At the Confluence of River and City: Urbanization, Modernity, and the Political Ecology of Urban Rivers

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Sustainable Development and Environmental Justice in African Cities

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.

This and the subsequent papers in this special issue set out the contours of Marxian urban political ecology and call for greater research attention to a neglected field of critical research that, given its political importance, requires urgent attention. Notwithstanding the important contributions of other critical perspectives on urban ecology, Marxist urban political ecology provides an integrated and relational approach that helps untangle the interconnected economic, political, social and ecological processes that together go to form highly uneven and deeply unjust urban landscapes. Because the power‐laden socioecological relations that shape the formation of urban environments constantly shift between groups of actors and scales, historical‐geographical insights into these ever‐changing urban configurations are necessary for the sake of considering the future of radical political‐ecological urban strategies. The social production of urban environments is gaining recognition within radical and historical‐materialist geography. The political programme, then, of urban political ecology is to enhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental construction by identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and a more inclusive mode of environmental production can be achieved.

Reviewed by: A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City by Matthew Vitz Eric Spears A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City. Matthew Vitz. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., 2018. 338 pp.; maps, photos, notes, bibliog., and index. $27.95 (paperback) (ISBN-13: 978-0822370406). The literature in political ecology often focuses on contemporary problems and, at times, the forecasting of global capitalism’s impact on local environments and people. These approaches have been commonly used in the study of Latin American political ecology, where poverty, social marginalization, and ecological destruction are more pronounced on the landscape. Perhaps most noteworthy of these contemporary Latin American research efforts is the work done by Erik Swyndgedouw (1995) on the urban political ecology of water in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Other political ecology works tend to focus on the current state of the of the anthropocene era (Ernston and Swyngedouw, 2019). Matthew Vitz (2018), however, takes a decidedly different approach to understanding the political ecology and development of Latin America’s largest city, Mexico City. He looks at the city’s political ecology through an historical materialist perspective. Vitz’s book is part of a broader series by Duke University Press called Radical Perspectives: A Radical History of Review Book Series. Vitz’s recent publication of A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City examines urban and environmental planning through the historical lens of politics, social struggle, and urban planning. Vitz bookends his Mexican study at the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1940s. He focuses on the Porfirian metropolitan environment through the rise of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PRI), which established itself as the dominate political party in Mexico. He maintains a political ecology tone throughout the book by writing “the politics of water and hygiene were the focal points of this (modernization) political transformation” (Vintz, p. 81). The decades within Vintz’s study provide an important glimpse into the federal district’s early efforts at modernization and urbanization, both of which established the precedent for the city’s exponential uneven development and environmental problems. The author argues that Mexico City’s modernization and urbanization are results of an “environmental technocracy”. The technocracy was represented by corrupted politics that favored large and expensive engineered solutions to urban planning at the detriment of marginalized communities. Vintz’s 1922 case study on the suppression of tenant rights movement exposes the power relations within a modernizing Mexico City (Vintz, p. 165). Vintz further explains Mexico City’s technocratic approach to urban planning with his case analysis of the Lake Texcoco reclamation project of the 1930s, which [End Page 324] spawned new single housing projects for the upper middle-class and wealthier elite. He writes about this production space in the following way: “Engineers operate amid ecological change and divergent social interests, and they respond to both social and environmental forces in accord with the interests they represent, in this case, urban-sanitary and class-infected political interests” (Vintz, p. 147). This historical analysis is reminiscent of David Harvey’s (1989) Grid of Spatial Practices, which is also based on Henri Lefebrve’s (1974) theory on the production of space, and within an historical materialist perspective of urban development and class struggle. Vintz’s research is not built on Harvey’s conceptual framework, per se, but does share its spirit of critical theory. Vintz presents a set of dialectical relations and modernism directed by another set of “elite environmental imaginaries, and vibrant natures interested to mold urban engineering schemes” (Vintz, p. 147). The author connects these environmental imaginaries to the impact of Mexico’s ejido system, a community-based and collective form of farming. Urban expansion and large-scale reclamation paved the way for the formation of Mexico City’s first modern shanty towns, as exemplified as colonia proleterias in flood-prone zones. Vintz makes an important contribution to political ecology’s literature and discourse. His research reminds us that environmental history is fundamental to our understanding of temporal productions of space—past and present. A City on a Lake is also an insightful glimpse into Mexico...

Today, design disciplines such as ecological urbanism aim at fusing natural and social sciences to restore the equilibrium between social and natural systems, and in extenso the urban and natural environment. But recent literature in urban political ecology and urban history has shown how this socioecological approach is generally stripped down to a merely ecological perspective, ignoring the sociopolitical side of the urban ecological project. I therefore argue that there is a need for a research programme that interrogates the history of the interaction between ecology, planning and politics. In this article I respond by developing a historical perspective on the rise of the ecosystemic approach towards the city, delving into the agency and political nature of ecological science itself. Through an in‐depth historical analysis of the Brussels school of urban ecology and urban ecologist Paul Duvigneaud, I highlight how urban ecology influenced politics through its association with the regional government and vice versa to argue that ecological knowledge was used to overcome political opposition, incorporate a specific regionalist agenda and build an ecological zoning practice in urban planning policies.

