Presentation short abstract

This presentation demonstrates how state narratives presents the river as a controllable resource, while residents’ practices reimagine it as a shared, vibrant space, exposing tensions between technocracy and lived hydrosocial realities.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation demonstrates how the El Harrach River in Algiers—a once vital urban waterway later suffocated by pollution and neglect—has been shaped by Algeria’s hydrocarbon-centred governance. Drawing on hydrosocial territories, frame analysis and ethnographic research, it explores how state narratives configure the river as an economic resource to be controlled and purified in order to maintain social stability, rather than as part of a living hydrosocial territory.

This study reveals that Algeria’s dependence on fossil fuels profoundly structures how rivers and water more broadly are imagined and governed. Policy discourses that present water as a “national priority” remain deeply entangled with extractivist logics that privilege hydrocarbons as the foundation of modernity and stability. This framing marginalises socio-ecological understandings of water bodies and neglect alternative attachments to the El Harrach as a place of memory, livelihood, and communal life.

At the same time, residents living along the river’s course express affective and embodied relations that contest official framings. Through their narratives and everyday practices, they reimagine the El Harrach as more than a polluted drainage canal, calling for its revival as a shared, vibrant site of heritage. These local visions expose the dissonance between state-led technocratic imaginaries and lived hydrosocial realities.

By situating the El Harrach river within wider debates on riverhood, extractivism, and postcolonial environmental governance, the presentation aims to highlight how hydrocarbon-dependent states configure watery worlds and how communities strive to re-politicise and reanimate them beyond the confines of extractive modernity.