Cities around the world are developing new ways of governing risks and vulnerabilities. In the new flood-governance measures, technological risk-prevention is linked to programmes of social resilience and cultural adaptation. By focusing on the catastrophic floods in the city of Villahermosa, Mexico, this article argues that new flood-governance strategies rely on complicated forms of neoliberal governance, in which flood governance is turned into a matter of adaptation and self-responsibilisation, while scant attention is paid to the socio-spatial distribution of vulnerabilities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in three socially differentiated neighbourhoods of Villahermosa, this article demonstrates how flood-governance strategies and the residents' responses to them vary across the city and how the production of flood risk is connected to the uneven production of urban space. The institutional acts of governing aim to render certain population groups governable, whilst being unable to eradicate dispersed contestation efforts.

This article explores the example of Cuba in order to understand how a contentious politics has evolved since the 2000s and especially after the semi-liberalisation of internet access in 2008. My aim is to analyse how use of new technologies impact the fragmented arenas of contention that already existed in Cuba. My argument is that they have reinforced existing dynamics, while creating new channels of expression and linkage, between contentious spaces within Cuba and with specific segments of the Cuban diaspora. Those dynamics have in turn allowed for the emergence of a transnational Cuban public arena and a more intricate contentious space in Cuba itself.