Assembling the water factory: Seawater desalination and the techno-politics of water privatisation in the San Diego–Tijuana metropolitan region

This and the subsequent papers in this special issue set out the contours of Marxian urban political ecology and call for greater research attention to a neglected field of critical research that, given its political importance, requires urgent attention. Notwithstanding the important contributions of other critical perspectives on urban ecology, Marxist urban political ecology provides an integrated and relational approach that helps untangle the interconnected economic, political, social and ecological processes that together go to form highly uneven and deeply unjust urban landscapes. Because the power‐laden socioecological relations that shape the formation of urban environments constantly shift between groups of actors and scales, historical‐geographical insights into these ever‐changing urban configurations are necessary for the sake of considering the future of radical political‐ecological urban strategies. The social production of urban environments is gaining recognition within radical and historical‐materialist geography. The political programme, then, of urban political ecology is to enhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental construction by identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and a more inclusive mode of environmental production can be achieved.

This article explores the potential of Urban Political Ecology analyses to reveal the nuanced relationships produced by nature and social relations in urban forests. A critique of the Urban Political Ecology forest literature, it focuses on the assumption in much of the literature that people in urban spaces perceive themselves to be advantaged by the presence of trees and disadvantaged by their absence. This critique leads to a call for an increased emphasis on the importance of different urban forest contexts and on the differential insights produced. The article constructs a narrative of the complex relationships, both historic and current, between communities, forest and the regulatory authorities in the governance of the urban forest of the valleys of south Wales. It then draws on recent research to reveal tensions in capitalist production and consumption relations, and identifies specific issues. Analysing these relationships and comparing the south Wales valleys case with other examples in Urban Political Ecology literature, the article seeks to promote the utility of Urban Political Ecology as a concept and to advance theoretically both Urban Political Ecology and, by extension, environmental justice.RésuméL'écologie politique urbaine, à travers ses analyses, est susceptible de révéler les relations en demi‐teintes que génèrent la nature et les relations sociales dans les forêts urbaines. Dans une critique des publications d'écologie politique urbaine sur la forêt, cet article s'intéresse à l'hypothèse courante selon laquelle les habitants des espaces urbains ressentent la présence d'arbres comme un avantage, et leur absence comme un désavantage. Il apparaît nécessaire de souligner l'importance des différents contextes de la forêt urbaine, ainsi que la diversité des perspectives qu'ils créent. L'article expose les rapports complexes, tant passés qu'actuels, entre communautés, forêt et autorités de réglementation dans le cadre de la gouvernance de la forêt urbaine de ‘The Valleys’ en Galles du sud. De plus, à partir de travaux de recherches récents, il repère des tensions dans les relations entre production capitaliste et consommation des espaces forestiers, et identifie des problèmes spécifiques. L'analyse de ces relations et la comparaison du cas des vallées des Galles du sud avec d'autres exemples traités dans les textes d'écologie politique urbaine encouragent à voir cette discipline comme un concept utile, donc à développer son cadre théorique et, par extension, celui de la justice environnementale.

This paper describes a hydro-economic analysis of agricultural, environmental and urban water supply alternatives for years 2025 and 2080, in Baja California. Alternatives include idealized water markets, wastewater reuse, seawater desalination and infrastructural expansions. A network of the water system was built to considering hydrology, agricultural, environmental and urban demands, infrastructure, economic values of water and operating costs. Wastewater reuse with other projected infrastructure expansions are overall the most economically optima alternatives. Markets offer leverage and flexibility for the future urban needs for locations with the proper infrastructure. Worthwhile expansions include a larger aqueduct to convey Colorado River water to the west. At current water price and operating costs, seawater desalination is uneconomical. Wastewater reuse for restoration is also an economic source of instream flows, with institutional arrangements on a subsidized water price. Hydro-economic analysis is useful to better understand water-related issues in Baja California and provide a technical basis for developing and comparing long-term water management solutions.