Rivers are important components of many urban systems, and research into urban rivers is increasing internationally, both in scope and intensity. As an introduction to a special section on urban rivers, this short article briefly highlights some key trends in urban river research based on a survey of published articles from Web of Knowledge, before summarising the contributions made by the special section papers. In particular, there has been a general increase in work on urban rivers since the 1990s, with a more dramatic increase from 2001. Most published research has concentrated on water quality and its wider environmental implications; ecologically, many studies have focused on autecology, community ecology or river restoration/rehabilitation, with the main emphasis on macroinvertebrates or fish. Geographically, most studies have taken place in North America (mainly the US) and Asia (mainly China). In the large majority of cases research has been on relatively small rivers within urbanised catchments rather than large, heavily urbanised systems within major towns or cities. Given the wide range of topics and studies relating to urban river research, a detailed meta-analysis of the urban river ecology literature would be a useful endeavour. The six papers included in the special section of this issue provide a sample of some of key and emerging themes within recent urban river research, and originate from a session on the understanding and management of urban rivers held at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual Meeting in 2010, at Imperial College London.

In what sense might urban political ecology be regarded as an expanded field? In this brief article, I emphasize how urban political ecology has the capacity to build conceptual bridges between the bio-physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. I suggest that urban political ecology is uniquely positioned to bring together material insights at different spatial scales, linking intricate local topographies with more distant extractive frontiers and zoonotic transfer zones. If urban political ecology wishes to engage with pluriversal ecologies, however, it will need to adopt a more eclectic and less deterministic conceptual framework. A more embodied vantage point can also develop links between neo-Marxian approaches and newly emerging fields such as critical phenomenology, critical toxicology, and multispecies ethnographies.

This concluding chapter provides the “useful narrative,” suggesting a reconceptualization of urban sustainability by incorporating social-ecological dialectics across long-term temporal scales that make invisible feedbacks and connections visible. In the midst of declensionism in the political ecology literature in general and Kolkata’s vulnerability to natural disasters or her “bourgeois” affiliations and tendencies in particular, this chapter shows how historical urban political ecology (HUPE), by capturing both clashing priorities and converging interests among multiple actors, has the potential to craft a common language of conversation between natural and social scientists and academicians and policy makers towards collective good for urban nature. It talks about how and why, through HUPE, political ecology can translate from the knowing to the doing mode, finally materializing in an “engaged praxis” (Loftus 2015, p. 180). Providing concrete examples of municipal-local, bureaucrat-technocrat-citizen interactions since the unfolding of urban nature, this chapter provides directions as to how Kolkata’s ecological subsidies can be harnessed enabling the city to re(gain) its resilience by involving everyone on board and by optimizing on exchanges and cross-fertilization across all existing domains, disciplines, knowledge, experience, and expertise. The chapter fleshes out the political commitment (along with the theoretical and methodological commitments) ingrained in HUPE and establishes how it is a very relevant, future-oriented framework, connecting the urban environmental past, present, and posterity.KeywordsBlue infrastructuresKolkataHistorical urban political ecology (HUPE)Political ecologyDeclensionismUrban sustainability

Urban political ecology attempts to unravel and politicize the socio-ecological processes that produce uneven waterscapes. At the core of this analysis are the choreographies of power that influence how much water flows through urban infrastructure as well as where it flows, thereby shaping conditions and quality of access in cities. If these analyses have been prolific in demonstrating uneven distribution of infrastructures and water quantity, the political ecology of water quality remains largely overlooked. In this paper, we argue that there is a clear theoretical and practical need to address questions of quality in relation to water access in the South. We show that conceptual resources for considering differentiated drinking water quality are already present within urban political ecology. We then contend that an interdisciplinary approach, highlighting the interdependencies between politics, power, and physiochemical and microbiological contamination of drinking water, can further our understandings of both uneven distribution of water contamination and the conceptualisation of inequalities in the urban waterscape. We illustrate our argument through the case of water supply in Lilongwe, Malawi. Our political ecology analysis starts from an examination of the physicochemical and microbiological quality of water supplied by the formal water utility across urban spaces in Lilongwe. We then present the topography of water (quality) inequalities in Lilongwe and identify the political processes underlying the production of differentiated water quality within the centralised network. This paper thereby serves as a deepening of urban political ecology as well as a demonstration of how this approach might be taken forward in the analysis of urbanism and water supplies.

Expanding cities present a sustainability challenge, as the uneven proliferation of hybrid landscape types becomes a major feature of 21st century urbanization. To fully address this challenge, scholars must consider the broad range of land uses that being produced beyond the urban core and how land use patterns in one location may be tied to patterns in other locations. Diverse threads within political ecology provide useful insights into the dynamics that produce uneven urbanization. Specifically, urban political ecology (UPE) details how economic power influences the development decision-making that proliferate urban forms, patterns of uneven access, and modes of decision-making, frequently viewing resource extraction and development through the urban metabolism lens. The political ecology of exurbia, or, perhaps, an exurban political ecology (ExPE), examines the symbolic role nature and the rural have played in conservation and development efforts that produce social, economic, and environmental conflicts. While UPE approaches tend to privilege macroscale dynamics, ExPE emphasizes the role of landowners, managers, and other actors in struggles over the production of exurban space, including through decision-making institutions and within the context of broader political economic forces. Three case studies illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, demonstrating the benefits for and giving suggestions on how to integrate their insights into urban sustainability research. Integrated political ecology approaches demonstrate how political-economic processes at a variety of scales produce diverse local sustainability responses.

