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The city as a hybrid: On nature, society and cyborgurbanizationErik Swyngedouw

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To cite this article: Erik Swyngedouw (1996): The city as a hybrid: On nature, society and cyborg urbanization, CapitalismNature Socialism, 7:2, 65-80

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The City As a Hybrid: On Nature, Societyand Cyborg Urbanization

By Erik Swyngedouw

We have before us, here and now, a whole. It is boththe condition for production and the product of actionitself, the place for mankind and the object of itspleasure: the earth.1

...a thing cannot be understood or even talked aboutindependently of the relations it has with otherthings. For example, resources can be defined only inrelationship to the mode of production which seeks tomake use of them and which simultaneously"produces" them through both the physical andmental activity of the users. There is, therefore, nosuch thing as a resource in abstract or a resourcewhich exist as a "thing in itself."2

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid ofmachine and organism, a creature of social reality aswell as a creature of fiction.3

The two extremes, local and global, are much lessinteresting than the intermediary arrangements that weare calling networks....Is it our fault if the networksare simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, likediscourse, and collective, like society?4

1 H. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity (London: Verso, 1995), p. 133.2 D. Harvey, Limits to Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 212.3 D. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women — The Reinvention of Nature(London: Free Association Books, 1991), p. 149.4 B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,1993), pp. 122, 6.

CNS 7 (2), June, 1996 65

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1. IntroductionIn his forthcoming book, David Harvey5 insists that there is

nothing particularly unnatural about New York City. Yet the virtualimages displaying and displayed in Time Square, the Disneyfication of42nd Street, Bronx kids playing with stand-pipes in the hot New Yorksummers, the multi-million dollar crack scene, Wall Street derivatives,trading in pork bellies and the fight of the homeless for their ownnature/space immortalized in Neil Smith's continuing chronicle of NewYork City's remorseless urban restructuring6 — these all seem veryremote, if not antithetical, to "nature," to the "green and pleasant land"not tainted by humans and left to its own devices and fundamental lawsof life as excavated by biologists, chemists and physicists.

On closer inspection, however, the city and the urban are a networkof interwoven processes that are both human and natural, real andfictional, mechanical and organic. There is nothing "purely" social ornatural about the city, even less a-social or a-natural; the city is bothnatural and social, real and fictional. In the city, society and nature,representation and being, are inseparable, integral to each other,infinitely bound up; yet, simultaneously, this hybrid socio-natural"thing" called "the city" is full of contradictions, tensions and conflicts.Urbanity and urbanization capture those proliferating objects that DonnaHaraway calls "Cyborgs" or "Tricksters"7 or that Bruno Latour refers toas "Quasi-Objects";8 they are intermediaries that embody and mediatenature and society and weave a network of infinite transgressions andliminal spaces. The kids' playful celebration of city street life whilecontesting, provoking and titillating the urban powers that be,whenever they let the water flush from the standpipe over the streetpavement and dance to the tune of rap's exhilerant exhortation ofquotidian big city life, is testament to the socio-natural production ofthe city and city life. If I were to capture some of that water in a cup,excavate the networks that brought it there and follow Ariadne's threadthrough the water, "I would pass with continuity from the local to the

5 D. Harvey, The Environment of Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming).6 N. Smith, "Social Justice, Gentrification and the Revanchist City," in A.Merrifield and E. Swyngedouw, eds., The Urbanization of Injustice (London:Lawrence & Wishart, forthcoming) and N. Smith and A. Herod,Gentrification: A Comprehensive Bibliography (New Brunswick, N.J.:Department of Geography, Rutgers University, 1991 (Series title:Discussion papers [Rutgers University, Department of Geography] newseries no. 1).7 Haraway, 1991, op. cit.8 Latour, 1993, op. cit.

