as a process has constituted the city and
the countryside, society and nature, a “unity of oppositesâ€
constructed from the integrated, lived world of human
social experience. At the same time, the “urbanization of
consciousness†constitutes Nature as well as Space.
(FitzSimmons 1989:108)
The “city†as a form of life is a specific, historically
developed model of the regulation of the societal
relationship with nature…. [U]rban struggles are
predominantly socio-ecological struggles, since they are
always about the social and material regulation and socio-
cultural symbolization of societal relationships with nature.
(Jahn 1991:54—translation Keil 1995)
INTRODUCTION
In the summer of 1998, the Southeast Asian financial bubble imploded. Global capital
moved spasmodically from place to place, leaving cities like Jakarta with a social and
physical wasteland where dozens of unfinished skyscrapers were dotted over the
landscape while thousands of unemployed children, women, and men were roaming the
streets in search of survival. In the meantime, El Niño’s global dynamic was wrecking
havoc in the region with its climatic disturbances. Puddles of stagnant water in the
defunct concrete buildings that had once promised continuing capital accumulation for
Indonesia became great ecological niches for a rapid explosion of mosquitoes. Malaria
and Dengue Fever suddenly joined unemployment and social and political mayhem in
shaping Jakarta’s cityscape. Global capital fused with global climate, with local power
struggles, and with socio-ecological conditions to re-shape Jakarta’s urban socio-
ecological conditions in profound, radical, and deeply troubling ways.
This example is just one among many to suggest how cities are dense networks of
interwoven socio-spatial processes that are simultaneously local and global, human and
physical, cultural and organic. The myriad transformations and metabolisms that support
and maintain urban life, such as, for example, water, food, computers or hamburgers
always combine infinitely connected physical and social processes (Latour 1993; Latour
and Hermant 1998; Swyngedouw 1999).
The world is rapidly approaching a situation in which most people live in cities, often
mega-cities. It is surprising, therefore, that in the burgeoning literature on environmental
sustainability and environmental politics, the urban environment is often neglected or
forgotten as attention is focused on “global†problems like climate c
Title: Capitalism as a facilitator of flooding; the theories of infrastructure and informality as coping strategies.
Topic/ Question: In 3000 words, answer the question:
Flooding in Accra, Ghana: examining the impacts of flooding on residents through the dimensions of class and environmental racism, and how capitalism as a structural force (political ecology), drives flooding. How can the theories of informality and infrastructure be informed, as coping mechanisms?
Requirements
Your paper must meet the following requirements:
• Be approx. 3,000 words in length excluding references (this is about 12 pages double spaced)
• Have a title
• State a clear thesis/argument.
• Theories must well analyzed in context to the topic and class material.
• Include examples. Repetition should be avoided.
•
Include a minimum of 3 readings from the course syllabus.
• Include a minimum of 6 peer-reviewed sources (i.e. a journal article, book, book chapter)
• Include a properly formatted list of references/bibliography.
Formatting requirements: include the essay title, use APA citation style, include
page numbers on the bottom right of the page, use 12-point font in Times New Roman, and double-spacing.
Class readings:
• Zeiderman, A. (2012). On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá. Environment and Planning A, 44(7), 1570-1588
• Pulido, L. (2017). Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence. Progress in human geography, 41(4), 524-533.
As you read this piece, pay attention to how Pulido defines and/or uses environmental racism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and the “environmental racism gap”.
• Gandy, M. (2017) “Mosquitos, Modernity, and Postcolonial Lagos”. In: The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination. MIT Press. (pp. 81 – 108)
• Heynen, N., Kaika, M., & Swyngedouw, E. (2006). “Urban Political Ecology” One In the nature of cities: Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism. London, New York. (pp. 1-
Environment and Planning A 2012, volume 44, pages 1570 – 1588
doi:10.1068/a44283
On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá
Austin Zeiderman §
Anthropology, Stanford University, Main Quad, Building 50, Stanford, CA 94035, USA;
e-mail: [email protected]
Received 28 May 2011; in revised form 18 October 2011
Abstract. How does risk become a technique for governing the future of cities and urban
life? Using genealogical and ethnographic methods, this paper tracks the emergence of
risk management in Bogotá, Colombia, from its initial institutionalization to its ongoing
implementation in governmental practice. Its specii c focus is the invention of the ‘zone
of high risk’ in Bogotá and the everyday work performed by the oi cials responsible for
determining the likelihood of landslide in these areas. It addresses the ongoing formation
of techniques of urban planning and governance and the active relationship between urban
populations and environments and emerging forms of political authority and technical
expertise. Ultimately, it reveals that techniques of risk management are made and remade
as experts and nonexperts grapple with the imperative to bring heterogeneous assemblages
of people and things into an unfolding technopolitical domain.
