The Politics of “Bad Water”－the Crisis of Urban Water Governance and the Controversy over Public Drinking Water Quality in the Kaohsiung City
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Huang, Jo-Tzu
Abstract
By studying and examining the long-lasting controversy over public drinking water quality in the Kaohsiung city, this research explores the co-evolution of urban governance and urban water supply system. First, I adapt the concept of “urban metabolism” that comes from Political Ecology to illustrate how urban water, as “social-nature”, was historically produced in the Kaohsiung region, pointing out the structural restrictions that led to the degradation of regional water quality.
Second, I turn to discuss the controversy and analyze how different social actors, according to their structural interests, framed the issue and gave different interpretations to the degraded urban water. In the meanwhile, the centralized regime of urban water supply, which had been controlled and monopolized by technical experts, became unstablized and has faced governance crisis since the late-1980s. In the waves of de-industrialization and political democratization, the municipal government played a more critical role in water supply governance, especially after the direct election of city mayor was implemented in the mid-1990s. The governance of urban water supply changed from “expert politics” to “urban politics”.
For winning the competitive election, the last appointed city mayor－Wu Den-yih, has proposed a series of projects to improve water quality. However, Wu’s efforts still tried to enhance the existing circulation of urban water which was established by technical experts under the authoritarian state in order to support heavy industry and maintain capital accumulation.
Until the late-90s, the local environmental group challenged the authoritarian hydro-state, calling on improving regional water quality and adjusting the regional water provision. This also led to the emergence of new urban regime. The new elected mayor－Hsieh Chang-Ting, has incorporated civic environmeantalism and lunched new technical improvement projects featuring advanced water treatments. Under the new governance regime, the “notorious” urban water acquired new symbolic value, and was used to boost citizen’s pride as well as urban image. On the other hand, in a more structural sense, the circulation of city’s water was reshaped to satisfy the long-neglected needs of collective consumptions.
Finally, because of the long-term governance failure, the Kaohsiung citizens became victims of “water speculator”. The research also explores the prosperous local water economy and the commercial drinking “subject” existing in domestic scale.
Subjects
高雄
自來水
都市治理
都市自然
爭議
Type
thesis
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