Water Security in Buenos Aires and the Paraná-Paraguay Waterway

This paper develops an ethnographic approach to dilemmas of urban water ecology by examining the ways people, socially organized in unique topographies, understand, represent, and grapple with water crises in their everyday lives. Part of a larger ethnographic project on global port cities, this paper focuses on three narratives of chronic hydrological imbalance across domains and scales: (1) an international maritime lawyer concerned about river sedimentation, (2) a cinematographer's film that brings attention to the deterioration of indigenous terraces that once moderated the downstream force of Andean waters, and (3) a city activist whose home flooded with water from the aquifer below after the privatized water company shut off neighborhood pumps and wells. The diverse actors' assessments of the situations familiar to them represent ethnographic intersections that tie hydrological imbalance to hydropolitics (Ribeiro 1994). Their narratives also encode "scalar mismatches" (Cumming, Cumming, and Redman 2006) which, when identified, provide clues to more effective designs for aligning the decision making spaces of water management with local topographies and cultures.