What has long been common elsewhere feels relatively novel in Germany and in Britain. Cities are running out of water, putting vulnerable and marginalized groups disproportionately at risk. This is leading to social and political conflicts around the causes of and impacts and necessary responses to water scarcity and its entanglements with urban planning policies related to housing, industrial development or sustainability transitions. Yet, despite urban actors’ unequal experiences of plans to tackle the water crisis and growing conflicts around it, dominant approaches to water scarcity in urban studies tend to forego analyses of the contentious politics and conflicts shaping the local planning processes aimed at managing it. Explicit links between planning policies and water availability remain underexamined.
To address this gap, the project dwells on the contentious politics of planning for water scarcity, asking (1) how local actors from the state, civil society and the economy negotiate plans for the emerging water crisis and how these plans are being contested and (2) to what extent this situation leads to alleged trade-offs between environmental goals and questions of social justice. To answer this, the project interweaves and builds upon planning literatures, political sociology and urban political ecology. It employs case study research in Berlin and its transforming hinterlands (Germany), where the coal exit is generating water shortages and Cambridge (United Kingdom), where water scarcity is entangled with questions around a dire housing crisis.
This research thus contributes to the interdisciplinary field of urban studies by pursuing three objectives: First, producing critical knowledge about the actors involved in these plans serves to gather insights into their competing interests, visions, and strategies. Second, by way of empirically tacing how water scarcity is governed and contested in relation to planned housing developments, I aim to explore the intersection of overlapping socio-ecological crises, namely water and housing, uncovering a previously underexplored nexus in urban planning. Third, building on these empirical contributions, the research aims to generate new knowledge about the role of the local state in dealing with the alleged trade-offs between environmental goals and questions of social justice.
This work is supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and KSB Stiftung.