From Flow to Saturation: What Happened to Erik Swyngedouw’s Glass of Water over the Last 28 Years?

Abstract

This article revisits Erik Swyngedouw’s 1996 essay “The City as a Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization” to examine how urban water production has changed in the early 21st century. It proposes reconsidering Swyngedouw’s ideas about the city as a space arranged by networks of multiple flows, involving human and non-human actors, goods and information, and about the glass filled with freshwater as a tangible representation of these dynamic flows. The development of global, extra-state, and otherwise structured urban spaces in the second half of the 20th century and the exploration of water’s material properties by blue humanities scholars, have enabled the replacement of widespread thinking through the flowas articulated in Swyngedouw’s essaywith conceptual approaches that take the constitution of water seriously. The article discusses one such approach developed by Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz to conceive of the urban space as a constantly changing environment, saturated with bodies, things, and other phenomena defined as situated manifestations emerging from the diverse relationships between water and other elements. This way of thinking about water allows for an expansion of network and infrastructure analysis, which implies the divisibility of their constituent components, to trace how spatially dispersed the connections between contemporary cities are, therefore demonstrating that urbanized water, too, flows outside confined streams.