Suchergebnisse

Durante la guerra civil española, los combates por la defensa de Madrid atrajeron la atención internacional. En las calles de la capital republicana tropas no profesionales lograron por primera vez detener a las mejores unidades del ejército español, y la aviación alemana empezó a poner en prácticas las tácticas de bombardeo que usaría durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El dominio de la geografía urbana del sistema hidráulico madrileño jugó un papel fundamental en la resistencia republicana. El control de los embalses al norte de la ciudad y el uso de las infraestructuras subterráneas de la ciudad para el combate proporcionó a los defensores ventajas tácticas y estratégicas significativas. Analizamos la gestión del agua en la ciudad durante la guerra centrándonos en la empresa responsable del servicio, Canales del Lozoya. ; During the Spanish Civil War, the battle for the defense of Madrid attracted international attention. It was on the streets of the capital where the unprofessional republican troops first managed to stop the best units of the Spanish army, while German aircraft put into practice bombing tactics that would later use during World War II. The control of urban hydrogeography in Madrid played a key role in Republican resistance. The seizing of the reservoirs north of the city and the military use of underground water infrastructures gave significant strategic and tactical advantages to the defenders. We analyze the city water management during the war by focusing on Canales del Lozoya the company in charge of the servicing water to Madrid.

The persistence of urban floods and the inability of aging sewage infrastructure to deal with stormwater make sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDSs) one of the emerging paradigms in urban water management, in which stormwater is no longer a hazard but a resource. Although most of the global research has been done on the technical aspects of SUDSs, their social impacts are not always taken into consideration. The neighborhood scale that characterizes SUDSs creates a different governance system -compared to the old structures of flood risk management -characterized by decentralization practices and where communities gain a better position of negotiation and new responsibilities. The objective of this research is to recognize how the diverse stakeholders involved in SUDSs interact with each other and to look into the different levels of understanding SUDSs as a new alternative of stormwater infrastructure. In order to accomplish this task, the paper introduces the case of the neighborhood of Bon Pastor (Barcelona, Spain), which has gone through urban transformations over the past years, promoting the development of SUDSs in 2012. Empirical evidence was obtained from 10 semi-structured interviews with government, technicians, social organizations, and local community citizens as well as revision of existing policy documents and grey literature on SUDSs and historical documents on the development of the neighborhood. The results show how active the community was during the design process and afterward, as sustainability gradually became one of the main topics in the neighborhood to be incorporated in new developments. However, it also unveiled several issues related to maintenance and the ambiguity of the term SUDS for the different stakeholders involved.

This article chronicles the complex, meandering, contested, and path-dependent unfolding of the remunicipalisation agenda pursued by a range of political forces and social movements in Barcelona as it has developed over the past few years. The remunicipalisation of water services management debate in the city has been marked by increasingly convoluted and intricately intertwined and enmeshed institutional configurations, legal controversies, entrenched and contested political positions, and sustained social activism. The case of Barcelona's water supply system is emblematic of the difficulties, resistances, and contradictions that open up when a long-standing status quo is challenged by the rising momentum of an oppositional agenda. The article narrates the unfolding of the controversy, demonstrating how the institutional configuration of water supply, which is organised at a metropolitan-regional level (comprising 22 municipalities and the city of Barcelona), multiplies contestations and controversies as local governments and their power coalitions respond differently to pressures and demands for remunicipalisation. In the first part of the article, we present a brief history of the private water supply system that has been in place in Barcelona since the 19th century with a particular emphasis on the complex architecture of its post-dictatorship institutional reconfiguration. The second part focuses explicitly on the making of a water controversy during the last decade when social and political demands for remunicipalisation intensified. The third part explores the present institutional, legal, and political deadlock, concluding with possible future avenues for the remunicipalisation debate (and its associated political possibilities) as well as other avenues to strengthen the metropolitan governance of water beyond the remunicipalisation debate.