Fixing a Swamp of Cobras: The Clash between Capital and Water in Shaping Urban Vulnerabilities

Abstract

This paper addresses how capital can refashion landscapes and patterns of risk and vulnerability. Drawing on the emblematic case of the conversion of Thailand's Cobra Swamp into Suvarnabhumi International Airport we argue that there is a fundamental clash between the internal logic of capital accumulation and the ecology of water that occurs in places in which land is under water for much of the year. Counterintuitively investment in public infrastructure such as airports targets locations that are exposed to flood risks. While the literature on capital fixes tends to treat "land" writ large, this paper adds a dimension that has been overlooked in the theoretical work, by highlighting the significance of the ecology of the land in which such fixes occur as a means of understanding patterns of investment, land use change and vulnerability. Our analysis draws on three separate but related concepts of capital "fixes"-spatial, technological and high/low road fixes. We argue the importance of recognising the specific ecological characteristics of land that capital "fixes". This perspective has global significance in providing critical insight into the ways in which capital creates and accommodates the kinds of vulnerabilities and risks associated with climate change.

Internal Colonialism as Socio‐Ecological Fix: The Case of New Clark City in the Philippines

“…Second, and connected with the above, we contribute to the growing body of socio‐ecological fix scholarship (Collard and Dempsey 2022; Dempsey 2015; Ekers 2015; Ekers and Prudham 2015, 2017, 2018; Friend and Hutanuwatr 2021; Guthman 2015; Johnson 2015; McCarthy 2015; Nugent 2015; Zalik 2015) by extending the concept's explanatory power to a Global South context, which has not received a lot of attention in the socio‐ecological fix literature. Here, we must reiterate Bok's (2019) argument, emphasising the necessity for merging “fix thinking” with plural theoretical approaches to mobilise the concept's explanatory power in diverse empirical locales for a more nuanced understanding of capitalist accumulation across the Global North and South.…”

“…Through such internal colonialist agendas, the local peasanty and Indigenous Aeta tribe have been further marginalised, whilst the project itself has, so far, contributed little to social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Rather, the development of New Clark City has resulted in the acceleration of historical dispossessions and displacements of peripheral cultures who are forced to migrate from their territory and land (Friend and Hutanuwatr 2021) to facilitate property transfer from the poor to the rich. As we have shown, this restructuring and reordering of space and nature irreversibly destroys the socio‐ecologies embodied in the lives of the peasantry and Indigenous communities located in the affected areas, transforming them into beggars, criminals, sex workers, and servants of foreigners hosted by the tourism industry.…”

“…Their starting point is the idea that the spatial fix is a metabolic process that cannot be comprehended only in economic terms (Ekers and Prudham 2017, 2018). The “socio‐ecological fix” concept is concerned with the way capitalist crises, which include political, economic, cultural, and environmental dimensions, are staved off by way of reordering capital along socio‐ecological processes and landscapes (Friend and Hutanuwatr 2021). Understanding Harvey's notion of spatial fix as an inherently metabolic process in which the production of space and nature happens simultaneously, the concept aims to capture the ways in which social relations as well as material and symbolic conditions of capitalist accumulation are reproduced through fixed capital investments in landscapes that are conjoined productions of space and nature (Ekers and Prudham 2017).…”

“…In our interviews, we were told that local farmers feel that they are driven off their land, that they are being dispossessed. This is hence a struggle over territory (Casaglia 2018), and the land becomes an important cornerstone of the social struggle (Friend and Hutanuwatr 2021). A crucial factor for the government to be able to portray New Clark City as a sustainable or “green” city is the claim that the land was depleted or indeed a kind of wasteland before the city development began.…”

“Money is Not the Problem”: The Slow Financialisation of Kenya’s Water Sector

“…The financialisation of nature, as noted more generally above, describes a diverse set of phenomena through which the varied material elements and processes of "nature" become enrolled in the circuits of capital accumulation through financial mechanisms, such as debt, value extraction and speculation (Ahlers and Merme 2016;Schmidt and Matthews 2018). Such processes are always messy and contradictory, often emerging in a piecemeal and (as noted above) uneven manner (Friend and Hutanuwatr 2021). At the heart of it, however, as put by Ouma et al (2018:501), is "a process of ontological reconfiguration"; a re-constitution or re-imagining of complex nature and social relations, "through which different qualities of nature and resource-based production are translated into a financial value form".…”