Urban Political Ecology

This working paper examines the concept of metabolism and its potential as a critical analytical lens to study the contemporary city from a political perspective. The paper illustrates how the metabolism concept has been used historically, both as a metaphor to describe the technological, social, political and economic dimensions of human-environment relations, and as a concrete analytical tool to quantify and better understand how flows of matter and energy shape the territorial and spatial configurations of cityscapes. Drawing on the example of the urban water metabolism of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA), the paper shows how the metabolism concept can be applied to study the politics of water in the city.

The lake system of Bangalore has undergone structural changes, reflecting the thrust of urbanisation, over the years. This has been more acute in the later part of the 20th century. This paper tries to understand the re-engineering of this system by government agencies through focusing on one lake in North Bangalore and through a visual documentation of the process.  This paper is also available at https://roha75.wordpress.com/ given the large size of the pdf.

This paper explores the potential to converge the theory of political ecology with the environmental justice discipline as means to promote more effective civil society actions against macroeconomic risks, whilst analysing the case of South Africa. Such a convergence could result in mutual benefit for both arenas that already share a commitment towards justice. Whilst political ecology has focused on theoretical perspectives, which are mostly applied in rural areas, and examined justice in a larger macroeconomic framework, environmental justice has been confined to an empirical focus at a local urban level, which is unable to link local struggles to larger political economic frameworks. Additionally, both arenas generally view civil society as coherent entities that act against the state and industry. Both disciplines should re-evaluate geographic scales and reconfigure romanticised understandings of civil society actions in order to attain justice.

#OpenAccess: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4522/Grounding-Urban-NaturesHistories-and-Futures-of

The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments. Rather than imposing a unified framework on the ecology of cities, the contributors use a variety of approaches across a range of of locales and timespans to examine how urban natures are part of—and are shaped by—cities and urbanization. "Grounding Urban Natures" offers case studies from cities on five continents that demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments.

The contributors consider the diversity of urban natures, analyzing urban ecologies that range from the coastal delta of New Orleans to real estate practices of the urban poor in Lagos. They examine the effect of popular movements on the meanings of urban nature in cities including San Francisco, Delhi, and Berlin. Finally, they explore abstract urban planning models and their global mobility, examining real-world applications in such cities as Cape Town, Baltimore, and the Chinese “eco-city” Yixing.

Contributors: Martín Ávila, Amita Baviskar, Jia-Ching Chen, Henrik Ernstson, James Evans, Lisa M. Hoffman, Jens Lachmund, Joshua Lewis, Lindsay Sawyer, Sverker Sörlin, Anne Whiston Spirn, Lance van Sittert, Richard A. Walker

Book Review of Social Ecology and the Right to the City, University of Chicago Press.
Published in 2019, the edited volume Social Ecology and the Right to the City grew out of a conference two years prior, organised by TRISE. The Transnational Institute of Social Ecology is an association of Europe-based activists and intellectuals who foster, develop and promote the analysis and practices of social ecology. First conceptualized by Murray Bookchin, social ecology combines anarchist claims to a self-determined life with socialist insistence on communal social structures, and positions these within a framework of eco-systemic sustainability. It thus constitutes one of the most holistic and solution-focussed social theories to face today’s convergence of environmental, social and political troubles. This review presents the volume that grew out of TRISE’s 2017 conference in Thessaloniki, Greece, and proposes further trajectories for the study and implementation of social ecology.

If South Korea is currently blessed by an embellishment thanks to the persistent soft power policies and the taking over of a responsible and courageous political cohort, we won’t regret the dark hours when the activists’ contests were at their peak due to so much degradation of essential freedoms undermined by so tentacular toxic politics. It was a time when it was necessary to protest against political and corporate delinquency. Thus, those ethical contortions and a very heavy price to pay by South Korean citizen to gain access to the neoliberal economic norms of a market society are the matrix interventions of the artist Jongsun Oh.

