Polluted Rivers, Infrastructure, and the Politics of Multispecies Health in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

• Applicant: Dr. Valentin Meilinger
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 545739306

The project studies urban water pollution as a problem of the Anthropocene, where societies face the unruly and health-threatening urban ecologies they have coproduced. There is a push among environmental policy stakeholders to remake unhealthy urban ecologies following the concept of planetary health, which emphasizes the codependency of human and ecosystem health. This mirrors a broader trend in tackling urban environmental crises through system-based approaches like resilience. However, diverse agencies and practices shape the realization of such concepts, often with technology at the center. The core premise here is that technology plays a vital, but little explicitly studied, political role in how actors understand and address entwined environmental and health challenges in cities. The main goal is to explore the political role of technology and its relations with nonhuman life in producing and remaking unhealthy urban environments. Through this focus, the project uncovers how system-based approaches to urban nature that become realized through technology shape unhealthy urban environments and their governance. The project includes a case study in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, using qualitative research methods. The case study investigates an environmental and public health crisis in Rio linked to water pollution in urban rivers and water supply infrastructures. It explores how inadequate sanitation, river degradation, and technical failures led to the pollution of Rio's water supply system with geosmin, a compound from blue-green algae growing in local rivers. It also studies how different actors use technology to differently represent the causes and health impacts of this crisis and how different infrastructural responses serve as political strategies. This inquiry serves to reconstruct how diverse “technological cultures of urban nature” meet and come into conflict in Rio’s water pollution context. The project draws from urban political ecology, cultural geography, urban infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies to analyze technology and its relations with nonhuman life as a site of power and difference in producing urban nature. This conceptual development will focus on refining the notion of technological cultures of urban nature to reveal uneven power relations, ambivalences, and political opportunities when urban environments are remade following system-based approaches. Moreover, the project will highlight nonhuman agencies in urban infrastructure dynamics and conceptualize the entwined politics of human and environmental health by thinking through multispecies infrastructures. The project leverages the concept of “technopolitics” of urban infrastructures from my doctoral research for the Rio case study and expands on the political interplay between technology and nonhuman life. The goal is to establish a long-term research agenda on global technological cultures of urban nature, focusing on urban water issues.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position