Meilinger V (2026)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Journal article
Publication year: 2026
DOI: 10.1080/21622671.2026.2642942
This article explores tensions between urbanisation and planetary boundaries by examining responses to water scarcity in the Frankfurt am Main region, Germany. Actors navigate resource scarcity and thereby influence regional politics of urban growth and climate adaptation by connecting urban homes and gardens, inner-city space, and rural hinterlands through new infrastructures of water storage. Those reach from centralised groundwater recharge systems to localised sponge city and rural biodiversity protection practices. These dynamics reveal the political role of technology in reconfiguring ‘urban ecologies of limits’ amid an emerging planetary shift in urban water management, influencing how environmental limits are scientifically represented, temporally framed and spatially scaled. The article captures these relationships through the notion of infrastructural technopolitics, advancing a resource-sensitive approach within urban infrastructure studies. It further grounds technopolitical analysis in geographical space by examining homes and gardens, inner-city spaces and rural hinterlands as interconnected technopolitical landscapes. This way of describing the shifting territories of the Critical Zone, the thin layer that harbours life on Earth, offers new avenues for developing political orientations toward urban water and space amid global environmental change, challenging persistent modernist distinctions and making space for more speculative futures.
APA:
Meilinger, V. (2026). From home to planet. Grounding planetary futures in Frankfurt’s technopolitical landscape of water scarcity. Territory, Politics, Governance. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2026.2642942
MLA:
Meilinger, Valentin. "From home to planet. Grounding planetary futures in Frankfurt’s technopolitical landscape of water scarcity." Territory, Politics, Governance (2026).
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