Alban Mannisi (2019), “Ontological Insurgent”, in Jongsun Oh, Seoul, goodpluscommunication, Seoul , pp 12-15
Preface

In recent years, the world has seen the emergence of a number of urban projects which, under the banner of experimentation, have promoted alternative models of city-making capable, in theory, of creating sustainable built environments. Among these supposedly experimental models, the smart city and the eco-city stand out in terms of geographical diffusion, and are hailed by their advocates as the mark of an innovative urbanism based on a scientific approach to urban development. Through the analysis of Hong Kong and Masdar City, examples of a smart-city agenda and an eco-city project respectively, this paper questions the sustainability of so-called smart cities and eco-cities, by investigating the extent to which they are developed in a controlled and systematic manner as their developers claim. More specifically, the paper counterclaims mainstream understandings of smart and ecological urbanism, arguing that what are promoted as cohesive settlements shaped by a homogeneous vision of the sustainable city, are actually fragmented cities made of disconnected and often incongruous pieces of urban fabric. Theoretically, these claims are discussed through the concept of Frankenstein urbanism which draws upon Mary Shelley's novel as a metaphor for unsuccessful experiments generated by the forced union of different, incompatible elements.

L'altra faccia del verde urbano: luoghi abbandonati, "insicuri", spesso inquinati, ma da cui giungono segni di cambiamento, presagi di un futuro che ci aspetta. Una parte significativa degli spazi verdi delle nostre città si trova oggi in stato di profondo abbandono, a seguito di carenze gestionali e progettuali. Si tratta di luoghi stigmatizzati o poco noti, vuoti o cosparsi di rovine industriali. Margini estremi vivi e vitali, in grado di svelare segrete identità, come un presentimento dell'urbano a venire. Frutto di una prolungata ricerca dell'autrice sulle aree verdi fluviali di Torino, La rivolta del verde è un viaggio, non nel giardino dell'Eden, ma in più prosaici "giardini pieni di merda", alla scoperta dei loro tesori nascosti: una biodiversità vegetale e faunistica insospettata, oltre a un insieme di pratiche d'uso ingegnose e significative. Un ricchissimo repertorio di storie invisibili ancora da raccontare. Attraverso un originale collage della storia ambientale di Torino, qui si rivela l'intrinseca politicità dell'ecologia urbana. Invece di addomesticare forzatamente la città, potremmo aprirci al selvati-co come a un terreno di arricchimento, scoperta e sfida. Lucilla Barchetta è antropologa e dottoressa di ricerca in Studi urbani e si occupa della relazione tra spazi verdi, paesaggi selvatici e immaginari del declino nelle città. È assegnista di ricerca presso l'Università IUAV di Venezia, dove svolge uno studio sull'evoluzione dell'immaginario futurologico riguardante l'ecosistema lagunare.

The case for degrowth is a case for stopping the pursuit of growth and for reorienting lives and societies toward wellbeing. This chapter impels moves to build good lives for all, and shows how existing resources can be shared and invested differently to secure good living with less money, less exploitation, and less environmental degradation. Readers will be familiar with the environmental damages and with the forms of inequality and exploitation presented in this book. What is different here is that we link these troubling phenomena to the imperative of modern economies to grow, and argue that overcoming them means moving away from the relentless drive for more.  (Book preface addressing COVID is also available on this site. )

India’s urban infrastructure is maligned for its breakdowns, inefficiencies, and inequities, and popular resentment at dysfunctional infrastructure is constant in public life. This article focuses on the surprising desire for India’s urban infrastructure among skateboarders. Skateboarders are drawn to India’s urban infrastructure because of its dysfunction, its seemingly unfinished nature. I explore these relationships by analysing four skate videos and making three arguments. First, infrastructure attracts skateboarders for possibilities of creative interpretation and appropriation, on-camera aesthetics, and the encounters generated between mostly foreign (though not always “western”) skaters and local urban dwellers. Second, far from isolated moments, the appropriation of India’s infrastructure is captured and circulated to an audience of millions in skateboard videos. Third, skate video presents urban India as a frontier in its subcultural geographic and cartographic imagination; although over two decades India’s cities have drifted closer to skateboarding’s core; concrete and steel replacing cows and festivals on screen. The article closes by exploring the implications for skateboarding—a subculture built on disrupting the city, hacking its infrastructure, moving against its flows—when operating in spaces where disruption is the essential condition of everyday life, and how this is transmitted to an adjacent viewing public.

