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particular I will draw a contrast between an emerging coalescence of scientifically inflected approaches to landscape design under the umbrella term ‘ecological urbanism’ and the alternative field of ‘urban political ecology’ that marks an ongoing critical reformulation of relational and structuralist accounts of nature–society relations under capitalist urbanisation. If the former
Geographers . To date, urban political ecology appears to have been less interested in authoritarian populism: political ecological studies concerned with the phenomenon have instead tended to focus on extractivist landscapes, on pipeline politics and – in the case of the JPS special issues – on agrarian transformations. While such an intellectual division of labour is
life, culture, and society along the US Southeastern Coast. Here, taking these contradictory moments together we start to uncover and connect histories, prophecies, visions, and political demands little recognised within urban political ecology. Uncovering contradictions buried within the interdependent, yet highly uneven constellations of socio-natural relations has been a
Urban political ecology (UPE) has been conceptually influential and empirically robust, however the field has mainly focused on the way cities are metabolically linked and networked with resource flows and ecological processes. Currently, in the face of climate change challenges, scholars working on UPE are taking the field in new directions: from expanding the field of enquiry to include more than human actors, to shifting the geographical focus to overlooked peripheries, the Global South or the suburbs. Although cities are framed by the New Urban Agenda, adopted by the UN Habitat 2016, as central actors, the very ontological status of cities is also questioned, with important implications for UPE. We argue that in order to answer these emerging questions we need renewed, qualified, conceptually robust and empirically substantiated research that does not come from already privileged vintage points or geographical locations. This book launches an inquiry into a UPE better informed by situated knowledges; an embodied UPE, that puts equal attention to the role of more than -human ontologies and processes of capital accumulation. The book aims to extend UPE analysis to new places and perspectives. As discussions regarding the environment are now dominated by policy makers, planners and politicians, it is more crucial than ever, we argue to maintain a critical engagement with mainstream policy and academic debates.
) Urban political ecology has over the past few decades matured into a thriving and sophisticated perspective across academic disciplines, policy networks, and activist organisations. A wide range of complementary, and occasionally competing ontologies, epistemologies, and associated social and political ecological imaginaries have spurred a vibrant debate (see Angelo and Wachsmuth
Urban political ecology as intervention to the current socio-environmental emergency In the opening scene of Blade Runner , Ridley Scott’s iconic 1982 movie, the cinematic gaze is drawn on downtown LA; a dense ‘centre’ made up of messy, smoggy, dirty, rainy streets, where a seething mass of people, cars, and flying objects move in chaotic trajectories. Soon after its
If urban political ecology (UPE) is, at its core, about urban life, infectious disease, its origin, trajectory, and the response to it must be among its prime occupations. 1 After all, cities and infectious disease have a joint history which is shaped and characterised by the relationships between human and non-human nature in and around
Introduction: Opening urban political ecology to the terrestrial Over the past two decades, the debate about the planet’s future has revolved around the climate crisis and colonised the political discourse on the link between urban and ecological questions. Moreover, it produced metanarratives of the global urban condition and a varied debate on
exacerbated by worsening poverty and climate emergencies, enabling, as our interlocutor affirmed deliberately, an urgent ‘question of ecological justice’. Building on urban political ecology (UPE), here I map how both subjects and their environment continue to represent the city’s biophysical and socio-political profanities. In my work in Nairobi, urban
We set out from three premises. First, that the historical conditions of climate change are intimately linked to the processes and production of new (historically particular) forms of extended urbanisation. Second, that urban political ecology, as a heterodox field, is well suited to examine these linkages. Third, that such a task may nonetheless require a renewed and revitalised integrated