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