(Full paper delivered at Association of American Geographers (AAG) 2015 )
“Ruralize the urban: urbanize the rural:… Replete terram [fill the earth].” Alluding to a passage in Genesis, these words appear on the frontispiece of Spanish Civil Engineer Ildefonso Cerdá’s colossal General Theory of Urbanization (1867). They capture the fervor with which he sought to compose a spatial order which would replace both city and territory, overcoming all historical boundaries and spatial distinctions. This new domestic template, the urbe, was to stretch across the earth, spanning both land and sea and uniting civilizations in a single spatial entity of private property and peaceful circulation. The birth of the urban would see the distinction between city and territory as a relic of the past, yielding in its place a hybrid spatiality that would erode the specificity of both. Instead, the infinite and mobile qualities of space experienced in the early modern Atlantic voyages would reemerge in the perpetually expansive process of ‘urbanización’. This paper examines the urban in this context: as a spatial order predicated on limitless circulation (vialidad) and endless expansion, I will examine how certain maritime ontologies and the orders projected onto the sea have been silently reterritorialized in the constitution of this modern spatial order. Exploring the urban in this way opens new questions about its present status: while today it may increasingly appear as a banal extension of urban space, I will reflect on how, in the face of climate change, the sea has also paradoxically reemerged as a kind of absolute limit condition to the urban.

This thesis is about the making of a power plant. It sheds light on how neoliberal ideas shape large public investments in sustainable energy infrastructure. It tells the story of how the City of Copenhagen decided to build what was claimed to be the greenest waste-fired power plant in the world: Copenhill. The plant was to have a ski slope at the rooftop and a chimney puffing smoke-rings. However, conflicting urban visions and rationalities led to a year-long crisis in the project’s planning phase. In the end, Copenhill was built over capacity, which today makes it difficult to match budget and costs. I combined information from internal municipal documents, interviews with decision makers and informal corridor talk to identify the driving forces behind the outcome of the crisis, and the contradictions and complexities of the case. I found that the crisis had roots in the way the public energy company ARC began to act like a private firm, with an entrepreneurial vision. ARC adopted an expansionist growth plan to build a large power plant with iconic architecture. The Copenhill project attracted local politicians wishing to brand Copenhagen as a green world city. However, the city’s Technical and Environmental Administration (TEA) was guided by a managerial vision with a strong sustainability focus. TEA’s analysis showed that there would not be enough garbage in the city to power the over-sized plant. Consequences for economy and environment were seen as potentially disastrous. Supported by city council and government, TEA tried to stop Copenhill. The clash between the two different urban visions led to the formation of two opposing coalitions with each their own rationality. The contradictions between growth rationality and green rationality caused the Copenhill Crisis. The direct intervention of the power élite in support of a growth solution short-circuited the norms of transparent public decision-making. Bowing to political pressure, TEA produced new documents saying that Copenhill would be great for economy and climate. Dark planning practices led to an outcome that was presented as a compromise between green and growth strategies. It was in fact a pure growth solution, wrapped in green arguments that were not rational. The case study supports a key proposition in theory on the dark side of planning: that rationality is context dependent and that the context of rationality is power. The case study adds insights to theory by showing the ways neoliberal thought merges with existing socio-economic conditions in space and time, specifically within a Nordic welfare-state context. It shows how public energy companies can face challenges, not only from neoliberal-driven privatization attempts, but also from internal neoliberal dogma. The case study reaffirms the strength of a Flyvbjergian approach to understand the effects of hidden power mechanisms on planning of public energy infrastructure.

