What is it about?
The politics, from above and below, of one of the world's largest cities almost running out of water and the surprising centrality of housing issues. What São Paulo's catastrophic close call reveals about cities and water scarcity in a warming world. And an argument to revitalize the concept of "collective consumption" to understand those politics, with an emphasis on the politics of housing and land use as playing a central role.
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Why is it important?
A new approach to understanding the urban politics of climate change that foregrounds already existing social struggles over housing. Existing approaches worry that climate change will exacerbate inequality. This article tries to show how urban social inequality drives cities' efforts to adapt to climate change far more deeply than scholars have so far realized. A major implication is that we need a socially sophisticated understanding of how cities might ration water.
Perspectives
I had been doing fieldwork in São Paulo for years before the drought broke out. The politics of that drought shocked me in a series of ways—from the government ignoring its best technocrats' own recommendations, to unprecedented civil society alliances that formed in response. In this piece I tried to capture how a whole cross-section of the city responded to the drought. I hope the piece pushes other scholars to also forsake narrow analyses and tackle urban climate politics with an ambitious and encompassing approach.
Daniel Aldana Cohen
New York University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Rationed City: The Politics of Water, Housing, and Land Use in Drought-Parched São Paulo, Public Culture, May 2016, Duke University Press,
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-3427451.
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