Water and Power: Urban Water per Swyngedouw, Kaika and Bakker

Water management in cities is a question of power before it is one of pipes: it decides who receives clean water, at what price, who suffers floods and droughts and who governs a resource on which all urban life depends. Three researchers in urban political ecology have shown this with concrete cases: Erik Swyngedouw, with the history of water in Guayaquil; Maria Kaika, with the hydraulic modernisation of Athens and European cities; and Karen Bakker, with the privatisation and remunicipalisation of water around the world. Their work explains why urban water, presented as a technical problem, is always a political dispute.

Erik Swyngedouw: the produced scarcity of Guayaquil

Swyngedouw, in Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (2004), reconstructs a century of water in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and shows that the city never had natural scarcity but produced scarcity: while affluent neighbourhoods received subsidised network water, more than half the population in the settlements bought water from tanker trucks at prices many times higher. That geography of water reflected and reproduced the geography of power, and every modernisation plan, financed with foreign debt, reordered who won and who paid. His concept of the hydrosocial cycle sums up the thesis: the water that reaches the tap is at once nature and society, and it cannot be managed without deciding for whom.

Maria Kaika: the city of flows and drought as a political moment

Kaika, in City of Flows (2005), follows the water of Athens from its springs to the dams of the twentieth century to show how modernity built cities that hide their dependence on nature. Water enters the home through invisible pipes and leaves through drains nobody sees, and that domestication produces an illusion of autonomy that breaks in every drought. Kaika analyses the Athens drought of 1989 to 1991 as a moment when nature returned to politics: rationing, saving campaigns, new dams and a debate about who should sacrifice. Her lesson is that water infrastructures are also ideologies, and that crises make them visible.

Karen Bakker: why water is an uncooperative commodity

Bakker, in Privatizing Water (2010) and in her study of England and Wales, An Uncooperative Commodity (2003), examines the wave of privatisations of the 1990s driven by the World Bank and the experience that followed. Her finding is that water is an uncooperative commodity: heavy, local, a natural monopoly, impossible to substitute, and therefore badly managed by the market. The privatisations of Buenos Aires, Manila or Cochabamba, where the water war of 2000 expelled the concessionaire, ended in conflicts and renegotiations, and since 2000 more than two hundred cities, Paris in 2010 and Berlin in 2013 among them, have remunicipalised the service. Bakker does not idealise the public: she demands that it be transparent, participatory and equitable.

Climate change, day zero and floods: sharing water and risk

Climate change adds pressure. Cape Town was in 2018 weeks away from the day zero when taps would be shut, and escaped through rationing, tiered tariffs and campaigns that halved consumption, amid debate over whether the rich with boreholes and pools bore an equal share. The floods of Valencia in 2024 or of Jakarta remind us that too much water is as political as too little: who lives in the flood zone and who has drainage. Swyngedouw, Kaika and Bakker agree that water adaptation requires sharing water, risk and decisions, not only building dams or desalination plants.

The sustainable city, in this reading, is the one that governs water as a commons: with tariffs that guarantee a vital minimum and charge for waste, with infrastructure that retains rain instead of expelling it, with user participation in decisions and with transparency about who receives what. Water and power go together, and a water policy that does not recognise it will keep producing scarcity for some and abundance for others.