Liquidscapes of the city

Abstract

The liquid reality of the urban has been often explored in the field of urban political ecology, which has considered the ways in which the city is actually stitched together or pulled apart by the physical flows of liquids, the submerged city made of pipes, tubes and sewers, a hidden network in which the drinkable and the wasted liquids intersect and flow asymmetrically. Many of these works have been crucial in embedding water in socio-political relations. However, often at the cost of reducing water to said relations, falling short of attending to water’s agentic capacity, failing to consider the encounter between those socio-political relations and the materiality of the liquid itself. Usually framed through questions of power, inequality, consumption and cultural meaning, rarely these studies have engaged with the materiality and agency of urban liquids and, most crucially, with their essential capacity to overflow. In this propositional piece, we ask the question: what does it mean to think the city through its overflows?