Despite years of investment in urban water infrastructure, and the state-a supposedly benign public entity-being the major actor in governing water, many poor residents in global south cities such as Blantyre experience unprecedented water-related problems. The neoliberal narrative unequivocally advocates privatising water; it frames the water problem as symptomatic of the unravelling of non-economic means of distributing this basic necessity of life while revering the free market as a panacea to this long-standing challenge. This thesis draws from the production/urbanisation of nature/space literature to contribute towards framing an alternative and more just political ecological water narrative. Through a radical critique of capitalist urbanisation, it argues that the contemporary urban water condition is the outcome and symptomatic of the unjust historical geographical legacies of modernist/capitalist means of producing water. It problematises the neo-liberal "tragedy of the commons" discourse that attributes these problems to the non-commodity nature of water. Through a case study of Blantyre City, the thesis frames this critique through two claims (1) that there is no such a thing as non-commodified produced water in contemporary Blantyre; (2) that the commodification of water is nothing new, it is a histo-geographical process deeply rooted in logics and contradictions of capitalist production of nature and space. It traces a critical moment in the capitalist remaking of hydro-social relations to colonial modernisation. British colonisation (late 1850s-early 1960s) inserted money and modern techniques at the heart of human-water interactions thereby significantly transforming traditional modes of accessing water. During this period, water began to change from being a common good to an economic resource that could privately be enclosed and harnessed as a means to economic/private ends through modern techniques. Institutions created to mediate this emergent modernist water architecture were dominated by vested private settler interests, depended heavily on external financing and revenue generated from exchanging water through money. British colonisations then sow first seeds in inserting monetary exchange, class and social power as mediators of the human-water interchange thereby entrenching social inequalities in Blantyre's waterscape. The post-colonial political transition in 1964 did little to radically reconfigure these colonial logics and their contradictions; in fact, albeit in qualitatively different ways, these dynamics intensified. The thesis establishes that these historical geographical dynamics continue to reproduce conditions through which underprivileged residents are alienated from water, and this basic need is commodified in contemporary Blantyre. In locating alienation and commodification within the wider historical geographical context of capitalist urbanisation, this thesis aims to critically engage with debates on neo-liberalisation of water. It takes issue with a particular ahistorical manner commodification of water is read and the failure of these debates to engage critically with the historical/colonial genesis of the present urban water condition in global south cities. The thesis hopes to contribute to academic and practical projects concerned with generating alternative understandings and finding just solutions to persistent water problems in the global south.

[pt] O objetivo deste trabalho é compreender as transformações do espaço através de sua mercantilização numa fazenda, ocupada por posseiros e em processo de desapropriação para ser transformada em assentamento. Essas transformações espaciais serão analisadas em momentos distintos, ou seja, a produção social ao longo do processo histórico num período de cerca de 100 anos. Algumas questões foram desenvolvidas ao longo do trabalho no sentido de perceber a alteração da organização do espaço da Fazenda e sua relação com a lógica da expansão urbana nas várias escalas, global, nacional e local; a forma como a lógica de uso da terra rural e urbana se expressa no espaço; o modo como as novas funções do espaço contribuem para sua reorganização. Um dos métodos de investigação nessa pesquisa foi a descrição, vendo esse método como elemento fundamental da análise geográfica no sentido de perceber a realidade como uma totalidade complexa à medida em que se misturam variáveis novas formando um todo mais intrincado em que os fenômenos se inter-relacionam. Outro método de investigação nessa pesquisa foi o método materialista histórico e dialético que conduziu para a compreensão do espaço como um produto histórico e social no qual uma sociedade, em um determinado momento histórico e das relações econômicas e sociais de produção interage com ele. O procedimento mais importante para a realização desse estudo é o trabalho de campo que foi relatado em detalhes nessa pesquisa, apontando sua importância e desafios. Os inquéritos e entrevistas feitos com os moradores da Fazenda Cantagalo contou com a riqueza de narrativas de onze moradores antigos cuja memória do passado no presente permitiu compreender melhor esse espaço. Todos os resultados obtidos foram dispostos numa matriz espaço-tempo e utilizada, ao longo do trabalho, para pensar sobre as diferentes maneiras com que os elementos especificados na matriz: terra, sujeitos sociais, trabalho, produção, natureza, Estado, organização e lutas se relacionam e tensionam contribuindo para a compreensão da produção do espaço da Fazenda Cantagalo. / [en] This dissertation aims at understanding the space transformations by means its commodification, based on the study of a farm, in a rural area at first occupied by squatters and currently undergoing a process of expropriation, so that it is transformed into a settlement. These spatial transformations will be analysed in different moments, which encompass the examination of social production along the historical process during a period of approximately 100 years. Throughout the research, the focus was the change of the organisation of Cantagalo Farm space and its relation with the logic of urban expansion in various scales: global, national and local; the way in which the logic of the use of rural land is expressed in space; the way the new space functions contribute to its reorganisation. One of the methods of investigation in this research was description, understood as a fundamental element of geographical analysis, as it allows the perception of reality as a complex totality, in as much as new variables are added, giving shape to a more intricate whole in which the phenomena are interrelated. Another investigation method used was Dialectical and Historical Materialism, which lead to the understanding of space as a historical and social product in which a society, at a given historical moment, and from given economic and social relations of production, interacts with that space. The most important procedure for the fulfilment of this study was the fieldwork, whose details reported in the dissertation demonstrate its importance and the challenges faced along the process. The enquiries and interviews made with the inhabitants of Cantagalo Farm were enriched by the reports of 11 old dwellers, whose current memory of the past enabled a better understanding of this space. All the obtained results were disposed in a space-time matrix, used, throughout the research, as an operational procedure for reflection about the different manners in which the elements specified in the matrix (land, social subjects, work, production, nature, State, organisation and struggles) are interrelated and wound up, contributing to the understanding of the production of space in Cantagalo Farm.