In the securitized city, control saturates the infrastructures of survival. The governance of urban water, routinely framed as ‘climate adaptation’ or ‘smart governance,’ is increasingly reorganized through datafication, cost-recovery, and security rationalities that recast inequality as a depoliticized technical necessity. This talk argues that water systems are becoming urban laboratories for exclusion, governing life through billing regimes, payment enforcement, and the ever-present possibility of disconnection.
Building on critical water geographies, I treat water as a post-social resource and as a political object made governable through infrastructure, expertise, and metrics that manufacture legibility while narrowing democratic contestation. Through the lens of water debt and shutoff regimes, I show how capital’s command extends beyond the workplace into social reproduction, disciplining precarious households and managing surplus populations via financialized and automated control. I foreground water as a key resource for grasping how security, accumulation, and governance converge in the urban waterscape. To reclaim the city, we must dismantle scarcity-and-security narratives and repoliticize water as a terrain of care, welfare, and justice.
Filippo Menga is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Bergamo and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Political Geography