Over the last 20 years, urban political ecology has made substantial contributions to the study of urban 'socionatures', part of the field's aim of applying political ecology to urban space. At the same time, urban political ecology has been limited by a perspective that tends to confine urbanisation to urban spatial forms; a conflation of process and site. The city is seen to be made by and for urban metabolism, disconnected from both rural and global socionatures. This paper offers a small, empirical corrective, based on a case study of Cambodian re-urbanisation under the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian genocide began with the capture of the capital, Phnom Penh, by Khmer Rouge forces in April 1975. According to the standard narrative, the subsequent destruction of urban infrastructure and forced evacuation of residents is a historical case of 'urbicide' and reflects a broader interpretation of the Khmer Rouge as ideologically 'anti-urban'. Using documentary evidence, this paper reconstructs the functional role of Cambodia's network of cities under the Khmer Rouge. Contrary to the narrative, we find that cities were not destroyed. Rather, urban sociospatial practices, forms and rural-urban relations were reorganised to support the demands of rice production for foreign exchange and facilitate the administration of violence. This pragmatic reconstruction challenges claims of urbicide and contradicts the narrative of 'dead cities' and 'ghost towns'. Most importantly, it challenges urban political ecology's city-centrism: the processes that reanimated Cambodia's cities were the same ones that transformed rural space and motivated the evacuation of cities in the first place. Cambodian re-urbanisation accompanied re-ruralisation, a dialectic propelled by the transition to state capitalism. In this light, we encourage an urban political ecology that looks beyond the city's cadastral limits and engages those political ecologies within which the urban is situated.

The city of Bangalore in southern India is rapidly expanding, resulting in major transformations in land use, wetland management, and the distribution of green spaces. This paper examines how transformations in land use and governance consequent to urbanization can change people’s perceptions of and interactions with an urban ecological commons, using the case study of the Agara lake in the south Indian city of Bangalore. In less than four decades, the landscape surrounding the lake has altered from a fundamentally agricultural area, dependent on the lake for irrigation and drinking water, to a densely urbanized area where the lake is used predominantly for recreation. A change in governance from community management to state management has sidelined the fishers, fodder collectors and agricultural users who traditionally maintained this lake. The governmental agencies that are supposed to maintain the lake are unable to do so due to a complex governance structure, with overlapping jurisdictions, compounded by an ongoing litigation. Over the past decades, the lake has largely transitioned into an urban green space primarily used for recreation and nature watching. This case study provides us with a broader understanding of how changes in governance consequent to urbanization and city expansion can impact interactions between people and ecological commons in a rapidly growing Indian city.

¿Afronta actualmente el capitalismo el “fin de la naturaleza barata”? Si así es, ¿qué podría significar esto y cuáles con las implicaciones para el futuro? Estamos, de hecho, siendo testigos del fin de la naturaleza barata en un sentido específico histórico. En vez de contemplar el fin de la naturaleza barata como la reafirmación de “límites de crecimiento” externos, sostengo que, a día de hoy, el capitalismo ha agotado la relación histórica que la produce. El fin de la naturaleza barata se comprende mejor como el agotamiento de las relaciones de valor que han restaurado periódicamente los “Four Cheaps”: trabajo, alimentos, energía y materias primas. Fundamentalmente, estas relaciones de valor son coproducidas por, y a través de, humanos con el resto de la naturaleza. La cuestión decisiva, por lo tanto, enciende las relaciones que envuelven y despliegan las sucesivas configuraciones de la naturaleza humana y extra-humana, simbólicamente capacitadas y materialmente realizadas, a través de la larga duración del sistema-mundo moderno. Significativamente, la apropiación de trabajo no remunerado —incluyendo los “regalos gratuitos” de la naturaleza— y la explotación del trabajo asalariado, forman una unidad dialéctica. Los límites del crecimiento enfrentados actualmente por el capital son suficientemente reales, y son “límites” coproducidos a través del capitalismo como ecología-mundo, uniendo la acumulación de capital, la búsqueda de poder y la coproducción de naturaleza como un todo orgánico. El límite de la ecología-mundo del capital es el capital en sí mismo.

