States of maintenance: Power, politics, and Egypt’s irrigation infrastructure

Barnes, Jessica

doi:10.1177/0263775816655161

Cited by 125 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Like remediation and restoration, repair and maintenance are not always inherently good (Barnes, 2016;Jackson, 2014). As Ureta (2014) points out (echoing critiques of restoration ecology), repair can also be seen as a normalization process that may be implicated in the maintenance of relations of power and order.…”

Section: Remediation As Repair Maintenance and Matters Of Carementioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking remediation: mine reclamation, environmental justice, and relations of care

Beckett

Keeling

2018

Local Environment

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To date, research on mine remediation in North America has focused primarily on technical management; relatively less is known about the historical, political and social dimensions of remediation. Remediation, as a continuation of the mining process, alters local landscapes and economies and can be both dangerous and beneficial for surrounding communities. Because remediation projects tend to focus on the technical aspects of clean-up, such projects risk overlooking the environmental injustices associated with past development and obscuring blame or responsibility from industry and government for environmental degradation. Insofar as it is understood as cleaning up or repairing environmental damage, remediation is generally seen as 'doing the good' and is less amenable to political or ethical challenges based on community concerns or values. This paper argues that greater attention needs to be paid to public participation and justice concerns associated with cleaning up mine sites. Drawing from the literatures on ecological restoration, environmental justice, reconciliation, discard studies, and perpetual care, we highlight critical, yet overlooked issues in the remediation of post-mining landscapes. We argue that remediation projects present a unique opportunity for the negotiation and articulation of morals, values, histories, and physical experiences associated with mine sites and we seek to re-frame remediation as an ongoing, creative process of community healing.

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Section: Remediation As Repair Maintenance and Matters Of Carementioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking remediation: mine reclamation, environmental justice, and relations of care

Beckett

Keeling

2018

Local Environment

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“…Finally, this project engages with the broad work in the politics of infrastructure (see e.g. Graham and Marvin, ; Holston, ; Truelove, ; Carse, ; Furlong, ; Silver, ; Barnes, ; Anand, ) through a consideration of how the urban socio‐natural landscape is held together through processes of maintenance and repair that cut across binaries of water and land (Thrift, ; Graham and Thrift, ; Mathur and da Cunha, ; Mandelman, ; Barnes, ). In doing so, the article engages with the nature of contemporary governance in São Paulo and calls for further attention into what Angel and Loftus () provocatively refer to as the ‘the set of socio‐ecological relations that goes by the name of the state’ (see also Angel, ; Harris, ).…”

Section: Methods and Conceptual Framingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linear Parks and the Political Ecologies of Permeability: Environmental displacement in São Paulo, Brazil

Millington¹

2018

Int J Urban Regional Res

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This article considers the politics of resettlement within ongoing efforts to construct the Tietê River Valley Park (Parque Várzeas do Tietê), a linear park that upon completion will be the largest linear park in the world. Located in the eastern periphery of São Paulo, Brazil, the proposed project uses riverbank naturalization to dampen floodpeaks and bring green space to underserved populations. Due to the presence of low‐income neighborhoods on the river's edge, however, the project calls for the removal of roughly 40,000 people. Drawing from urban political ecology and contemporary concerns about environmentally induced displacement, I consider the conflicts over resettlement that mark the project. I analyze the project itself and situate it within a regional context defined by autoconstruction, regularized flooding, and insecure tenure. I argue that despite claims that the project will yield less risky lives for displaced residents, the form through which the project is being developed actually puts displaced residents in heightened situations of risk. I consider how communities have organized to resist displacement, and call for an approach to governance in peripheral landscapes that takes seriously the histories of collective infrastructural provisioning and autoconstructed housing that have marked them for decades.

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“…More recently, Jessica Barnes () has argued that a chief purpose of the annual maintenance of irrigation infrastructure on the Nile has been to maintain state control over that infrastructure. To maintain the status quo in an infrastructural system, or to increase its “resilience,” is in other words to reinforce historically situated power relations.…”

Section: Energy Use and Infrastructure As A Political‐ecological Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maintaining power: Decarbonisation and recentralisation in Cuba’s Energy Revolution

Cederlöf

2019

Trans Inst British Geog

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With the Energy Revolution of 2005, the energy and carbon intensity of the Cuban state‐economy decreased by over a third. More than an issue of low‐carbon transition, however, this article suggests that the Energy Revolution was an attempt to maintain social power relations through everyday energy use. Drawing on archival and ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba, the article conceptualises energy infrastructures as co‐constitutive of the ecological conditions for social life. Energy infrastructures shape human action and interaction by operationalising political‐economic regimes of energy distribution. The article traces the state‐socialist logic guiding Cuba's longstanding electrification campaign and shows how a multitude of market‐based energy systems during the 1990s “special period” undermined this logic. By examining three core interventions during the Energy Revolution, finally, it demonstrates how the Energy Revolution recentralised power relations through energy use, re‐establishing the hegemony of the socialist state. If energy use is seen as a political‐ecological process, the maintenance of energy infrastructure is an act that reinforces a socio‐ecological order and, hence, a set of political‐economic relations.

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States of maintenance: Power, politics, and Egypt’s irrigation infrastructure

Cited by 125 publications

References 52 publications

Rethinking remediation: mine reclamation, environmental justice, and relations of care

Rethinking remediation: mine reclamation, environmental justice, and relations of care

Linear Parks and the Political Ecologies of Permeability: Environmental displacement in São Paulo, Brazil

Maintaining power: Decarbonisation and recentralisation in Cuba’s Energy Revolution

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