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global, from the human to the nonhuman."9 These flows would narratemany interrelated tales of the city: the story of its people and thepowerful socio-ecological processes that produce the urban and itsspaces of privilege and exclusion; of participation and marginality; ofrats and bankers; of water-borne disease and speculation in water-industry related futures and options; of chemical, physical andbiological reactions and transformations; of the global hydrologicalcycle and global warming; of the capital, machinations and strategies ofdam builders; of urban land developers; of the knowledges of theengineers; of the passage from river to urban reservoir. In sum, my cupof water embodies multiple tales of the "city as a hybrid." The rhizomeof underground and surface water flows, of streams, pipes and veins thatcome together in urban water gushing from the stand-pipe is a powerfulmetaphor for the socio-ecological processes that produce the city andbecome embodied in city life.

It is rather astonishing that critical urban studies have very rarelytaken this to heart. Over the past two decades, a bewildering literatureon political-economic perspectives of the city has been published (muchof which has now become the staple of many an urban study or publicpolicy program). While many of these critical perspectives attempted toimplicitly or explicitly form a tandem with urban social movementsand radical urban politics, only a few of them tried to build bridges withecological movements whose political momentum has becomeincreasingly important over the past 25 years or so. This is all the moresurprising given the foundations of Marxism and historical materialismin general, which always maintained the ontological basis of nature inthe production of society.10 Recently, a rapprochement has begun todevelop between ecological thinking, political economy, urban studiesand critical social and cultural theory. This may provide the fermentfrom which a new and richer urban ecology or urban political ecologymay germinate.

In this article, I wish to explore recent developments in politicalecology perspectives on the city; to redefine the problematic and chartthe contours of a political and research program; and tentatively toindicate a possible avenue for exploring such a new urban political-ecological program.

9 Ibid., p. 121.10 T. Benton, "Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique andReconstruction," New Left Review, 178, 1989; and R. Grundman, Marxismand Ecology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

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2. Theorizing Socio-Nature:Political Ecology/Urban Ecology

In Grundrisse and in Capital, Marx insisted on the "natural"foundations of social development. Clearly, any materialist approachnecessarily adheres to a perspective which insists that "nature" is anintegral part of the "metabolism" of social life. Social relations operatein and through metabolizing the "natural" environment through whichboth society and nature are transformed, changed, or altered and newsocio-natural forms are produced. While nature provides the foundation,the dynamics of social relations produce nature's and society's history.Of course, the ambition of classical Marxism was wider thanreconstructing the dialectics of historical socio-natural transformationsand their contradictions. It also insisted on the ideological notion of"nature" in bourgeois science and society and claimed to uncover the"real" Truth through the excavation of "underlying" socio-ecologicalprocesses.11 However, by concentrating on the labor process per se,Marxist analysis tended to replicate the very problem it meant tocriticize. In particular, by rendering nature to the substratum for theunfolding of social relations, in particular of labor relations, itmaintained the material basis for social life, while relegating "naturalprocesses" to a realm outside the social. Ironically, this is almostexactly identical to the bourgeois ideological view of nature as externalto society, yet universal in its functioning.

Neil Smith, for his part, insisted that nature is an integral part of a"process of production."12 The latter concept, borrowed from Lefebvre,suggests that nature itself is a historical-geographical process, insistson the inseparability of society and nature, and maintains the unity ofsocio-nature as a produced thing. In brief, both society and nature areproduced, hence malleable, transformable and transgressive. Smith doesnot suggest that all non-human processes are socially produced, butargues that the idea of some sort of pristine nature ("first nature" inLefebvre's account) becomes increasingly problematic as historicalsocio-nature produces entirely new "nature" over space and time and asthe number of hybrids and quasi-objects proliferates and multiplies.Indeed, from the very beginning, but accelerating as "modernization"heated up, the objects and subjects of daily life became increasinglymore socio-natural. Consider, for example, the socio-ecological

11 A. Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: New Left Books,1971); and Benton, 1989, op. cit.12 N. Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production ofSpace (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).

