Liquid Power

Description

An examination of the central role of water politics and engineering in Spain’s modernization, illustrating water’s part in forging, maintaining, and transforming social power.

In this book, Erik Swyngedouw explores how water becomes part of the tumultuous processes of modernization and development. Using the experience of Spain as a lens to view the interplay of modernity and environmental transformation, Swyngedouw shows that every political project is also an environmental project.

In 1898, Spain lost its last overseas colony, triggering a period of post-imperialist turmoil still referred to as El Disastre. Turning inward, the nation embarked on “regeneration” and modernization. Water played a central role in this; during a turbulent period from the twentieth century into the twenty-first—through the Franco years and into the new era of liberal democracy—Spain’s waterscapes were completely transformed, with large-scale projects that ranged from dam construction to irrigation to desalinization. Swyngedouw describes the contested political-ecological process that marked this transformation, showing that the Spain’s diverse and contested paths to modernization were predicated on particular trajectories of environmental transformation.

After laying out his theoretical perspectives, Swyngedouw analyzes three periods of Spain’s political-ecological modernization: the aspirations and stalled modernization of the early twentieth century; the accelerated efforts under the authoritarian Franco regime—which included six hundred dams, expanded hydroelectricity, and massive irrigation; and the changing hydro-social landscape under social democracy. Offering an innovative perspective on the relationship of nature and society, Liquid Power illuminates the political nature of nature.Preface ix
List of Acronyms xiii
1 “Not a Drop of Water…”: Spain’s Cyborg Water World 1
2 The Hydro-Social Cycle and the Making of Cyborg Worlds 19
3 “Regeneracionismo” and the Emergence of Hydraulic Modernization, 1898-1930 39
4 Chronicle of a Death Foretold: The Failure of Early Twentieth-Century Hydraulic Modernization 67
5 Paco El Rana’s Wet Dream for Spain 99
6 Welcome Mr. Marshall! 129
7 Marching Foreword to the Past: From Hydro-Deadlock to Water and Modernity Reimagined 163
8 Mobilizing the Seas: Reassembling Hydro-Modernities 191
9 Politicizing Water, Politicizing Natures, Or…”Water Does Not Exist!” 223
Notes 231
References 249
Index 285Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at Manchester University and the author of Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain (MIT Press).US

Additional information