Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 131, May 2022, Pages 234-242
Geoforum

On the margins of the hydrosocial: Quasi-events along a stagnant river

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.03.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Conceptualization of stagnant water based on ethnography of downstream neighbourhoods of Semarang.

  • Rethinking the concept of the hydrosocial cycle through an appreciation of stagnation is proposed.

  • Brings Povinelli's concept of quasi-events in dialogue with scholarship on the hydrosocial.

  • Stagnation is product of urbanization, marginalization, and uncoordinated infrastructural repairs.

  • Initiates a needed reflection on margins of the hydrosocial.

Abstract

This article investigates stagnation as a product of hydrosocial relations in light of ethnographic research conducted in the port city of Semarang, Indonesia. In Semarang’s coastal north, river water spills daily into neighbourhoods during high tide, and often stagnates in houses and streets. While recent studies have shown that water governance is a form of social control, reproducing (infra)structures of subjugation and social inequality, little attention has been paid to the margins of water infrastructure, especially in cities. By focusing on stagnation, this article examines hydrosocial arrangements in the margins of postcolonial drainage infrastructure. When the peripheral and densely populated neighbourhoods in Semarang’s north are flooded during high tide, residents resort to private or semi-public pumps to get rid of stagnant water. Residents deplore insufficient state attention to their area, reflected in collapsing or seeping riverbanks. A relatively reliable flood prevention is the timely and regular raising of house floors and streets. The municipality responds to dramatic rates of land subsidence (10–15 cm/year) by raising roads and riverbanks. Yet, many dwellings along the Banger River have been destroyed by intruding sea water and left behind in ruins, suggesting a permanent failure of the city’s drainage system. Residents bear the brunt of supplementary infrastructural labour, their efforts of infrastructural repair and maintenance sustaining a bare minimum of safety. The article mobilizes Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of quasi-events to understand the hydrosocial relations that shape peoples’ precarious relation with drainage infrastructure as unequal yet generalized. Quasi-events, that is, efforts to hold water at bay, suck energy and resources from marginalized residents. As such, the article argues that the margin of the hydrosocial is integral to the political configuration of land and water.

Section snippets

Introduction: Landscapes of stagnation

The coastal neighbourhoods of the Javanese port city Semarang are built on silt and multiple layers of landfill. Every year, another layer gets added. The neighbourhoods are located on land that is sinking. They have to be constantly lifted (to stay above sea level) and drained (to prevent stagnation). Both serve to protect them from the brackish, toxic water lurking in urban rivers and gutters. But on occasion, the water cannot be held back. During high tide, the rivers fill up with seawater,

Stagnation in hydrosocial terms?

Going back as far as Wittfogel’s (1957) seminal study of despotic water empires, geographers, political ecologists, and scholars in related disciplines have begun to reexamine the social construction of water and its relations with power. To name only a few, recent studies have shown that water governance is a form of social control, reproducing (infra)structures of subjugation and social inequality (Gandy, 2003, Swyngedouw, 2004, Kooy and Bakker, 2008, Björkman, 2014), while also being a site

Towards A hydrosocial approach to stagnation

In a recent article, Linton and Budds (2014) significantly pushed the definition of the hydrosocial cycle and revealed new ways of putting it to work analytically. Importantly, they preserve the metaphor of cyclical movement, which derives from early 20th century theories of water’s involvement in metabolic ecological processes. Their definition of the hydrosocial cycle “as a socio-natural process by which water and society make and remake each other over space and time” (Linton & Budds (2014

The origins of stagnation in Semarang

This section retraces the origins of social stagnation and entrapment. To demonstrate how residents became confined at the margin, I begin with a historical portrayal of Semarang’s coastal development under Dutch rule before describing more recent transformations of drainage infrastructure. Lastly, the section familiarizes the reader with the living conditions and prospects of residents of the riverside sub-district Kemijen, located in the northeast of Semarang. Both conditions and outlooks on

Dealing with stagnation

In this last section, I turn to communal and individual efforts to stave off rob and fix drainage infrastructure, that is, to prevent stagnant water. I look at sociotechnical arrangements that loop both water, individuals’ energies, and capital into more or less closed circuits. I capture how individuals’ projects, often barely sustained by municipal funds, allow residents and communities to endure but not end the stagnation that followed normalization and socioecological decay.

Compound (RW) 10

Conclusion

At the time of writing a first draft of this article, an onslaught of videos of and posts about rob hit Semarang’s Facebook forums. Images of contaminated water pouring into the neighbourhood accompanied by laments from neighbours paint the picture of a “real” catastrophe. These posts often seem to ask more firmly for top-down measures; the ‘meantime’, then, sustained through small community-based projects, neighbourhood initiatives, and government grants has reached its expiry date and it has

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Tania Li, Cynthia Morinville, Stephen Campbell, Luisa Cortesi, Alejandro Camargo, the anonymous reviewer, and the editors of Geoforum for helpful comments made on the draft. An early version of this paper was presented on the “Land-Water Nexus” panel at the 2015 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Denver, Colorado. I appreciated the comments I received in the session, particularly those from Lauren Yapp and Franz Krause. I would like to thank the Ontario

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