The development of projects for new eco-cities is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon. Alleged eco-cities are being built across a variety of spaces via processes of urbanisation triggering substantial environmental, social and economic impacts. This article investigates how new eco-city projects interpret and practice urban sustainability by focusing on the policy context that underpins their development. The article argues that projects for new eco-cities are shaped in loci by policy agendas tailored around specific economic and political targets. In these terms, the ideas and strategies of urban sustainability adopted by eco-city developers are understood as reflections of broader policy priorities. The case study employed in this article, Masdar City, reveals how the Emirati eco-city initiative is the product of local agendas seeking economic growth via urbanisation to preserve the political institutions of Abu Dhabi. Following the economic imperatives set by the ruling class, the Masdar City project interprets sustainability as ecological modernisation and practices urban environmentalism almost exclusively in economic terms. The article shows how the developers of Masdar City capitalise on sustainability by building an urban platform to develop and commercialise clean-tech products, and concludes that the Emirati alleged eco-city is an example of urban eco-modernisation: a high-tech urban development informed by market analysis rather than ecological studies.

El presente libro aporta al estudio de las relaciones entre las desigualdades socio-económicas y los cambios ambientales en la urbanización de Bogotá, un tema de indudable trascendencia justo en un contexto mundial actual marcado por el incremento de las desigualdades a nivel urbano y los desafíos ambientales asociados al cambio climático, la contaminación, los desastres, el derecho al agua, y como nos ha enseñado el 2020, los virus y las pandemias que creíamos superados. Es también una ayuda para comprender la urbanización como un proceso ambiental, en el cual están presentes elementos tanto sociales como naturales.
El caso del río Tunjuelo es ilustrativo de la producción de desigualdades ambientales en el proceso de urbanización, se analiza la relación existente entre la intensificación del proceso de urbanización de Bogotá a mediados del siglo XX, la actividad minera en el río y la ocurrencia de inundaciones en los barrios ubicados sus riberas, y se muestra cómo esta interrelación debe ser entendida en el marco de la alta desigualdad socioespacial que caracterizó el proceso de urbanización de la capital.
Además de lo que puede significar para el entorno bogotano, esta información puede servir de comparación o contrastación de situaciones similares en otras ciudades y otros ríos urbanos tanto de Colombia como de América Latina.

The article explores how nature becomes part of the city using an example of allotments in Prague, Czech Republic. Prague allotments result from an ongoing political-ecological process of urbanization of nature locally driven by a socialist (1948-1989) and later neoliberal governance. We employ an approach of situated urban political ecology and analyse the changes to planning of allotments and their impact on the experience of gardeners. This double focus allows us to elucidate the effects of neoliberalisation on the processes of the production of urban nature with respect to both policy and everyday practice. We contrast contemporary capitalist urbanisation to its socialist predecessor demonstrating the immediate impacts of the acceptance of neoliberal modes of governance on allotments, urban nature and the conception of the city. We open allotments as a terrain for UPE in order to turn the attention to the (uneven) production of urban nature in a post-socialist context which has so far been largely absent from the UPE literature. We demonstrate that post-socialist urbanization is a fruitful terrain offering new opportunities to unmask the effects of neoliberalisation on the production of uneven urban space and thus improve our understanding of contemporary uneven urbanisms.

Geographers have been at the forefront of interrogating the changes made possible by the ubiquity of computing and the phenomenon of 'big data' in an emerging field known as 'critical data studies'. In this article, I argue that engagement with the proliferation of computing infrastructures that make these new developments possible in the first place allows critical data studies to gain important historical-geographical perspective, connect to new manifestations of uneven development, and better grasp the role of non-human actors within emerging socio-technical relations. This expanded empirical framing opens up new theoretical implications and opportunities for public engagement with critical infrastructure.

