Water marginalization at the urban fringe: environmental justice and urban political ecology across the North–South divide

2015/02/12 by Malini Ranganathan, Carolina Balazs · 3 citations
Social Sciences · #Water Governance and Infrastructure #Urban Planning and Governance #Urban and Rural Development Challenges

paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/02723638.2015.1005414

openalex publication_date 2015/02/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02

Abstract

This article reconsiders the epistemic and geographic boundaries that have long separated scholarship on urban water poverty and politics in the Global North and South. We stage an encounter between the seemingly dissimilar cases of Tooleville outside of the city of Exeter in California’s Central Valley and Bommanahalli outside of Bangalore, India, to illuminate the geography of water marginalization at the fringes of urban areas, and to deepen cross-fertilization between two geographic literatures: environmental justice (EJ) and urban political ecology (UPE). We argue that there is scope for transnational learning in three arenas in particular: (1) water access, (2) state practice, and (3) political agency. In so doing, we aim to advance a genuinely post-colonial approach to theory and practice in the pressing arena of urban water politics.

Citations

• Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale
• Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services
• Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict
• Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning
• A Theory of Access*
• Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services

Cited by

• Exposing the myths of household water insecurity in the global north: A critical review
• Bommanahalli [wikipedia]
• Tooleville, California [wikipedia]