
Departmental Papers (Sociology)
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
2016
Publication Source
Public Culture
Volume
22
Issue
2
Start Page
261
Last Page
289
Abstract
Specters of rationing haunt metro São Paulo. Water supplies have plunged to historic, dangerous lows. The idea of rationing has become a flash-point. The state’s center-right governor has insisted that rationing be avoided at all costs and the state’s profit-driven water utility has followed suit, even as dwindling water supplies are being opaquely and unequally distributed. To make sense of the situation, I propose, through an exploration of the crisis’s origins and recent developments that builds on over one year of ethnographic fieldwork, a new approach to ecological scarcity. It revitalizes, in a socioecological and crisis-sensitive form, Manuel Castells’s concept of collective consumption politics, with a focus on housing and land use. The question is how acute crises and longstanding socioecological struggles interact, from above and below. In São Paulo, this dilemma takes the form of housing movements’ and environmentalists’ longstanding estrangement, but prompted by crisis, some leaders are experimenting with cooperation. In an echo of the June 2013 bus fare protests, this fledgling coalition proposes a democratic version of rationing that goes beyond the distribution of water through pipes and that threatens broader power arrangements.
Copyright/Permission Statement
This is a pre-publication text, unformatted and missing final copy-edits. This pre-publication text is made available with permission from Duke University Press. For the final version, go to: http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/28/2_79/261.abstract.
Recommended Citation
Cohen, Daniel. 2016. "The Rationed City: The Politics of Water, Housing and Land Use in Drought-Parched São Paulo." Public Culture 22 (2): 261-289.
Included in
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Date Posted: 14 June 2017
This document has been peer reviewed.