Urban political ecology has conceptualized the city as a process of urbanization rather than a bounded site. Yet, in practice, the majority of urban political ecology literature has focused on sites within city limits. This tension in urban political ecology evokes broader conversations in urban geography around city-as-place versus urbanization-as-process. In this paper, I bring an urban political ecology analysis to examine co-constitutive urbanization and ruralization processes, focusing on sites beyond city boundaries in three empirical case studies located within the broader hydrosocial territory of urban Southern California. By focusing on the rural components of hydrosocial territories, I show that each of the three case studies has been shaped in very different ways based on its enrollment within urban Southern California’s hydrosocial territory; in turn, the rural has also shaped the cities through flows of politics and resources. The paper demonstrates how urban political ecology can be usefully applied to understand rural places, illustrating how processes of urbanization can be involved in the production of distinctly rural—and distinctly different—landscapes. The cases demonstrate the utility of urban political ecology as an analytical framework that can examine co-constitutive urbanization/ruralization processes and impacts while maintaining enough groundedness to highlight place-based differences.

In what sense might urban political ecology be regarded as an expanded field? In this brief article, I emphasize how urban political ecology has the capacity to build conceptual bridges between the bio-physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. I suggest that urban political ecology is uniquely positioned to bring together material insights at different spatial scales, linking intricate local topographies with more distant extractive frontiers and zoonotic transfer zones. If urban political ecology wishes to engage with pluriversal ecologies, however, it will need to adopt a more eclectic and less deterministic conceptual framework. A more embodied vantage point can also develop links between neo-Marxian approaches and newly emerging fields such as critical phenomenology, critical toxicology, and multispecies ethnographies.

This article examines a debate regarding future orientations for the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE). Anchored in two UPE discourses toward a more planetary or a more situated UPE, I argue that these discourses present two critical yet independent responses to early UPE scholarship, opening up the possibility for a more synthesising position. Building off of this debate as well as some of UPE's intellectual traditions, I then argue for a rapprochement between UPE and the field of critical logistics, using the 2022 expansion of the IJmuiden sea lock in the Netherlands as an illustrative case for demonstrating how applying the combined theoretical and methodological insights of UPE and critical logistics can turn a seemingly mundane sea lock infrastructure into a key site from which to draw out the political stakes of urban and climate futures as they play out in a city like Amsterdam. A closer engagement with critical logistics can not only extend UPE's existing themes and empirical focal points, but also attend to theoretical tensions regarding the politics of scale and place central to the debate between a more planetary and a more situated UPE. Finally, I argue that this rapprochement is not only theoretical and methodological but also political, as the wealth of work in critical logistics on articulating a counterlogistics can help UPE expand its political project in a time of climate emergency and interlocking capitalist crises.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Sustainable Development and Environmental Justice in African Cities

Over the last 20 years, urban political ecology has made substantial contributions to the study of urban ‘socionatures’, part of the field's aim of applying political ecology to urban space. At the same time, urban political ecology has been limited by a perspective that tends to confine urbanisation to urban spatial forms; a conflation of process and site. The city is seen to be made by and for urban metabolism, disconnected from both rural and global socionatures. This paper offers a small, empirical corrective, based on a case study of Cambodian re‐urbanisation under the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian genocide began with the capture of the capital, Phnom Penh, by Khmer Rouge forces in April 1975. According to the standard narrative, the subsequent destruction of urban infrastructure and forced evacuation of residents is a historical case of ‘urbicide’ and reflects a broader interpretation of the Khmer Rouge as ideologically ‘anti‐urban’. Using documentary evidence, this paper reconstructs the functional role of Cambodia's network of cities under the Khmer Rouge. Contrary to the narrative, we find that cities were not destroyed. Rather, urban sociospatial practices, forms and rural–urban relations were reorganised to support the demands of rice production for foreign exchange and facilitate the administration of violence. This pragmatic reconstruction challenges claims of urbicide and contradicts the narrative of ‘dead cities’ and ‘ghost towns’. Most importantly, it challenges urban political ecology's city‐centrism: the processes that reanimated Cambodia's cities were the same ones that transformed rural space and motivated the evacuation of cities in the first place. Cambodian re‐urbanisation accompanied re‐ruralisation, a dialectic propelled by the transition to state capitalism. In this light, we encourage an urban political ecology that looks beyond the city's cadastral limits and engages those political ecologies within which the urban is situated.

Urban political ecology now finds itself at a crossroads between gradual marginalization or renewed intellectual impetus. Despite some recent critical re-evaluations of the field, there remain a series of conceptual tensions that have only been partially explored. I consider six issues in particular: the uncertain relations between urban political ecology and the biophysical sciences; the emergence of extended conceptions of agency and subjectivity; the redefinition of space, scale, and the urban realm; renewed interest in urban epidemiology; the delineation of urban ecological imaginaries; and finally, the emergence of evidentiary materialism as an alternative posthuman configuration to new materialist ontologies. I conclude that a conceptually enriched urban political ecology could play an enhanced role in critical environmental research.