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transformations of entire ecological systems (through agriculture, forexample); sand and clay metabolized into concrete buildings andurbanity through the labor process; and the contested production of newgenomes (such as Oncomousetm^.13

We encounter here, however, an interesting paradox. Insisting onthe "social production of nature" suggests the "determination in the lastinstance" of social relations in the production process, hence may easilyfall back into the trap of subsuming processes-in-nature under theumbrella of an exclusively socially produced and controlled nature; and,consequently, of the idea of a manageable and subordinated primordialand external nature whose metabolism remains "outside" the social anddiscursive. Nature itself belongs to the "pure" domain of the natural andphysical world and becomes just "tainted" and "transformed" by thesocial. Indeed, the ghost of Lysenko still haunts us. The social and thenatural are brought together and turned historical and geographical, butin ways that keep both "pure" and as separate domains. Not that thenetworks that constitute and the processes that produce "socio-natural"hybrids are reconstructed, but rather the social and natural are seen astwo contradictory, yet complementary, poles that construct a "reality"which is itself muddled and needs to be "purified" by isolating andseparating things natural and things social.

I would argue, with Latour,14 that this process of "purification"resides in the conceptual, deeply (non-)modernist, apparatus anddiscursive construction of the world into two separate, but deeplyinterrelated realms (and this is exactly the way in which the theoreticaldebate left and right and much of green is organized), nature and society,between which a dialectical relationship unfolds. The debate, then,becomes a dispute about the nature of the relationship, its implicationsand the absence/presence of some ontological foundation.

The argument runs more or less as follows. Humans encounternature with its internal dynamics, principles and laws as a society withits own organizing principles. This encounter inflicts consequencesfrom one onto the other. The dialectic between nature and societybecomes an external one, i.e., a conflictual relationship between twoseparate fields, nature and society, mediated by ideological andrepresentational practices. The product, then, is the thing (object orsubject) that is produced out of this encounter. If we, however, maintain

13 D. Haraway, "Mice into Wormholes: A Technoscience Fugue in TwoParts" (mimeographed paper, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1994).14 Latour, 1993, op. cit.

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a view of dialectics as internal relations,15 we must insist on the needto transcend the binary formations of "nature" and "society" and todevelop a new "language" which maintains the dialectical unity of theprocess of change as embodied in the thing itself. The things arehybrids or quasi-objects (subjects and objects, material and discursive,natural and social) from the very beginning.

Here I shall use, for better or for worse, political ecology to capturethis process of the production of networks and socio-nature to refer tothe product, the hybrid, the quasi-object. I mean that the "world" is ahistorical-geographical process of perpetual metabolism in which"social" and "natural" processes combine in an historical-geographical"production process of socio-nature," whose outcome (historical nature)embodies chemical, physical, social, economic, political and culturalprocesses in highly contradictory but inseparable manners. Every bodyand thing is a cyborg, a mediator, part social and part natural, butwithout discrete boundaries, continually internalizing the multiplecontradictory relations that re-define and re-work every body and thing.Again, my cup of water can serve to exemplify this. Drinking waterfrom the stand-pipe combines the circulation of productive, merchantand financial capital with the production of land rent and their associatedclass relations; the ecological transformation of hydrological complexesand the bio-chemical process of purification with the libidinoussensation and the physiological necessity of drinking fluids; and thesocial regulation of access to water with images of clarity, cleanliness,health and virginity. Although I cannot separate these "concepts" andpractices from each other in the flow of water, it does not take much toidentify the profound social, cultural, political and ecological forces,struggles and power relations at work in this perpetual metabolizingcirculation process of flowing water. We can represent this in Figure 1.

However "true" the above may be, it remains caught in a"representational" discourse of knowledge production which denies or, atleast, fails to problematise, how this representation of socio-nature isitself inevitably caught in a weave of symbolic and discursivemeanings. Recent post-marxist or post-modernist accounts havechallenged the very assumption on which the above rests; that is, theyhave challenged the possibility of constructing "The Truth" about theworld, a claim that many Western historical-materialist perspectives

15 B. Oilman, Dialectical Investigations (London: Routledge, 1993); andHarvey, 1996, op. cit

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Figure 1. The Dialectics of the Material Production ofSocio-Nature

IDEOLOGICAL ANDREPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES

METABOLISMBIO-CHEMICAL (the material production SOCIALRELATIONS of socio-nature) RELATIONS

