911爆料网

Description

Content:

Urbanisation in the global South unfolds with significant disparities in access to essential services and resources, widening the gaps in living conditions between privileged and marginalised groups. Not only unmet demands grow in most cities and regions, but the state鈥檚 capacity to ensure some sort of universal provision of essential services (water, energy, transport, etc.) is being undermined. Moreover, a contemporary drive towards making cities globally competitive tends to favour certain flows and spaces, furthering urban fragmentation and deepening inequalities. Simultaneously, intensified competition for natural resources due to expanding urban and economic demands leads to sometimes violent forms of resource appropriation and environmental injustices that extend well beyond the city-region, with large infrastructures mediating this complex relationship between cities, rural and indigenous communities, and nature.

听

This module studies the above processes by examining conditions of access to essential services and resources and how these are governed. Its theoretical foundation allows participants to critically analyse the underlying causes of urban fragmentation and urban and regional unsustainability, which tend to disproportionately affect those marginalised in decision-making processes. Interdisciplinary in nature, the module uses the lens of political ecology to examine the urban condition as well as urban-rural interactions, providing elements to assess sustainable approaches to the use of natural resources, including in the context of low-carbon transitions. As such, the module seeks to help appreciate and devise socially just and democratic transitions to sustainability, paying particular attention to progressive responses emerging from a range of actors and through the deepening of citizenship.

听

Teaching delivery:

This module is taught in 9 weekly lectures.

听

Indicative Topics:

Infrastructure and services in an unsustainable, unjust world

Governmentality, splintered and splintering urbanisms

Urban metabolism: infrastructure and circulation

Cities and 鈥榚lsewheres鈥�: the political ecology of large infrastructures

Technology justice and eco-technologies in the global South

Energy democracy and low-carbon transitions

Neoliberalism, 鈥榟ydrocracies鈥� and water sector reforms

Public versus private debate in service delivery and beyond

Social power: from resistance to alternatives

听

The above are indicative lecture topics 鈥攂ased on module content in 2023/24, subject to possible changes.

听

Module Aims:

This module aims to provide participants with the following:

听

• A comprehensive understanding of the underlying causes (and consequences) of unequal conditions of access to essential resources and services, with a focus in urban and periurban areas.
• An appreciation of the ways in which the development of infrastructure and infrastructure networks is embedded in wider struggles for social, economic, and political power.
• The ability to examine tensions in the simultaneous pursuit of the various dimensions of sustainability at multiple scales.
• A critical understanding of the assumptions behind and effects of mainstream governance discourses, policies, and practices.
• An appreciation of the role of communities and social movements in everyday practices of resistance and autonomy and in the formation of alternative and more democratic governance models.

听

Recommended readings:

Graham, S. and C. McFarlane (eds.), 2015, Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context, Earthscan, London, Introduction, pp. 1-14.

听

Heller, L. et al., 2023, 鈥淲hat water will the UN Conference carry forward: a fundamental human right or a commodity?鈥�, The Lancet, Vol. 402, Issue 10404.

听

Kumar, A. Pols, A. and J. Ho虉ffken, 2021, Dilemmas of Energy Transitions in the Global South: Balancing Urgency and Justice, Chapter 1: Urgency vs justice: A politics of energy transitions in the age of the Anthropocene, Routledge, pp. 1-17.

听