This article focuses on the material and discursive constructions of nature and children in the city. While dominant representations and idealizations of nature and childhood depend on the binary logic of the nature/culture and rural/urban divide, there is also a simplification and romanticization of nature in children's geographies and a lack of children and their spaces in urban political ecology. We argue that children and nature in cities need to be removed from a binary model of being and attended to in more nuanced ways in urban political ecology and children's geographies. In this regard, we suggest that both nature and children in cities need to be queered. We need to ask how the production of urban spaces (re)creates particular romantic and idealized relations with natures that reify the binaries between nature/culture, and male/female through a heteronormative framework. The purpose of this article is to bring the critical nature–society theories of urban political ecology into conversation with work in children's geographies that explores the ‘nature' of childhood, and in doing so queer the relationship between children and nature. Drawing on research on queer ecologies, and queered childhoods, we aim to provide a framework to rethink and queer both nature and children in cities.

The delineation of microplate-tectonic terranes1 which make up western North America, the timing of their accretions to western North America and the identification of their original geological settings are all topics of debate2,3. The most recent addition to this family of terranes is the Santa Lucia/Orocopia allochthon4,5 (SLOA) (Fig. 1), which is made up of Salinia6,7 and several other smaller terranes8 and is located in central and southern California. This composite terrane amalgamated in the Cretaceous and accreted to southern California by the early Palaeogene4,5. We describe here new palaeomagnetic results from localities outboard from the SLOA in southern California (USA) and Baja California (Mexico). These results are used to define a newly identified allochthonous terrane in southern and Baja California (Peninsular Ranges terrane9, PRT) which is outboard from the SLOA, estimate the PRT's palaeolatitude drift history for the past 160 Myr, and infer its original geological setting. PRT and SLOA palaeolatitude drift histories are then combined to produce a new perspective on the tectonic development of southern and Baja California over the past 160 Myr.

In the kampungs of North Jakarta, people make their lives in the face of a variety of transformations. While Jakarta has always experienced flooding from the coast and from its rivers, flooding is getting worse, and has dramatic effects on kampungs and their residents. At the same time, flood mitigation efforts by the government of Jakarta involve new infrastructures, such as sea walls and land reclamation, which interrupt livelihood practices in the kampungs and have led to violent evictions. Residents of North Jakarta’s kampungs must negotiate the surprise impacts of both flooding and the government’s attempts to manage flooding. In this article, we catalogue the social and material practices that support life and livelihoods in the contexts of these urban environmental transformations, drawing from fieldwork conducted in three North Jakarta kampungs and from recent critical geographical research about urban resilience and urban political ecologies. We describe these practices as everyday acts of resilience, reworking, and resistance. These everyday practices are social and material, drawing from and remaking social and material relations. Although everyday practices of resilience, reworking, and resistance require investments in social relations, we also demonstrate that the dividends filter through existing power structures in the kampungs.