(quasi-objects/hybrids)

MATERIAL PRACTICES

made their own, both in their attempt to "unveil" the ideologicalconstruction of other epistemes and in arguing for the "real" science ofhistorical materialism. As Castree16 argues, both historians of scienceand cultural theorists have insisted that "socio-nature" is not just outthere but becomes constructed via time-place specific modes oftechnological, political, and "staged" appropriation of "filtered facts"("scientific" experiments or methods are the classic case of this); thatthe production of "knowledge(s)" proceeds in and throughrepresentational systems or discursive apparatuses where reality residesin the representation, yet remains outside to it; and that the presumedcorrespondence of the concept with the thing is as much infused withthe "cultural" position of the representor as with the materiality of theprocess represented. Put simply, the representation above of "reality"remains caught in the socio-cultural situatedness of the times and placesof representation. Sensitivity to the constructions of representations ofand discourses on "socio-nature" can be diagrammatically represented inFigure 2 (which is apparently fundamentally at odds with Figure 1).

Despite the implicit claim made in the first half of this section ofthe possibility of constructing a "Truth" of socio-nature via a historical-materialist analysis of the internal dialectical relations of the perpetualmetabolism of socio-nature, cultural critics and historians of science(nature) question the very possibility of such claim; more importantly,they insist on the inevitable non-neutrality or positionality of suchclaims.17 In short, constructing knowledge is in itself a deeplyhistorical, dialectical, powerful process that is infused with andembodies the very metabolism it claims to reconstruct as the very

16 N. Castree, "The Nature of Produced Nature: Materiality and KnowledgeConstruction in Marxism," Antipode, 27, 1, 1995.17 Haraway, 1995, op. cit.; Latour, 1993, op. cit.

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Figure 2. The Dialectics of the RepresentationalProduction of Socio-Nature

REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES

METABOLISMDISCURSIVE (the discursive production LANGUAGECONSTRUCTIONS of socio-nature)

(Quasi-objects, hybrids)

CULTURAL PRACTICES

materiality of socio-nature itself. In short, the "real" metabolismencircled via a political-ecological episteme is itself encapsulated withand engulfed by the equally real discursive/linguistic/culturalconstruction of reality. My claim is that the socio-natural productionprocess of the city is itself caught in a represenational discourse thatproduces nature/society (socio-nature) in a particular partial fashion.This insight, of course, makes my claim to "truth" as vulnerable to"relativist" interpretations as any other. Yet, we cannot easily dismissthese post-enlightenment criticisms. In what follows, I shall outline apossible way out of this paradox and attempt to illustrate this with aconcrete example of the "production of urban socio-nature."

2. Muddling Through: Flow, Process and Dialectics

Properly amended, Lefebvre's work can come to the rescue here.For Lefebvre, capturing space or socio-nature from a dialectical andemancipatory perspective implies constructing multiple narratives thatrelate material, representational and symbolic practices, each of whichhas a series of particular characteristics and internalizes the dialecticalrelations defined by the other "domains," but none of which can bereduced to the other.18 Of course, the production process of socio-natureincludes both material processes (edifying constructs and manufacturingnew genetic materials) as well as proliferating discursive and symbolicrepresentations of nature. As Lefebvre insisted,19 the production ofnature (space) transcends merely material conditions and processes, butis related to the production of discourses on nature (mainly byscientists, engineers and the like), on the one hand, and powerfulimages and symbols inscribed in this thing called "nature" (virginity, amoral code, originality, "survival of the fittest," wilderness), on theother.

18 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).19 Ibid.

