One of the ecological priorities for Montreal seems to be revegetation (verdissement in Quebec French), principally to struggle against heat island effects but also to boost biodiversity and make the city more pleasant and beautiful. This goal appears in several official documents. In Montreal’s last sustainable plan for the period 2016-2020, one of the four…
Poo-lympics: the blunder of Rio’s sewerage
Treating sewage across Rio’s vast metropolis is an intricate issue entwined with the social and political marginalisation of favelas. Though untreated wastewater affects both people of the hills and people of the asphalt, the impacts of poor sanitation are greater for those in poorer and informal communities. Only a small percentage of water flows are…
Socio-ecological transformation in the wetlands of Xochimilco
In previous blog posts, I have gone into detail about water and urban political ecology so this blog post will explore how political, social and economic relations structure local sense of place and connection to Xochimilco. By investigating the local’s sense of place, I hope to uncover the relations which structure access to this unique…
To sanitise, or segregate? How Cape Town dealt with disease and why it still matters today
In the Western contemporary, sanitation is a given. For the entirety of my life, access to fresh drinking water and clean loos, supported by a well organised sewage system has seemed like a basic function of modern existence. But for the non-white communities in Cape Town’s informal settlements, my everyday reality would be their ‘dream…
Montreal towards ‘zero waste’? An effort on organic waste
Waste management is a key competence of municipalities, both the collection and the treatment, and is important for hygiene, health, comfort and the environment. The consumer society leads us to consume more and more goods and produce more and more wastes. Sustainable waste management goes with recycling. It goes also with a reduction of the…
Real consequences of obsolete water management in Rio de Janeiro
Water resource management is a contentious issue in contemporary Brazil. Urbanisation and the growth of regional economic nodes across Brazil has increased demands for food and energy. As such, the expansion of the agricultural sector and the country-wide reliance on hydropower contributes to issues of water scarcity within cities. Though a large proportion of Brazil’s…
Are Mexico City’s poorest being left high and dry?
In my previous post, I explored what happens at the start and finish of Mexico City’s water flow. This post will go into what happens in between, by looking at the transportation and distribution of water through the lens of ‘urban metabolism’ which I mentioned in my previous post. The amount of water coming out…
Urban waste: a problem or opportunity for Cape’s Townships?
Waste is one of the many unintended consequences in the epoch of modernisation. Cape Town is no exemption, producing up to 7,000 tonnes of waste per day. To make matters worse, just 10% is recycled, with the rest accumulating across one of the city’s whopping 164 landfill sites (Cebuulski 2018). These situate around the outskirts…
Either ends of the spectrum: indigenous populations footing Mexico City’s water bill
When it comes to urban political ecology and Mexico City in academic literature, there is no doubt that water is the most written about topic in the literature. The rapid processes of urbanisation over the past 700 years have turned Mexico City from a city of floating gardens and a place that was once dubbed…
The juxtaposed beauty of Rio’s formal/informal refuse management
Solid waste management is an issue for all urban agglomerations as the excessive consumption of modern lifestyles inevitably produce vast amounts of refuse. Rio de Janeiro’s population of 6.5 million produces around 9050 tonnes of solid waste per day, equating to around 1.5kg per person per day (Tirado-Soto and Zamberlan 2013). The ‘formal’ solutions for…
Urban Political Ecology UCL 