Hug March#

FIELD OF SCHOLARSHIP: Urban Political Ecology, Water Management, Geography

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:

Hug March earned a doctoral degree in Environmental Sciences at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in 2010 with the thesis "Urban Water Management and Market Environmentalism: A Historical Perspective for Barcelona and Madrid" under the supervision of Prof. David Saurí (Department of Geography, UAB). Hug March has been PhD student in the Department of Geography, at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, from 2006-2009, with a scholarship from the Catalan Government. During this period he was visiting PhD student at the School of Environment and Development of the University of Manchester (2007-2008, 5 months), under the supervision of Prof. Maria Kaika (Geography). After obtaining his doctoral degree he was involved in the European project ESPON Climate Change and Territorial Effects on Regional and Local Economies at the Department of Geography (UAB). He has been a postdoctoral fellow at Géosciences Environnement Toulouse (Université de Toulouse, CNRS, IRD)/Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) in the context of the MAELIA project (RTRA STAE Toulouse). In 2012 he became a postdoctoral research fellow at Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) (Barcelona, Spain), with a Juan de la Cierva contract.

DETAILS OF RESEARCH:

My research revolves around the urban political ecology of the urban water cycle, focusing on the relationships between urbanization, infrastructure, technology, finance, droughts and governance at multiple spatial and temporal scales and geographies. I have also done research on climate change perception in tourist areas of Mediterranean Spain where water is a critical resource for economic activity. Beyond the water cycle I am interested in understanding the role of the environment in contemporary urban debates. Thus I have expanded my research towards the deployment at the discursive and material level of the Smart City concept both by institutional actors and private companies to cope with current economic and environmental crises. At the same time I am also interested in urban socio-ecological alternatives and imaginaries emerging from the grassroots. All in all, the underlying rationale of my research is to understand how the environment is constituted by and constitutive of socio-political and politico-economic projects, and how nature-society relationships mutate across time and space. My work has been published in journals such as Geoforum, EURS, Environment and Planning A, Regional Studies, Ecological Economics, Environmental Management, Natural Hazards, Regional Environmental Change, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, Antipode, IJURR, and Journal of Cleaner Production.

ONE/TWO KEY PUBLICATION REFERENCES:

March, H. (2013, early view). Taming, controlling and metabolizing flows: Water and the urbanization process of Barcelona and Madrid (1850–2012). European Urban and Regional Studies, DOI: 0969776412474665

March, H., Purcell, T. (2014).The muddy waters of financialisation and new accumulation strategies in the global water industry: The case of AGBAR. Geoforum, 53:11-20