Liquid Power

Erik Swyngedouw

Published by The MIT Press

Swyngedouw, E..
Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain.
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

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Preface

This book project commenced on a rainy Saturday morning in 1995 in my

office in the School of Geography at Oxford University. That morning I was
trying to finalize a proposal for the European Union’s Marie Curie Fellow-
ship program that permitted senior researchers to undertake work in what
the EU’s bureaucratic jargon then defined as Objective 5 regions. The latter
were regions that performed economically far below the EU’s average and
would benefit from “knowledge transfer”’ by “experienced” scholars. At
the time, most of Spain’s regions (with the exception of the Madrid region
and Catalonia) fitted the bill. At the same time, Spain was also suffering
from an extraordinary period of drought that had lasted several years and
had sparked an intensely politicized debate over water and water resource
management.
For these reasons, it offered an appealing laboratory to extend into new
domains my political-ecological work on the relationships between social
and political power on the one hand and water and its hydro-social orga-
nization on the other. The problem was that I needed a personal invitation
from a local university. So, I picked up the phone to call my old friend and
former co-fellow at the Centre for Metropolitan Research and Planning at
Johns Hopkins University, Fernando Moliní, now professor of geography
at Madrid’s Autonomous University. I had not seen him for over ten years
and I was not even sure if the old phone number I had in my address book
was still correct. But as soon as the receiver at the other end was picked up,
I recognized Fernando’s voice.
I explained my predicament and he immediately offered to look into
it. Just a few hours later I received a telephone call from Professor Immac-
ulada Calavaca, head of the geography department of the University of
Seville. By the next morning, all the paper work was sorted and I was set
for my first foray into researching Spain’s tumultuous hydro-social land-
scape. Upon arrival in Seville, I met Professor Leandro del Moral, the great
x Preface

leading national expert on water politics, who was to become my mentor

and good friend. Over coffee in the university’s bar, I explained my interest
in Spain’s waters and asked for some initial reading material. After finishing
our coffee, Leandro took me through the corridors of the university, located
in the old tobacco factory where Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, immortal-
ized in George Bizet’s opera, was rolling cigars in the nineteenth century.
Upon unlocking the door to his office, Leandro said: “Here it is. Take it.”
Shelves stacked with literature and documents on Spain’s waters lined the
office walls. Without Leandro’s generosity in sharing years of accumulated
work, this book would not have been possible. Leandro, his wonderful wife
Angela, daughter Lucia, and now grandson Nilo, have become great friends
over the years, offering a welcoming home each time I return to this most
beautiful and exuberant of Spanish cities. Indeed, Seville became a second
home to me as the project took shape over the years following my first
meeting with Leandro, and the conversations and discussions with aca-
demics, activists, and policymakers in Andalusia proved to be invaluable
for shaping and sharpening the arguments that unfold in this book. Lean-
dro’s extensive network of contacts was also vital in helping me to navigate
through the labyrinthine and highly contentious assemblages and constel-
lations that shape and reshape Spain’s hydro-social cycle.
A few years later, in 2004, I spent a sabbatical leave period at the Autono-
mous University of Barcelona. David Saurí from the geography department
and Joan Martinez-Alier and his team at ICTA (Institut de Ciència i Tec-
nologia Ambientals) were great hosts. David is both an expert on Spain’s
water and a Tintin fan. No wonder we hit it off immediately. My successive
research visits to Barcelona made me discover another one of Spain’s exu-
berant cities and offered a rather different perspective on Spain’s tormented
twentieth century political-ecological transformations.
These two cities, where I would return many times, provided a welcom-
ing base from which I ventured into the excavation and reconstruction of
water’s liquid power and the exploration of how Spain’s waters are involved
in shifting geometries of economic power networks, changing political alli-
ances, competing cultural discourses, and technological controversies. I
visited dams and irrigated fields, canals and desalination stations. I talked
to local policymakers and representatives of regional or national govern-
ment departments. I delved into archives and watched hours of film reels.
I interviewed activists and academics, engineers and politicians, laypersons
as well as experts. All of them I thank for their generosity and their willing-
ness to share their knowledge and views with me.
Preface xi