The racial and cultural politics of land and property are central to urban struggle, but have received relatively little attention in geography. This paper analyzes land struggles in Detroit where over 100,000 parcels of land are classified as " vacant ". Since 2010, planners and government officials have been developing controversial plans to ruralize Detroit's " vacant " neighborhoods as part of a program of fiscal austerity, reigniting old questions of racialized dispossession, sovereignty, and struggles for liberation. This paper analyzes these contentious politics by examining disputes over a white businessman's proposal to build the world's largest urban forest in the center of a Black majority city. I focus on how residents, urban farmers, and community activists resisted the project by making counterclaims to vacant land as an urban commons. They argued that the land is inhabited not empty and that it belonged to those who labored upon and suffered for it. Combining community-based ethnography with insights from critical property theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, I argue that land struggles in Detroit are more than distributional conflicts over resources. They are inextricable from debates over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird modern liberal democracies and ongoing struggles for decolonization.

En los últimos años la sociedad se ha percatado del engaño perpetrado por empresas y fabricantes,
que conscientemente reducen la vida útil de sus productos y servicios para fomentar el consumo
de los mismos. El concepto de obsolescencia programada engloba toda una serie de prácticas que
socavan la elección del consumidor forzando el consumo repetitivo y el descarte de productos
perfectamente funcionales o, que habiendo fallado su reparación es inviable, técnica o
económicamente. Por supuesto este aumento del consumo se produce a costa del medio
ambiente, al incrementarse el despilfarro de recursos y la producción de residuos. El objetivo de la
presente investigación es la definición de la obsolescencia programada pues es un concepto muy
amplio y que no hace más que expandirse, ya que la economía postfordista desarrolla
constantemente técnicas y procesos que expanden la necesidad de consumo y la sustitución de
bienes obsoletos. Por otra parte frente a la idea de que la obsolescencia programada es el estímulo
de la economía y la garantía de empleo debe oponerse el coste de la misma para nuestro planeta,
pues en la concepción de una ciudad más sostenible resulta insuficiente actuar exclusivamente
sobre la eficacia de los sistemas de la misma si no se actúa, además, sobre el consumo. De
momento sigue aumentando la velocidad a la que nuestros bienes se vuelven obsoletos,
obligándonos a consumir aún más sin que logremos saciarnos y el legado de nuestra cultura lo
constituyen innumerables vertederos rebosantes de residuos.

Özet: Yapıya ait hurdanın yeniden kullanıma sunulduğu alanlar olarak tanımlayabileceğimiz çıkmacılar, İstanbul'da 20. yüzyılın özellikle ikinci yarısındaki enformel kentleşme ile 2000 sonrasında ivme kazanan neoliberal kentleşme süreçlerinin arakesitinde yer alır. Çıkmacılar, gecekondu yapılaşmasının kendi imkansızlıklarından türemiş bir aktör olarak enkazdan kurtarılan pencere, kapı ve vitrifiye gibi yapı elemanlarının biriktiği ve yeniden dolaşıma sokulduğu kişi ya da yerler olarak tariflenebilir. Gece-kondu, kentsel dönüşüm ve mahalle yıkımları ile ilişkilenen bu hurdalıklar, kentin çeperlerinde yer alan semtlerde karşımıza çıkıyor. İstanbul'un kentsel dönüşüm coğrafyasından hareketle küresel ile yerel ekonominin kesişiminde varlıklarını sürdürmeye çalışan çıkmacı hurdalıklarını, gecekondu yapı kültürü ile 'yıkıp yeniden yapma ve yerinden etme' mekanizmaları üzerinden işleyen totaliter kentleşmenin getirdiği yapı kültürü kapsamında inceliyoruz. Amacımız, çıkmacıların bugün kent coğrafyası ve çeperlerinde nasıl etkileri olduğunu inceleyerek kent ekolojisine ve kentsel müşterekle-rin inşasına yönelik çıkarımlara varılabilir mi sorgulamak. Bunu yaparken, çıkmacıları bir " ilişkisel altyapı " (Simone, 2015) yani fiziksel veya kamusal altyapıların yokluğun-da kent sakinlerinin hayatta kalmak ya da kente ayak uydurmak için geliştirdiği ilişki temelli çözümlere bir örnek olarak konumlandırıyoruz. Anahtar sözcükler: İstanbul ve çevresi, enkaz, ilişkisel altyapı, gayriresmî ekonomi, kentsel dönüşüm, kent ekolojisi.

