The contentious urban politics of planning for water scarcity

What has long been common elsewhere feels relatively novel in Northern Europe. Cities are running out of water, putting vulnerable and marginalized groups disproportionately at risk. This is leading to social and political conflicts around the causes and impacts of, and necessary responses, to water scarcity and its entanglements with urban planning policies related to housing, industrial development or sustainability transitions. What happens, then, when a city runs out of water? This project aims to understand how cities as collective actors plan for the water crisis in Germany and the United Kingdom. Doing so, it examines the contentious and under-researched urban politics of planning for water scarcity.

Context

What has long been common elsewhere feels relatively novel in Germany and in Britain. Cities are running out of water, putting vulnerable and marginalized groups disproportionately at risk. This is leading to social and political conflicts around the causes of and impacts and necessary responses to water scarcity and its entanglements with urban planning policies related to housing, industrial development or sustainability transitions. Yet, despite urban actors’ unequal levels of experience in making plans to tackle water shortages, and the growing conflicts around the new water crisis, dominant approaches to water scarcity in urban studies tend to forego analyses of the contentious politics and conflicts shaping the local planning processes aimed at managing it. Explicit links between planning policies and water availability remain underexamined.

Aims

To address this gap, the project concentrates on the contentious politics of planning for water scarcity, asking (1) how local actors from the state, civil society, and economic sector negotiate plans for the emerging water crisis and how these plans are being contested, and (2) to what extent this situation leads to alleged trade-offs between environmental goals and questions of social justice. To answer this, the project interweaves and builds upon planning literatures, political sociology, and urban political ecology. It employs case study research in Berlin and its transforming hinterlands, where the coal exit is generating water shortages, and Cambridge, where water scarcity is entangled with questions around a dire housing crisis.

This research thus aims to contribute to the interdisciplinary field of urban studies by pursuing three objectives: First, producing critical knowledge about the actors involved in these plans serves to gather insights into their competing interests, visions, and strategies. Second, by way of empirically tracing how water scarcity is governed and contested in relation to planned housing and new industrial developments, I aim to explore the intersection of overlapping socio-ecological crises, namely water and housing, probing a previously underexplored nexus in urban planning. Third, building on these empirical contributions, the research aims to generate new knowledge about the role of the local state in dealing with the alleged trade-offs between environmental goals and questions of social justice.

Research design

To answer these questions, I develop and operationalize a political sociology of planning for water scarcity¹ through engaging qualitative comparative case study research in Berlin and Cambridge. To analyse the collected material (expert interviews, document analysis, and participant observations) I employ constructivist grounded theory.²

This work is supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the DAAD-Stiftung, KSB Stiftung Stipendium.