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In short, Lefebvre's triad opens up an avenue for enquiry whichinsists on the "materiality" of each of the component elements, butwhose content can be approached only via the excavation of themetabolism of their becoming, in which the internal relations are thesignifying and producing mechanisms. Lefebvre insists on theontological priority of process and flux which becomes interiorized ineach of the moments of the production process, but always in afleeting, dynamic and transgressive manner. Whether we discuss theprocess of speciation or the symbolic meanings of nature to city folks,it is the stories of the process of their perpetual re-working that broachtheir being as part of a process of continuous transformation in whichthe stories themselves will subsequently take part. Latour's networksand quasi-objects need to be historicized. Following Ariadne's threadthrough the Gordian knot of socio-nature's networks — as Latoursuggests — is not good enough if stripped from the process of itshistorical-geographical production. Hybridization is a process ofproduction, of becoming, of perpetual transgression. Lefebvre'sinsistence on temporality(ies), combined with Latour's networkedreconstruction of quasi-objects, provide a glimpse of how a reworkedpolitical ecology of the city might be practised.

The above two diagrams, therefore, need to be combined andinserted into each other, as in Figure 3. None of the component parts isreducible to the other, yet their constitution arises from the multipledialectical relations that swirl out from the production process itselfand, consequently, neither of them is neutral in terms of the productionprocess nor in terms of the representational positioning or in terms ofthe representor.

Figure 3. The Production of Socio-NatureREPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES

DISCURSIVE LANGUAGECONSTRUCTIONS

METABOLISMIDEOLOGICAL (the production of SOCIALPRACTICES socio-nature) RELATIONS

(Quasi-objects/hybrids)

BIO-CHEMICAL/ CULTURALPHYSICAL PROCESSES PRACTICES

MATERIAL PRACTICES

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In sum, political ecology is a process-based episteme in whichnothing is ever fixed; or, at best, fixity is the transient moment that cannever be captured in its entirety as the flows perpetually destroy andcreate, combine and separate. The dialectical perspective also insists onthe non-neutrality of relations in terms of both their operation and theiroutcome, and, finally, distinct categories (nature, society, city, species)are the outcome of the infusion of materially-discursive practices whichare each time creatively destroyed in the very production process ofsocio-nature.

Where does this lead us, then, in terms of approaching the politicalecology of the city? A few conclusions come readily to mind. First,although we cannot escape the "thing" or "the product," transformativeknowledges about the latter can only be gauged from reconstructing theprocesses of production of "quasi-objects." Second, there is no "thing-like" ontological or essential foundation (society, nature or text), as theprocess of becoming and of hybridization has ontological andepistemological priority. Third, as every "thing-cyborg" internalizes themultiple relations of its production, any "thing" can be entered as thestarting point for undertaking the archaeology of her/his socio-naturalmetabolism (the production of her/his socio-nature). Fourth, thisarchaeology has always already begun and is never ending (cf.Althusser's infamous "history as a process without a subject"), alwaysopen, contested and contestable as each narrative becomes interiorized inthe production of the thing her/himself. Fifth, this does not necessarilylead to a relativist position given the non-neutrality and intenselypowerful forces through which socio-nature is produced. Everyarchaeology and associated narrative and praxis is always implicated in,and consequential to, this very production process. Knowledge andpractice are always "situated" in the weave of (power) relations thatdefines and produces socio-nature. Sixth, the notion of a socio-naturalproduction process transcends the binary distinctions betweensociety/nature, material/ideological, and real/discursive. Seventh, itinsists that every practice is inserted into the power relations that infusethe production process of socio-nature.

Of course, all this is easy to say but hard to do. Yet, I wouldmaintain that such a perspective has profound implications forunderstanding the relationship between capitalism, modernity, ecology,and the city, both for approaching the political ecology of the city andfor transformative socialist-ecological urban politics. A number ofrecent contributions to this debate have begun to address thisproblematic in one way or another. William Cronon in Nature'sMetropolis, for example, tells the story of Chicago from the vantage