This commentary makes a case for a more rigorous treatment of the body as a material and political site within the sub-field of urban political ecology. I propose an embodied urban political ecology grounded in a feminist, anti-racist and postcolonial approach consisting of five orienting propositions. They include attention to metabolism, social reproduction, intersectionality and articulation, emotion and affect, and political subjectivity. Although applicable to political ecology broadly, I focus on the urban because of how often the body is mobilised in conceptualisations of cities and infrastructure despite the fact that material embodiment remains under-studied and disparately theorised in the subfield. I suggest that theoretical and empirical attention to embodiment in these five key arenas can deepen understandings of the terrain of environmental politics and potential transformation within the subfield of urban political ecology.

In 2014, approximately 100,000 lots lie ‘‘vacant’’ in Detroit after decades of industrial decline, white flight, and poverty. Planners and government officials have proposed to repurpose Detroit’s highest vacancy neighborhoods, deemed to have ‘‘no market value,’’ as blue and green infrastructure (retention ponds, carbon forests, urban farms, greenways). According to the Detroit Future City plan, traditional public services (water, street lights, transportation, garbage pickup) and the ‘‘grey infrastructures’’ that deliver them will be reduced and eventually withdrawn from these zones. While Detroit is widely touted for its potential as a model green city, the costs and benefits of green redevelopment are distributed unevenly within the context of gentrification and bankruptcy. Through an analysis of media representations, a contentious citywide planning project, and the construction of a private urban forest, I demonstrate how settler colonial imaginaries and rationalities articulate with austerity measures to prepare a postindustrial urban frontier for resettlement and reinvestment. During the historical era of U.S. settler colonialism, economic development happened through westward expansion on a continental scale (and then imperial scale), but today, in the urban United States, it occurs through internal differentiation of previously developed spaces and is taking a new form. Where the rural settlers of the 19th century sought to conquer wilderness, ‘‘urban pioneers’’ in the 21st century deploy nature as a tool of economic development in a city with a shrinking population and a large spatial footprint. Yet accumulation by green dispossession still turns on some of the defining features of settler colonialism, e.g., private property as a civilizing mechanism on the frontier, the appropriation of collective land and resources, and the expendability of particular people and places. The production of this new urban frontier also depends, like any frontier, on erasure: the material and discursive work of presenting ‘‘empty’’ landscapes as in need of improvement by non-local actors. I argue that understanding the stakes of postindustrial urban development struggles requires attention to how concepts of (white) settler society – which have been absorbed into political and legal-juridical institutions, discourses, myths, symbols, and national metaphors – are used to claim ‘‘wild’’ and ‘‘empty’’ lands like those in Detroit.

Notions of connectivity and relationality increasingly pervade theories, discourses and practices of environmental governance. Recently, the concept of the ‘resource nexus’ has emerged as an important new framework that emphasises the interconnections, tensions and synergies between sectors that have traditionally been managed separately. Part of a broader trend towards integrated environmental governance, nexus thinking rests on the premise that the challenges facing water, energy, food and other resources are inexorably connected and contingent. Although presenting itself as a radically new framework, the nexus discourse in current form is techno-managerial in character, profoundly de-politicising, and reinforces neoliberal approaches to environmental governance. At the same time, the ‘material turn’ in social science research has re-engaged ideas of social, political and material relationality to understand the complexity and heterogeneity of the socio-natural condition in the twenty-first century. Although theoretically and ontologically diverse, the fields of political ecology, assemblage thinking and infrastructure studies all critically interrogate the politics of relationality.
Mobilising an urban political ecology framework, and drawing on notions of emergence and distributed agency from assemblage thinking, this research examines the politics of the water-energy nexus through a critical analysis of the extraordinary emergence of seawater desalination as a significant new urban water supply for Southern California, USA, and Baja California, Mexico. Research was conducted in the San Diego–Tijuana metropolitan region, where a large desalting facility has recently been completed to supply San Diego with purified ocean water, and a larger ‘binational’ facility is planned in Mexico to supply both sides of the border. The research makes three broad contributions. First, to understand desalination as emerging from the historical coproduction and urbanisation of water and energy in the American West. Second, to examine the transitioning environmental politics concomitant with calls for greater understanding of interrelationality. And third, to interrogate the efficacy of technology in reconfiguring the co-constitution of water, energy and society.

