Right to Water and Environmental Justice: Swyngedouw and Davis

The right to water is the recognition that access to safe drinking water and sanitation is a condition of a dignified life and not a commodity, and the United Nations General Assembly declared it a human right in 2010, after decades of urban conflicts over who controls water and at what price. Environmental justice is the framework that explains why those conflicts hit the poor and minorities hardest, and two authors have applied it to urban water: the geographer Erik Swyngedouw, who in Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (2004) and Liquid Power (2015) showed that city water is always a relation of power, and Mike Davis, who in Planet of Slums (2006) documented how a billion people live without sanitation in the informal settlements of the Global South.

Erik Swyngedouw: urban water scarcity is produced, not natural

Swyngedouw studied Guayaquil, in Ecuador, where in the 1990s about half the population bought water from tanker trucks at prices far above the network's, while wealthy neighbourhoods received it subsidised by pipe. His conclusion is that urban water scarcity is rarely natural: it is produced by decisions about where the network reaches, who pays for infrastructure and who is served first. In Liquid Power he applied that lens to twentieth-century Spain, where dams, transfers and irrigation were instruments of political power, from the regenerationists to Franco and to the water wars between autonomous regions.

Privatisation and remunicipalisation: from Cochabamba to Paris

Privatisation is the central conflict of recent decades. With World Bank backing, many cities granted concessions of their water systems to private firms in the 1990s, and the results were higher tariffs and disconnections for non-payment. The Cochabamba water war in Bolivia in 2000, when the population expelled the concessionaire after price rises, became a symbol of resistance, and since then more than two hundred cities, from Paris in 2010 to Berlin in 2013, have remunicipalised the service. Swyngedouw reads those episodes as the dispute over whether water is a commons or a business.

Mike Davis: water and sanitation in informal settlements

Davis shows the harshest face. In the informal settlements of Lagos, Nairobi, Mumbai or Mexico City, water arrives through vendors, contaminated wells or illegal connections, and the lack of sanitation makes diarrhoeal disease a leading cause of child mortality. That situation is not a technical shortfall but the result of policies that do not regard settlements as a legitimate part of the city and direct investment to formal districts. Environmental injustice, in his analysis, is the systematic distribution of risks, flooding, contamination, disease, onto those who contributed least to producing them.

Flint, Detroit and Cape Town: environmental injustice in the North

Cases in the North confirm that injustice is not exclusive to the South. In Flint, Michigan, in 2014, the decision to switch water source to save money poisoned with lead the water of a mostly Black and poor city, and officials took more than a year to admit it. In Detroit, water was cut off to tens of thousands of households for non-payment. In Cape Town, the Day Zero crisis of 2018 showed that consumption limits were applied very differently between wealthy suburbs and townships. The environmental justice movement, born in the United States in the 1980s, has made water one of its main fronts.

The lesson of Swyngedouw and Davis is that guaranteeing the right to water is a political decision before a technical one: extending the network to informal settlements, keeping social tariffs and banning disconnections, managing the resource as a commons and giving affected communities a voice in decisions on dams, transfers and concessions. A city that distributes water by income produces environmental injustice by design; one that distributes it as a right turns its most invisible infrastructure into the basis of urban equality.