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point of the socio-natural processes that transformed both city andcountryside and produced the particular political ecology that shaped thetransformation of the mid-West and produced a particular Americansocio-nature.20 While symptomatically silent about the myriadstruggles that have infused this process (African-American, women andworkers' organizations and struggles are notoriously absent from ormarginalized in his narrative), the book marks interesting and powerfulpointers on the way of a political ecology of the urban. Mike Davis, forhis part, in City of Quartz21 and, more directly, in recent writing on"natural" disasters in Los Angeles,22 suggests how nature and societybecome materially and discursively constructed in and through thedialectics of Los Angeles' urbanization process and of the multiplesocial struggles that have infused and shaped this process in deeplyuneven, exclusive and empowering/disempowering ways. Surely,homelessness and racism combine with pollution, earthquakes and waterscarcity as the most acute socio-ecological problems that have beenproduced through the particular form of post-industrial capitalistdevelopment that has shaped LA's becoming as the Third WorldMegalopolis. These excavations are hesitant, yet important, steps in thedevelopment of a critical and political ecologically activist scholarshipon the socio-nature of the city. In the next part, we shall tentativelyexplore this perspective further. Our vantage point will be thecirculation of water, its insertion in the metabolism of the city and inthe political ecology of the urbanization process.

3. The City in a Cup Of Water

In this story, I shall use once again a cup of water as my symbolicand material entry point into an (admittedly somewhat sketchy) attemptto excavate the political ecology of the urbanization process.23 Water isof course bio-chemically vital, embodies deep social meaning andcultural value, and internalizes powerful relations, both socio-economicand physical. Life in whatever form is hardly imaginable without water.The socio-natural production of the city is predicated upon some sort of

20 W. Cronon, Nature's Metropolis (New York: Norton, 1991).21 M. Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1991).22 M. Davis, "Los Angeles after the Storm: The Dialectic of OrdinaryDisasters," Antipode, 37, 3, 1995.2 3 E. Swyngedouw, El Problema del Abastecimiento del Agua Potable enGuayaquil, ILDIS, Quito, 1995a; E. Swyngedouw, "The Contradictions ofUrban Water Provision," Third World Planning Review, 17, 4, 1995b; andE. Swyngedouw, "The Political Ecology of the Urbanization of Water inGuayaquil, Ecuador: 1880-1990," Environment and Planning A(forthcoming, 1996).

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circulating water. The multiple temporalities and interpenetratingcirculations of water — for example, the hydrological cycle,canalization, and distribution networks of all kinds — illustrate theperpetual metabolization and mobilization of water. Water is,moreover, worldwide rapidly becoming a problem of frighteningdimensions. Over a billion people have no access to some sort ofreasonably potable water. Mega-cities in the developing world sufferfrom immense water shortages, while the water metabolism in westerncities begins to threaten the very metabolism of urban life as pollutantsof all kinds (but notably nitrates) challenge the very sustainability ofthe capitalist city and the metabolism of social and biological life.24 InLondon, for example, the sprawling explosion of rats roaming thestreets in the hours of the early morning is testament to the immanentcollapse of the city's water supply and sewage system. Yet, watercarries powerful symbolic meanings — health, purity, naturalness,which in recent years have been successfully "mined" by a burgeoningglobal multi-billion dollar mineral water industry. Our cup of waterrelates all things/subjects in a network, a rhizome, connecting the mostintimate of socio-spatial relations, inserts them in a giant politicaleconomy of urban, national and international development, and is partof a chain of local, regional, national and global circulations of water,money, texts and bodies.

In this sense, I would insist that we can reconstruct — and hencetheorize — the urbanization process as a political-ecological processwith water as the entry point; water that embodies, simultaneously andinseparably, bio-chemical and physical properties, cultural and symbolicmeanings, and socio-economic characteristics. These multiplemetabolisms of water are structured and organized through relations ofpower, socio-natural power, that is, relations of domination andsubordination, of access and exclusion, of emancipation and repression.These social power relations become embedded in the flow andmetabolisms of circulating water.

The circulation of water produces a physical geography and amaterial landscape, but also a symbolic and cultural landscape of power.The waterscape is a liminal landscape (to use Zukin's wording)25 wherethe cyborg character of the transgression between society's nature andnature's society is perpetually emptied out, filled in again, and

24 P. Gleick, ed., Water in Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press,1993); and S. Postel, The Last Oasis (London: Earthscan, 1992).25 S. Zukin, Landscapes of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press,1991).

