Urban Waters: ecologies, inequalities, a

How does climate change transform how we read, write and tell urban histories? How can the so-called Anthropocene change how we do urban ethnography? How does it affect how we imagine viable, desirable urban futures? Finally, how do we reassess agency, social change, and collective life in the face of challenges brought about by the entanglement of human and non-human actions in phenomena like melting icebergs, air pollution, viruses and pandemics, floods and landslides, or rising sea levels? Addressing these questions requires expanding the temporal and spatial scopes and scales usually deployed in modern urban histories. With this end in mind, we will engage with readings that explore how ports, landfills, pollution, rivers, lakes, pipes and wells, wastewater, beaches and disasters constitute sites of city making in different cities and time periods, and therefore of instituting, reproducing or perpetuating inequalities. We will focus mostly but not exclusively on case studies of Latin American cities, drawing scholarly work in history, anthropology, social and environmental history, urban political ecology, geography, science and technology studies, architecture, urbanism and urban planning.