Abstract
What form do the current and future catastrophes of the Anthropocene take? Adapting a concept from Rod Nixon, this communication makes a case for the notion of slow catastrophes, whose unfolding in space and time is uneven and entangled. Taking the events of Cape Town’s Day Zero drought as a case study, this paper examines the politics and poetics of water in the Anthropocene, and the implications of Anthropogenic climate change for urban life. It argues that rather than being understood as an inert resource, fresh drinking water is a complex object constructed at the intersection between natural systems, cultural imaginaries, and social, political and economic interests. The extraordinary events of Day Zero raised the specter of Mad Max-style water wars. They also led to the development of new forms of solidarity, with water acting as a social leveler. The paper argues that the events in Cape Town open a window onto the future, to the extent that it describes something about what happens when the added stresses of climate change are mapped onto already-contested social and political situations.
Highlights
What form do the current and future catastrophes of the Anthropocene take? Adapting a concept from Rod Nixon, this communication makes a case for the notion of slow catastrophes, whose unfolding in space and time is uneven and entangled
In the case of Cape Town, it took—and is taking—the form of a combination of factors: An aging infrastructure; rapid population growth over the last few decades as economic migrants have poured into the city from the surrounding hinterland; a severe and largely unpredicted three year drought; and chronic political in-fighting within the ruling Democratic Alliance, and between the Democratic Alliance and the African National Congress [24,25,26]
This combination of social, political, economic and climatic factors delivered up a potent moment—an Anthropocene moment—when anxieties about the future and apocalyptic imaginaries meshed with conditions on the ground, falling dam levels, and the torrent of facts and figures reported in the news, and delivered up on websites like the City of Cape Town’s own “Water Dashboard”
Summary
A journey into the Anthropocene is a journey into the unknown, as previously taken-for-granted resources and infrastructures become scarce or break down. The final idea that is borrowed from Nixon is the idea that slow violence (slow catastrophes) disproportionately impacts the poor of the world, and already vulnerable people, communities and nations This is not a new idea but is one that has already been eloquently presented by, for example, the postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose “The Climate of History” [4] first alerted the author to the need to rethink his own scholarly practice. With all of this in mind, Cape Town is discussed
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