From the hydrosocial to the hydrocitizen: Water, place and subjectivity within emergent urban wetlands

Abstract

This paper argues that the expansion of corporate social responsibility initiatives within the English water sector, and in particular the opening up of privately owned public spaces (POPS) in urban settings, have generated spatially fixed forms of human-environment relationships that we have termed ‘hydrocitizenships’. Utilising empirical fieldwork undertaken within an emergent wetland POPS, we suggest that these novel modes of citizen agency are primarily enacted through the performativity of volunteering, in multiple civic roles such as landscapers, citizen scientists, stewards and storytelling guides. Members of the local community thus effectively curate new civic subjectivities for themselves in response to the site and its organisation, by producing for themselves new modes of ‘hydrocitizenship’. These hybrid intertwined forms of practice prompt us to ask questions about the extent to which these apparently new forms of environmental citizenship are self-directed, or manipulated. As access, control over, and use of, water resources are a synecdoche of structural power relationships within contemporary neoliberal economies, we can go further to suggest that these blue-green POPS are emblematic of a new iteration of hydro-social relations in which water, place and subjectivity become the collateral through which new POPS are secured. For water companies seeking to deploy corporate social responsibility there is, then, a subtle two step move to be made, by building brand loyalty and then developing new forms of resource management in which local communities accept heightened levels of responsibility for sites to which they are offered recreational access. These emergent ‘hydrocitizenships’ thus encapsulate very specific geo-spatial subjectivities and performativities which lock in access to waterscapes with closely scripted conditionalities regarding activity and behaviour.

Human–wildlife interaction networks at urban blue spaces

“…In a broader context, such connections promote a greater affinity and curation of these areas within the wider landscape ( sensu hydrocitizenship: Gearey et al, 2019; Gearey et al, 2019) . These connections therefore represent an opportunity to use human–wildlife interactions and blue spaces to engage local users with the potential benefit of engaging with social and environmental challenges (Gearey et al, 2019; Schmitt et al, 2019). With the development of hydrocitizenship, there is a need to understand how urban blue spaces feature in people’s past, present, and future lives, since nature and wildlife feature significantly in positive memories (McEwan et al, 2020).…”

“…Our results show that these spaces can be important focal points for interactions, and where strategies exist to increase human-nature connectedness, blue spaces may be good locations to maximise their impact. In a broader context, such connections promote a greater affinity and curation of these areas within the wider landscape (sensu hydrocitizenship: Gearey et al, 2019;Gearey et al, 2019) . These connections therefore represent an opportunity to use human-wildlife interactions and blue spaces to engage local users with the potential benefit of engaging with social and environmental challenges (Gearey et al, 2019;Schmitt et al, 2019).…”

Stewardship practice and the performance of citizenship: Greening tree-pits in the streets of Berlin

“…Thus, work on community gardening as the assertion of the “right to the city” (Gilbert and Phillipps 2003; Purcell and Tyman 2015), “food citizenship” (Baker, 2004) or “DIY(do-it-yourself)-citizenship” (Crossan et al, 2016), has emphasized its potential to change established (neoliberal) ways of producing, using, and governing space. It has become a core question of empirical research which of these opposing modalities of citizenship certain stewardship interventions produce, or how they might overlap in politically ambiguous constellations (Certoma and Noteboom, 2017; Gearey et al, 2019; Ghose and Pettygrove, 2014; Hobsons and Hills, 2010).…”

“…Sometimes, these are simple one-off actions such as removing litter from parks (Krasny and Tidball, 2015), but stewardship also includes longer-term projects which creatively modify urban spaces. Examples are tree-planting campaigns (Fisher et al, 2015), wetland management (Gearey et al, 2019), or community-based gardening and agriculture (e.g., Certoma, 2019; Certoma and Noteboom 2017; Corcoran and Joëlle 2017; Krasny and Tidball, 2015; Milbourne 2012; Torres et al, 2017). Stewardship can also refer to small-scale, and often illicit, forms of decorative planting which are sometimes discussed as “guerrilla gardening” (Adams and Hardman, 2014; Blomley, 2005; Pellegrini and Baudry, 2015; Reynolds, 2008).…”

Broaching the brook: Daylighting, community and the ‘stickiness’ of water

“…In this sense, the urban water system is 'blackboxed' (Furlong, 2010: 465), technologically concealed from the people who use it daily, undermining both their awareness and understanding of its dynamics (Chappells et al, 2011;Morales et al, 2014). Infrastructure is physical but it is also profoundly social, lived with intimately and unavoidably (Graham and McFarlane, 2015), mediating the experience and meaning of citizenship in an everyday, mundane register (Anand, 2017;Gearey et al, 2019).…”