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transformed.26 This circulation of water is embedded in and interiorizesa series of multiple power relations along ethnic, gender and classlines.27 These situated power relations, in turn, swirl out and operate ata variety of interrelated geographical scale levels, from the scale of thebody upward to the political ecology of the city to the global scale ofuneven development. While water is captured, sanitized, bio-chemicallymetabolized to become "urban" drinking water, it is simultaneouslyhomogenized, standardized and transformed into a commodity and intothe real-abstract homogenized qualities of money power and its manifoldsymbolic, cultural, social, and economic meanings. The struggle forwater and the contested nature of the uneven access to water turn theissue into a highly contested terrain that captures wider processes of thepolitical ecology of urbanization. This can be captured by the multipleand scaled power relationships that infuse the urban water circulationprocess.

Water has always possessed powerful connotations and conveyedimportant symbolic messages. "Naturalness," virginity, healing andpurification have often been associated with water, while waterspectacles have in many ways testified to the power and the glory ofvarious kinds of (urban) elites.28 Combined with the biologicalnecessity of water, urbanization has always been predicated uponorganizing, controlling and mastering the socio-natural circulation ofwater.

With the rise of the modern capitalist city, the powerful meaningsof water became once again transformed and combined with other socio-spatial forces in shaping decidedly new mechanisms of socio-naturaldifferentiation, of empowerment and disempowerment. Circulatingwater through the city and the effort to quite literally domesticate waterare fairly recent.29 The very idea of a city being permanently washedwith water flowing through its underground veins and in-door plumbingis a 19th century development, not surprisingly just a few years afterthe concept of circulation had become a key metaphor for relating to theworld. Harvey had developed the insight of the double circulation of

26 R. Keil, "A World of Natures: Space, Perception and the Construction ofUrban Environments," mimeographed paper, Faculty of EnvironmentalStudies, York University, 1994.27 See Swyngedouw, 1995a, op. cit.28 C.W. Moore and J. Lidz, Water and Architecture (London: Thames andHudson, 1994); S. Schama, Landscape & Memory (London: Harper Collins,1995).29 J.P. Goubert, The Conquest of Water (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).

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blood in the human body,30 Rousseau and Montesquieu talked about the"circulation" of power and wealth,31 while Ricardo and Marx hadexplained the circulation of money under capitalism.

The domestication of water and the privatization of bodily hygienewere predicated upon and paralleled by an increasing commodification ofwater. The urbanization of water, in short, necessitated both ecologicaltransformation (capturing water, engineering its flow, negotiating geo-political relations, mastering some sort of chemical and biologicalpurification and so forth) and a social transformation. Indeed the veryhomogenization and standardization of "potable" urban water propelledthe diverse natural flows and characteristics of nature's water into therealm of commodity and money circulation with its abstract qualitiesand concrete social power relations. The urban conquest of waterbrought it squarely into the sphere of money and cultural capital and itsassociated power relations and redrew socio-natural power relations inimportant new ways.

The commodified domestication of water announced, for example,the withdrawal of the urban elite body and bodily hygiene from thepublic or semi-public sphere and its retreat into the privacy andintimacy of the bathroom and the toilet. This, in turn, redefined thebody and bodily relations. The new sanitized and de-odorized (washed)urban body in a sanitized urban public civic space redefined both classand gender relations. Images of sexuality (predominantly female) beganto revolve around the secrets, intimacy and eroticism associated with thebathroom, the toilet, and the sprinkling of domesticated water over thenaked body. Of course, the new de-odorized urban body, embodyingquite literally a new civic, modern-urban ideal, carried by an urbanbourgeoisie that was becoming quickly self-confident of its new role,became re-odorized in new ways, expressing cultural distinction andpower differentiation.32 Men began to smell after tobacco and leather,women after roses and violets. But this new urban civic body alsoseparated the sanitized bodies of the new urban elites from the smellypeasant and sweaty proletariat. Class and gender relations becameimpregnated with smell and odor and the body aura became an element

30R. Sennett, Flesh and Stone (London: Faber and Faber, 1994).31 I. Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (London: Marion Boyars,1986).32 P. Bourdieu, Distinction (London: Routledge, London, 1986).

