environmental justice

The last instalment of the annual ACC NOTRUC Seminar Series is presented by Dr Nate Millington on Producing water scarcity in São Paulo, Brazil: The 2014 Water Crisis and the Binding  Politics of Infrastructure at 15:00 in Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town. ABSTRACT In 2014, political intransigence combined with a severe drought to push São Paulo, Brazil, to the edge of a profound water crisis. In this paper, I consider the response to the crisis on behalf of the state government, focusing on both the way that the crisis was narrated as well as responded to. I consider the suite of actions taken to cope with scarcity, focusing specifically on the state’s employment of pressure reductions in the water pipes as opposed to a formal rationing. I argue that despite the state government’s claims that only a small minority was going without water, the reality was that residents of the urban periphery were facing consistent water shortages. I argue that these shortages are representative of a form of infrastructural politics, in which the seemingly most technically viable solutions to the crisis exacerbated inequality due to the inequity that is built into the city’s hydrological infrastructure itself. I conclude by thinking of the city’s crisis as indicative of the changing nature of daily life in contemporary cities in the wake of climate change at both the local and global scale. More on the full seminar series here. More on the NOTRUC programme here.