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This paper investigates the critical role of workers to enhance the resilience of water supply services in cities at war through analyzing the case of Madrid and the Madrid water company Canales del Lozoya during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). We argue that securing the protection of vital urban flows mediated through infrastructures is a key objective of cities under attack. In doing so we co
Autarkic ideology and economic policies were central features of the interwar period in Europe. Despite autarky's connection to geographical concepts such as space, resources and population, its historical impact has been relatively little explored in the literature. In this article, we first present how the concept of 'autarky' conflates two etymological meanings: self-sufficiency and authoritari
Literature on war and the environment has examined a wide range of militarized landscapes, but massive fortification systems such as the Maginot or Siegfried lines, which are symbols of a military trend in vogue during the interwar period, have largely been ignored. These military walls interwove natural and national values and constituted massive landscape interventions, aimed at reinforcing poli
The mobilization of water has been key for the reconfiguration and modernization of the Spanish state. During the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975), the hydro-social reengineering of Spain was central to Franco's political mission but failed to provide for subnational, regionalist aspirations which subsequently pursued their own agendas for water development. In this paper we examine the (failed)
Debates on the total or partial privatization of water usually follow the rationale that efficient and rational management is best left to the private sphere. In this paper and using a historical example, we attempt to assess critically this assumption arguing that efficiency and rationality in resource management are and have been an asset of collective management as well. We present the case of
Combining historical climatology and environmental history, this article examines the diverse range of strategies deployed by the city government of Barcelona (Catalonia, NE Spain) to confront the recurrent drought episodes experienced between 1626 and 1650. Our reconstruction of drought in Barcelona for the period 1525-1821, based on pro pluvia rogations as documentary proxy data, identifies the
During the Civil War (1936–1939), Spain became a testing ground of military technologies and tactics that were applied during World War II on a much larger scale. Due to artillery bombardment and aerial bombing, Madrid’s urban water supply approached the brink of collapse. The efforts of the workers of the state water company were fundamental to control leaks and guarantee the city’s water supply.
Around midnight of 9 January 1959, the Vega de Tera dam broke, releasing nearly 8 million cubic metres of water that destroyed the Spanish town of Ribadelago, killing 144 people. To this day, it remains the worst dam-related failure of the past two centuries of Spanish history. In this chapter we expand the time frame of the disaster, moving from a one-day narrative to focus on the processes of re
In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in anarchism from both social movements and critical academic circles. When tracing the genealogy of anarchist perspectives since the nineteenth century, radical geographers have pointed out the importance of the anarchist movement in Spain, and particularly in the city of Barcelona. During the 1960s and 1970s, authors like Murray Bookchin shared
At the intersection of natural and social sciences, interest in river sedimentary fluxes and their alteration by human activities is increasing in the context of general retreat of delta formations. Since the 1950s, the construction of large dams in the main course of rivers has produced, among other impacts, a radical decrease in sedimentary fluxes — a key factor in the worldwide sedimentary cris
The history of hydraulic infrastructures is plagued with failures often with catastrophic consequences. Although the agency of water in disasters has been widely documented less well known are the substances in water such as salt that may cause infrastructural collapse and harm humans, flora and fauna. In the Llobregat River Basin (Barcelona), a 120-km long pipe transports salt-saturated wastewate
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 rol
After a century of accelerating drainage, in the 1960s coastal wetlands became the object of unprecedented protection campaigns around the world. This paper compares the history of three successful cases of coastal wetland protection in the Mediterranean between the 1960s and 1980s: the Rhône (France), Po (Italy), and Ebro (Spain) River deltas. As most of the coast of Mediterranean Europe, these t