The list of people who have been vital in bringing this project to frui-
tion is indeed too long to recount and I cannot possibly do justice to all of
them. Arantxa Rodriguez in Bilbao, Giorgos Kallis and his wonderful team
of activist-researchers in Barcelona, and Antonio Rico and María Hernandez
in Alicante were fantastic hosts and became dear friends.
I am of course also indebted to the two fine institutions where I worked
over the past fifteen years, first at the School of Geography and the Environ-
ment of Oxford University and, since 2006, in Geography at the School of
Environment, Education and Development of the University of Manches-
ter. The latter, in particular, gave me valuable time and intellectual space,
as well as an academic milieu conducive to debate and discussion with
excellent students and scholars. These conversations too had their imprint
on the project and helped shape the arguments developed in this book. I
am particularly grateful to Gavin Bride, Stefan Bouzarovski, Saska Petrova,
John O’Neil, Frank Moulaert, Simon Guy, Noel Castree, Vladimir Jankovic,
Nik Heynen, Pedro Arojo, Neil Coe, Martin Evans, Esteban Castro, Mark
Usher, Jason Beery, the Manchester OpenSpace crew (Brian Rosa, Joanna
Tantanasi, Lazaros Karaliotas, Sampson Wong), Andy Merrifield, Manches-
ter University’s Society Environment Research Group, David Harvey, Robin
de la Motte, Guy Baeten, Joseph Garí, Greet Remans, Stuart Franklin, Ben
Page, Karen Bakker, Alex Loftus, Jessica Budds, Christine McCullough,
Kerem Oktem, Morag Torrance, Michael Ekers, Miranda Morgan, Simon
Addison, Suraya Fazel-Ellahi, Creighton Connolly, JulieAnn De Los Reyes,
Santiago Gorostiza (especially for help with sourcing some of the images),
and Melissa Garcia Lamarca. I am also grateful to Alba Vidal for her research
assistance. The quality of the manuscript improved considerably thanks to
the competent and meticulous proofreading by Hounaida Abi Haidar, Ben
Lear, and Eva Swyngedouw.
Cartographers and graphics specialists Ailsa Allen from Oxford Uni-
versity and Nick Scarle from the Manchester University Cartographic
Unit took care of the artwork, figures, and maps. It is great to work with
such skilled specialists. Thanks also to Clay Morgan, Miranda Martin,
and Kathleen Caruso at the MIT Press for their support, encouragement,
patience, and professionalism.
Most of the research on which this book is based was funded by the
EU’s successive Framework Programs, most recently the ENTITLE Program,
a Marie Curie Initial Training Grant, coordinated by the Autonomous Uni-
versity of Barcelona, and which brings together a fabulous bunch of junior
and senior political ecologists from around the world. It is this kind of proj-
ect that makes me believe that the European Union is still something worth
xii Preface

fighting for, despite the widespread despair over the direction that this geo-
political project is currently taking. The British Academy funded part of the
fieldwork on the politics of desalination. The bulk of the manuscript was
completed during my tenure as a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior
Research Fellow in 2011.
I am particularly grateful to the National Archives of the Administra-
tion of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (Ministerio
de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Archivo General de la Administración), the
archives of the Junta de Castilla y León, and Antonio Rico of the geography
department of the University of Alicante for their help in securing some
of the images. Chapters 3 and 4 draw partly on earlier work published as
“Modernity and Hibridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of
the Spanish Waterscape, 1890–1930,” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 89 (3) (1999): 443-465. Chapters 5 and 6 have been expanded
and adapted from “TechnoNatural Revolutions—The Scalar Politics of Fran-
co’s Hydro-Social Dream for Spain, 1939–1975,” Transactions, Institute of
British Geographers New Series 32 (2007): 9–28, and from “Producing Nature,
Scaling Environment: Water, Networks, and Territories in Fascist Spain,”
in Leviathan Undone? Towards a Political Economy of Scale, ed. R. Keil and R.
Mahon (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 121–139.
A summary of chapter 8 was published as “Into the Sea: Desalination as a
Hydro-Social Fix in Spain,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers
103 (2) (2013): 261–270.
Over the many years it took to complete this book, I saw my children
Eva, Nikolaas, and Arno grow up to become the wonderful adults they now
are. They had to live through long absences and endure my endless con-
versations and discussions about water, politics, and emancipatory politics,
but they also accompanied me during delightfully intense times in Spain.
Last but not least, I dedicate this book to Maria Kaika, for everything.