Climate compressions in urban water systems: implications for urban governance

Deljana Iossifova, University of Manchester

Nazia Hussain, University of Tokyo

Urban governance addresses climate change through the language of resilience and adaptation. Yet the lived experience of infrastructure remains a question of time: who anticipates, who waits, and who absorbs the aftermath, and for how long. Building on feminist and political geographic accounts of temporality, care and attritional harm, this presentation introduces the concept ‘climate compression’.

This concept names moments when climate volatility forces long-term infrastructural neglect to unfold as an immediate event, and when the fast violence of infrastructural breakdown obscures, reframes and reallocates the slow violence embedded in everyday systems, thus making infrastructural violence newly visible and differently distributed. In this frame, disruption turns routine insufficiency into acute failure; shifts accountability towards keeping water systems running; and renders any return to the ordinary an intensified burden on social reproduction.

Drawing comparatively on research in urban water in China, India and Brazil, the presentation shows how pressure on hydrosocial systems and urban services compresses temporalities across familia social and spatial divides. Across these contexts, ‘climate compression’ helps explain how volatility reallocates responsibility and reshapes infrastructural citizenship. This suggests a research and policy agenda that centres temporality, social reproduction and infrastructural justice in the design, retrofit and governance of urban systems under the threat of climate change.

Priorities are to orient governance towards anticipation and continuity rather than post-hoc response, and to align oversight with accountability for temporal harms across populations. These commitments redistribute risk and responsibility, strengthen infrastructural citizenship and constrain infrastructural violence amid climate volatility.

Deljana Iossifova is Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Manchester, where she is also Director of the Confucius Institute. She is Editor-in-Chief of “The Journal of Architecture” and former Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Urban Studies Foundation and AzuKo Foundation. Prof. Iossifova leads a portfolio of research on sustainable infrastructure and transitions. She has worked on complex urban transformations, cities and biodiversity and the human ecosystems of ageing. Her main research focus is on the Global East and South, including China, Japan, Bulgaria, India and Brazil. She is the author of Translocal Ageing in the Global East (Palgrave, 2020) and lead editor of Urban Infrastructuring (Springer, 2022) and Defining the Urban (Routledge, 2018). Trained as an architect at ETH Zurich, she practised in Germany, China, Japan and the USA before earning a PhD in Social Engineering at Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Nazia Hussain is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Future Initiatives (IFI) at the University of Tokyo. She studies linkages between water and local politics in cities and beyond through urban processes of capital accumulation, and the resultant implications for human insecurity (including food security). She draws on literatures on state and governance, urban theory, political ecology, criminology, and philosophy of science. Her grant-funded research is focused on understanding governance processes in Asia and Africa in response to stresses posed by climate change and urbanization. She holds a PhD from the Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University. She was a recipient of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Policy Research, United Nations University, and a Fulbright scholarship for an MA in International Relations from Boston University.

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