This paper examines how the politics of water governance intersected with germ suppression during US colonial rule in the Philippines. Drawing on historical materials and policy documents, we critically trace two interrelated processes of hydroterritorialization through which cholera outbreaks in the early 1900s spurred the production of sanitary waters in the Philippines through dams, water supply networks, and irrigation systems. First, we show how differentiated access to water along the lines of race, class and region reproduced an uneven geography of disease through historical processes of exclusion from clean water. Second, we develop the concept of corporeal territorialization to explain how the cholera outbreak provided the political and economic rationale for expansive water infrastructure projects. We argue that racialized colonial rationalities around water and sanitation not only disciplined bodies but also reconfigured socioeconomic and political geographies through diverse infrastructural interventions. Our analysis contributes to geographical debates on the intersection of infrastructure politics, embodiment, and the spatial governance of water systems.
Despite lacking a permanent administrative structure, West Malaysia's Klang Valley constitutes the territorial and material basis upon which state spatial strategies have been constructed. However, the Valley's technocratic origins have often received insufficient attention in contemporary scholarship, thus obscuring its emergence as a regional development scheme, fundamentally shaped by Cold War‐era decolonization, anxieties over natural disasters, and postcolonial communal tensions. By viewing the Valley's production through the lens of hydro‐modernization, we apply a theoretical framework combining enclosure and racial governmentality to comparatively analyse two developmental studies: (1) the Klang Valley Plan; and (2) the Klang Valley Regional Planning and Development Study. Our analysis centres on how approaches to regional development were fundamentally transformed in the 1970s in response to Singapore's separation from Malaysia, top‐down imperatives to engineer national unity in the wake of the 1969 racial riots, and severe flooding that inundated Kuala Lumpur and other parts of West Malaysia. In response, ecological considerations were displaced in favour of conceptualizing the Valley as an abstract space, upon which the racialized ideological goals of the New Economic Policy could be spatially operationalized, while an emergent regime of environmental governance simplified the ecological complexity of the underlying Klang River basin in favour of hydrological engineering. We conclude by calling for greater sensitivity to how the Valley's development was rooted in racialized political considerations and changing conceptions of (post)colonial environments. In doing so, we offer a more critical interrogation of race, environment, and nationhood in the Malaysian Anthropocene.
Formulated in the mid-1980s, mobile space theory represents a valuable contribution to geographical literature, yet it has remained insufficiently understood and disseminated outside a small circle of Francophone geographers led by Denis Retaill & eacute;. This paper critically evaluates the advances of this approach within Francophone geography and explores its contribution to the larger discipline. Bibliometric review, qualitative interviews and social network analysis presented in this paper suggest that the relative isolation of mobile space theory reflects both conceptual criticisms and institutional obstacles. Thus far, mobile space theory is perceived as too similar to other approaches dealing with mobilities and too focused on the spatialities of 'tropical' societies. The diffusion of mobile space theory has also been constrained by the centralized structure and limited opportunities offered by the academic system upon which it relies institutionally. However, none of these obstacles are insurmountable.
This paper traces an intellectual and geographical arc of thinking about outer space in the tropics, connecting Peter Redfield's Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (2000), Sean T. Mitchell's Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil (2017) and Asif Siddiqi's Cosmic Fragments: Dislocation and Discontent in the Global Space Age (2025). The paper examines how the authors explore the social and political dislocations of spaceflight in order to develop the contemporary European, Brazilian and Indian satellite launching facilities near the equator and how scholars have begun to account for forgotten actors and locations in Cold War space history. The paper argues for renewed attention to the tropics as both a geopolitical site and epistemic location of global space activities - shaped by enduring inequalities in space access, launch and data sovereignty, and by the evolving nature of space hegemony and dependency - and calls for new studies of space technology and resistance in the battles to define the limits of sovereignty, territory, and autonomy in an unequal Global Space Age.