Casual observers of chaparral in southern California(SCA) quickly learn two key facts about fires: they maybe started in a variety of weather conditions—windy orcalm, dry or humid—and the most spectacular modernburns occur during Santa Ana winds. Serious research-ers who seek to understand ecosystems and guide landmanagers must ask whether this has always been true.Readers should be surprised that Keeley and Fothering-ham (2001 [this issue]) answer yes. First, the chaparralecosystem has certainly not been static: it has experi-enced major changes in fire management as southernCalifornia’s population has increased. Second, observa-tions of the chaparral in nearby Baja California (BCA)immediately reveal a very different dynamic that surelydeserves serious consideration as a model for SCA, onethat precedes the establishment of modern suppressionpractices and dense population. The chaparral of BCA ischaracterized by smaller stands and a propensity forlow-intensity fires in relatively calm, humid weather.The sharp transition between the two regimes cannotbe explained by natural gradients in flora or weather; itfollows the international border, an artificial line drawnby human beings. Vegetation maps show that Californiaecosystems extend 200 km into BCA (Minnich & Franco-Vizcaino 1998).Climatic gradients including temperature and meanannual precipitation cross the border at right angles, andprevailing winds are everywhere westerly. Open-rangecattle grazing is practiced in BCA, but chaparral is unpal-atable to livestock (Minnich & Bahre 1995). Without dis-tinctive suppression systems, changes in fire regime shouldbe expressed in a continuum along environmental gradi-ents, not the discontinuity seen along the border. Theprimary difference is that BCA has not experienced thesame protectionist management policies as SCA, and thedivergence in chaparral fire ecology may provide insightinto the nature of historical vegetation change in SCA.The seminal question is how fires shaped ecosystemswithout management interference. Suppression is un-precedented in ecological history.Keeley and Fotheringham are obviously aware of theneed to balance the BCA and SCA models in any plausi-ble account of chaparral history. Yet their analysis fo-cuses on a 1983 account of the cross-border contrastand ignores a substantial body of more recent publica-tions, including a 52-year transborder fire history (1920–1971; Minnich & Chou 1997), a study of transborder post-fire chronosequences (Minnich & Bahre 1995), and stud-ies of presuppression fire regimes in SCA (Minnich 1987,1988). To evaluate their case for dismissing the BCAmodel, I must review the key findings they ignore. Thesefindings concern the following sequence of topics: (1)the nonrandom turnover of fire patches, (2) the over-abundance of natural ignitions compared with fuel pro-duction; (3) the dominance of landscape burning by rel-atively few fires (most fire starts fail), and (4) therandom phasing of fires with normal weather in the ab-sence of fire control. This is not just an intellectual exer-cise: these are serious implications for fire management.Both the original and subsequent studies (Minnich1983; Minnich & Chou 1997) show that, in the absenceof suppression, the chaparral of BCA is a diverse, fine-grained patch mosaic. With fire suppression in SCA, thechaparral comprises unbroken carpets of mature vegeta-tion interspersed with a few extensively denuded water-sheds (Fig. 1). There are ample data to suggest differ-ences in fire management, including the number of firesof 15 ha (BCA, 2000 events; SCA 350 events), maxi-mum fire size (BCA, 3,000 ha; SCA 59,000 ha), and dif-ferences in fire weather (BCA, onshore flows; SCA, off-shore flows). The only similarity is that fire-return intervalsare 50–70 years in both countries. Our integrated modelexplains the disparate fire outcomes that have existed inthe two countries since the 1920s, Keeley and Fother-ingham do not.An important aspect in developing fire-disturbancetheory is choosing an incontrovertible starting point thatleads in directions productive for research. The modelby Minnich and Chou (1997) is based on the fact that

Urban political ecology (UPE) infuses Marxism with poststructuralism and constructivism to explore the dialectic relationship between nature and society in urban environments as well as the economic aspect of an urban socioecological system. Nevertheless, the literature on southern urbanism has urged UPE to become more “provincialized” to reflect the diffuse forms of power and everyday governance influencing the planning of cities in the Global South. This article reviews and reflects on this wave of debates raised by critics who have positioned postcolonial thinking as an alternative to Marxist political economy, in which UPE is rooted. It also identifies those works that might help provincialize UPE differently. Without rejecting the Marxism, another set of approaches draws influence from the strategic-relational approach (SRA) to examine environmental issues in ways that destabilize conventionally economic determinist UPE. In addition to involving corporate elites and city officials, a UPE framework incorporating the SRA is capable of bringing the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community leaders, and environmentalists in everyday governance to the front. The article contends that the latter framework adds weight on public participation and local governance in different geopolitical contexts without losing sight of the social inequalities caused by state-led or privatized programs in the quest for urban resilience.

Urban political ecology (UPE) can contribute important insights to examine traffic congestion, a significant social and environmental problem underexplored in UPE. Specifically, by attending to power relations, the production of urban space, and cultural practices, UPE can help explain why traffic congestions arises and persists but also creates inequalities in terms of environmental impacts and mobility. Based on qualitative research conducted in 2018, the article applies a UPE framework to Bangkok, Thailand, which has some of the world's worst congestion in one of the world's most unequal countries. The city's largely unplanned and uneven development has made congestion worse in a number of ways. Further, the neglect of public transport, particularly the bus system, and the highest priority given to cars has exacerbated congestion but also reflects class interests as well as unequal power relations. Governance shortcomings, including fragmentation, institutional inertia, corruption, and frequent changes in leadership, have also severely hindered state actors to address congestion. However, due to the poor's limited power, solutions to congestion, are post-political and shaped by elite interests. Analyses of congestion need to consider how socio-political relations, discourses, and a city's materiality shape outcomes.Key Words: urban transport governance, Bangkok traffic congestion, urban political ecology, Thailand political economy, Bangkok's bus system