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in cultural and social differentiation and power relations.33 In short, theurban ecological conquest of water and the fusion of water circulationwith the urbanization process (for a vivid account see J. Verne'sfuturistic account of Paris),34 its commodified domestication and relatedprocesses of access to and exclusion from, brought water squarely intothe realm of urban social power.

Urban water works signalled this new class and genderdifferentiation. The mechanisms of exclusion and access to unlimitedquantities of potable water were cemented into the water engineeringsystem itself and remain like this till today. In third world cities, forexample, the elites, clustering around the water reservoirs, had and haveunlimited access to water, which in addition to the above culturaldistinctions, turned this into significantly longer life expectancy andinto valued symbols of cultural capital and power. Permanently irrigatedtropical gardens separate their often militarized urban oases from theurban desert that surrounds them, while fountains in the courtyardtestify to their social position. Images of the smelly peasant and un-hygienic indigina reinforce how water becomes an integral element ofsocial power in the city and part of the process of the urbanization ofnature. Water-related illnesses and deaths are the top cause of infantmortality for most of the world's children.

The social struggle around water is the result of the deeplyexclusive and marginalizing political, economic and ecologicalprocesses that drove the expansion of the city. The urbanization processitself is, indeed, predicated upon the mastering and engineering ofnature's water. The ecological conquest of water becomes a necessaryattribute for the expansion and growth of the city. At the same time,the capital required to build and expand the urban landscape itself is alsogenerated through the political-ecological transformation of the city'shinterland.35 In short, the political-ecological history of many cities canbe written from the perspective of the need to urbanize and domesticatenature's water and the parallel necessity to push the ecological frontieroutward as the city expanded. As such, the political-ecological processproduces both a new urban and rural socio-nature. The city's growth andwater urbanization process is closely associated with successive wavesof ecological conquest and the pushing outwards of the urban socio-

33 P. Suskind, Perfume (London: Penguin, 1987); A. Corbin, The Foul andthe Fragrant (London: Picador, 1994); and H.J. Rindisbacher, The Smell ofBooks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).34 J. Verne, Paris au XXième Siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1994).35 E. Swyngedouw, 1996, op. cit.

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ecological frontier. The history of Los Angeles' urbanization process,for example, indicates how the socio-ecological transformation of desertlands, the manufacture of an orchard socio-nature and the subsequentconstruction of "silicon" landscapes is parallelled by urbanizing,capturing and controlling ever larger watersheds, water flows, waterterritoria and an ever-changing, but immensely contested and sociallysignificant (in terms of access and exclusion, empowerment/disempowerment) choreography of national laws, rules and engineeringprojects.36 Local, regional and national socio-natures are combined withengineering narratives, land speculation and global water and moneyflows. Investments in bottled water companies, speculation in water-industry related and globally traded financial instruments andglobal/local hydrological cycles fuse together in the production ofhybridized waters and cyborg cities. Water circulation and theurbanization of water becomes thus deeply caught up in the politicalecology of the local and national state, the international divisions oflabor and local, regional and global hydrological and climatologicalcycles.

4. City As Cyborg

The production of the city as a cyborg, excavated through theanalysis of the circulation of hybridized water, opens up a new arena forthinking and acting on the city, an arena that is neither local nor global,but that weaves a network that is always simultaneously deeplylocalized and extends its reach over a certain scale, a certain spatialsurface. The tensions, conflicts and forces that flow with the waterthrough the body, the city, the region and the globe show the cracks inthe lines, the meshes in the net, the spaces and plateaus of power and ofresistance. When the kids unleash the flows of water and its countlesslines and threads that have brought them there from the stand-pipe anddance in the manufactured rain, they celebrate, contest and transformcity's nature and nature's city.

36 D. Worster, Rivers of Empire (New York: Random House, 1985); R.Gottlieb and M. Fitzsimmons, Thirst for Growth (Tucson: University ofArizona Press, 1991); N. Hundley, The Great Thirst (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1992).

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