How should humans live with animals and other forms of life? Could responses to this question improve the health and wellbeing of the biosphere? This paper argues that design researchers ought to engage nonhuman lifeforms as collaborators: informants and co-designers, or clients and users. Inspired by recent design challenges involving birds, bats and trees, this paper positions emancipatory multispecies cohabitation as a goal that can alleviate ongoing biodiversity losses and human-wildlife conflicts, in cities and beyond. It opens an interdisciplinary conversation by translating emerging scholarship in ethics, politics, and aesthetics to a narrative about desirable more-than-human cultures. This discussion has significant implications and can help to inform regulation, instrumentation, and pedagogies of future design.

La nature en ville dans un contexte de densification, étude portant sur l'archéologie de l'écologie urbaine. Comportant une analyse comparative des processus d'urbanisation au 19ème et de gentrification au 21ème. Une recherche sur la biopolitique mineure (résistance, négociations, participation) et sur la nature sauvage et rudérale : la friche.

Over the last several decades, scholars and practitioners have progressively acknowledged that we cannot consider cities as the place where nature stops anymore, resulting in urban environments being increasingly appreciated and theorized as hybrids between nature and culture, entities made of socio-ecological processes in constant transformation. Spanning the fields of political ecology, environmental studies, and sociology, this new direction in urban theory emerged in concert with global concern for sustainability and environmental justice. This volume explores the notion that connecting with nature holds the key to a more progressive and liberatory politics.

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programmes, by filling the void left by the “rolling back” of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalisation. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and fieldwork in Oakland, CA, I explain how urban agriculture arises from a protective counter-movement, while at the same time entrenching the neoliberal organisation of contemporary urban political economies through its entanglement with multiple processes of neoliberalisation. By focusing on one function or the other, however, rather than understanding such contradictions as internal and inherent, we risk undermining urban agriculture's transformative potential. Coming to terms with its internal contradictions can help activists, policy-makers and practitioners better position urban agriculture within coordinated efforts for structural change, one of many means to an end rather than an end unto itself.

Current debates about the Anthropocene have sparked renewed interest in the relationship between ecology, technology, and coloniality. How do humans relate to one another, to the living environment, and to their material or technological artifacts; and how are these relations structured by coloniality, defined not only as a material process of appropriation and subjugation, but also as an exclusionary hierarchy of knowing and being that still pervades contemporary life? While these questions have of course received attention in decolonial theory, they have also captured the interest of scholars who self-identify with the field of political ecology. However, it can be argued that political ecology still primarily adheres to research practices and paradigms that have been developed in the West, regardless of its diversity and dynamism as a field of research. It is therefore suggested that a rapprochement between decolonial theory and political ecology can open up new perspectives on current debates that are emerging around the concept of the Anthropocene. In particular, the article takes the recent interest in the ontological implications of the Anthropocene as a point of departure to bring the decolonial notion of 'border thinking' into a conversation with the so-called 'new materialism' in political ecology. While both approaches are not necessarily opposed to values grounded in rationality, they can be seen as attempts to rethink ontological divisions such as human/nature or subject/object based on 'enchanted' ways of knowing and being-in-the-world. Yet, although enchantment has the potential to counter inherently colonial practices of appropriation, commodification and objectification, it is argued that keeping a moderately critical distance to enchanted narratives is still recommended, not because of the alleged naïveté of such narratives, but rather because enchantments may also function as and through technologies of power.