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  • Published: 15 August 2023
  • ISBN: 9780262548960
  • Imprint: MIT Press Academic
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $79.99
Categories:

Liquid Power

Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain




An examination of the central role of water politics and engineering in Spain's modernization, illustrating water's part in forging, maintaining, and transforming social power.

An examination of the central role of water politics and engineering in Spain's modernization, illustrating water's part in forging, maintaining, and transforming social power.

In this book, Erik Swyngedouw explores how water becomes part of the tumultuous processes of modernization and development. Using the experience of Spain as a lens to view the interplay of modernity and environmental transformation, Swyngedouw shows that every political project is also an environmental project.

In 1898, Spain lost its last overseas colony, triggering a period of post-imperialist turmoil still referred to as El Disastre. Turning inward, the nation embarked on “regeneration” and modernization. Water played a central role in this; during a turbulent period from the twentieth century into the twenty-first—through the Franco years and into the new era of liberal democracy—Spain's waterscapes were completely transformed, with large-scale projects that ranged from dam construction to irrigation to desalinization. Swyngedouw describes the contested political-ecological process that marked this transformation, showing that the Spain's diverse and contested paths to modernization were predicated on particular trajectories of environmental transformation.

After laying out his theoretical perspectives, Swyngedouw analyzes three periods of Spain's political-ecological modernization: the aspirations and stalled modernization of the early twentieth century; the accelerated efforts under the authoritarian Franco regime—which included six hundred dams, expanded hydroelectricity, and massive irrigation; and the changing hydro-social landscape under social democracy. Offering an innovative perspective on the relationship of nature and society, Liquid Power illuminates the political nature of nature.

  • Published: 15 August 2023
  • ISBN: 9780262548960
  • Imprint: MIT Press Academic
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $79.99
Categories:

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Praise for Liquid Power

"Liquid Power is a momentous addition to the annals of hydraulic state-making. Swyngedouw's sparkling analysis of water management and hydro-politics is epic in scope and decisive in detail. I can guarantee readers they won't ever see Spain the same way again."
--Andrew Ross, author of Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City

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