Keywords: risk, security, cities, urban governance, environment, hazards, Bogotá, Colombia
Introduction
In this paper I examine the emergence of risk as a technique of urban planning and governance
in Bogotá, Colombia. This local story offers insight into a general pattern in which the
informal settlements that predominate in cities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, along
with the populations inhabiting them, are brought into novel governmental frameworks.
It also refl ects a broader phenomenon, whereby techniques of risk management and other
mechanisms of ‘securitization’ are emerging across a range of apparently disparate domains
in both the global North and South as essential elements of ‘good governance’. According
to Hodson and Marvin (2010, page 31), the rise of “urban ecological security†represents
“a paradigm challenge to our conventional understanding of contemporary urbanismâ€.
To understand these widespread transformations, this paper bridges the gap between the
fi eld of urban studies and the literature on the political technologies of risk and security.
The city of Bogotá provides an especially good vantage point from which to examine how
risk becomes a technique for governing the future of cities and urban life.
Between 1950 and 2000 the population of Bogotá exploded from just over 700 000 to
about 7 million (DANE, 1957; 2005). Much of this populat
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH
DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12757
227
© 2019 Urban research PUblications limited
— EVICTING SLUMS, ‘BUILDING BACK BETTER’:
Resiliency Revanchism and Disaster Risk Management in
Manila
Maria Khristine alvarez and Kenneth Cardenas
Abstract
This article examines how the politics of managing global catastrophic risks
plays out in a stereotypically ‘vulnerable’ megacity in the global South. It analyses
the disproportionate impact of the 2009 Ondoy floods on Manila’s underclasses as a
consequence of the failures and partial successes of twentieth-century developmentalism,
in the course of which the Philippine state facilitated a highly uneven distribution of
disaster risk. It argues that the selective interpretation and omission of facts underpinned
a disaster risk management (DRM) strategy premised on the eviction of slum dwellers.
Through the lens of aesthetic governmentality we analyse how elite and expert knowledge
produced a narrative of the slum as the source of urban flood risk via the territorial
stigmatization of slums as blockages. We also show how the redescription of flood risk based
on aesthetics produced uneven landscapes of risk, materializing in the ‘danger’/‘high-risk’-
zone binary. This article characterizes the politics of the Metro Manila DRM strategy by
introducing the concept of resiliency revanchism: a ‘politics of revenge’ predicated on the
currency of DRM and ‘resiliency’, animated by historically entrenched prejudicial attitudes
toward urban underclasses, and enabled by the selective interpretation, circulation and
use of expertise.
Introduction
As objects of policy, money and theory, Southern cities often appear through
vocabularies of deficiencies and crises. The exercise of state power, the assumption of
debt and the creation of categories proceed with the invocation of some technically
articulated need––overcrowding, underprovision, poverty. Vulnerability to climate
change has recently emerged as one of these deficiencies: as more poor people move to
and live in underprovisioned coastal and riverine cities, and as sea levels rise and
extreme weather becomes more frequent, we are likely to see more climate-related
disasters. The rapid rise of this narrative had been helped along by recent catastrophic
floods in Southern cities, which have had the effect of rendering visible these presaged
futures in the present. Consequently, it is now in fashion to rank cities based on climate
risk indices, both now and into the projected future; to attribute proximate causes of
urban growth such as conflict, forced migration, or de-agrarianization to the ultimate
cause of climate change; or to pledge billions of dollars toward building ‘resilient’ cities.
As these ideas gain wider currency in the public imagination, in policy agendas
and in infrastr
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