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Erik Swyngedouw
Thinkers

Erik Swyngedouw

1956

Belgian geographer who founded urban political ecology: the water, air and greenery of the city are produced and distributed with power.

Born in Belgium in 1956, trained in Leuven and at Johns Hopkins with David Harvey, and professor of geography at the University of Manchester after two decades at Oxford, Swyngedouw is the founder, with Maria Kaika and Nik Heynen, of urban political ecology. His starting point is that nature in the city does not exist apart from society: the water from the tap, the air one breathes and the neighbourhood park are products of decisions, investments and conflicts, and are therefore unequally distributed.

Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (2004) followed the water of Guayaquil from the watersheds to the neighbourhoods without a network to show that scarcity is manufactured, and Liquid Power (2015) did the same for twentieth-century Spain, where dams, transfers and irrigation built a territory and a state at once. His concept of urban metabolism, taken from Marx, describes the city as a continuous flow of matter, energy and capital.

His other line is the critique of the post-political: in Promises of the Political (2018) and in his articles on sustainability and resilience he argues that the technocratic consensus on climate hides the conflict over who pays and who decides, and that the just city requires re-politicising what is presented as management. He is one of the most cited European geographers and his framework is used today to study droughts, floods and river restorations.

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