ABSTRACTExpanding cities present a sustainability challenge, as the uneven proliferation of hybrid landscape types becomes a major feature of 21st century urbanization. To fully address this challenge, scholars must consider the broad range of land uses that being produced beyond the urban core and how land use patterns in one location may be tied to patterns in other locations. Diverse threads within political ecology provide useful insights into the dynamics that produce uneven urbanization. Specifically, urban political ecology (UPE) details how economic power influences the development decision-making that proliferate urban forms, patterns of uneven access, and modes of decision-making, frequently viewing resource extraction and development through the urban metabolism lens. The political ecology of exurbia, or, perhaps, an exurban political ecology (ExPE), examines the symbolic role nature and the rural have played in conservation and development efforts that produce social, economic, and environmental conflicts. While UPE approaches tend to privilege macroscale dynamics, ExPE emphasizes the role of landowners, managers, and other actors in struggles over the production of exurban space, including through decision-making institutions and within the context of broader political economic forces. Three case studies illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, demonstrating the benefits for and giving suggestions on how to integrate their insights into urban sustainability research. Integrated political ecology approaches demonstrate how political-economic processes at a variety of scales produce diverse local sustainability responses.

Urban political ecology has conceptualized the city as a process of urbanization rather than a bounded site. Yet, in practice, the majority of urban political ecology literature has focused on sites within city limits. This tension in urban political ecology evokes broader conversations in urban geography around city-as-place versus urbanization-as-process. In this paper, I bring an urban political ecology analysis to examine co-constitutive urbanization and ruralization processes, focusing on sites beyond city boundaries in three empirical case studies located within the broader hydrosocial territory of urban Southern California. By focusing on the rural components of hydrosocial territories, I show that each of the three case studies has been shaped in very different ways based on its enrollment within urban Southern California’s hydrosocial territory; in turn, the rural has also shaped the cities through flows of politics and resources. The paper demonstrates how urban political ecology can be usefully applied to understand rural places, illustrating how processes of urbanization can be involved in the production of distinctly rural—and distinctly different—landscapes. The cases demonstrate the utility of urban political ecology as an analytical framework that can examine co-constitutive urbanization/ruralization processes and impacts while maintaining enough groundedness to highlight place-based differences.

In Urban Political Ecology (UPE), the state's role in urbanization is typically framed around domestic governance and capital accumulation, with less focus on the state's role in global geopolitics, imperialism, and empire. This paper builds on UPE's understanding of urban environments as shaped by power relations to explore how US empire, particularly through military bases, intersects with urban natures. Unlike other urban actors who prioritize exchange-value, militaries focus on nature's use-value. Their unique political powers allow them to bypass environmental regulations, transforming urban natures for strategic purposes. The paper examines two aspects of this dynamic: globally, military investments prioritize geostrategic locations and vital natural assets like waterways; locally, they harness natural assets like deep-water harbors, flat lands, and sources of freshwater, often crowding out other kinds of capital-driven urban development or uses. The paper examines the military buildup of Guåhan/Guam, a Pacific island central to US efforts to counter China. The US military controls much of the island, imposing environmental harms on Indigenous CHamoru populations. In response, Indigenous-led environmental groups challenge the military's seizure of nature, asserting alternative use-values, like environmental protection or spiritual use, revealing the limitations of empire's control over urban natures.

This article examines a debate regarding future orientations for the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE). Anchored in two UPE discourses toward a more planetary or a more situated UPE, I argue that these discourses present two critical yet independent responses to early UPE scholarship, opening up the possibility for a more synthesising position. Building off of this debate as well as some of UPE's intellectual traditions, I then argue for a rapprochement between UPE and the field of critical logistics, using the 2022 expansion of the IJmuiden sea lock in the Netherlands as an illustrative case for demonstrating how applying the combined theoretical and methodological insights of UPE and critical logistics can turn a seemingly mundane sea lock infrastructure into a key site from which to draw out the political stakes of urban and climate futures as they play out in a city like Amsterdam. A closer engagement with critical logistics can not only extend UPE's existing themes and empirical focal points, but also attend to theoretical tensions regarding the politics of scale and place central to the debate between a more planetary and a more situated UPE. Finally, I argue that this rapprochement is not only theoretical and methodological but also political, as the wealth of work in critical logistics on articulating a counterlogistics can help UPE expand its political project in a time of climate emergency and interlocking capitalist crises.

Urban ecological politics is shaped by both moments of concerted action and more silent perceptions and responses. Instead of only being evident in situations of organised protest, the politics of urban ecology is also manifested, in material and symbolic terms, in the daily life of the residents. The fragmentation of urban political ecology turns out to be an important element in the affirmation of post-political forms of urban governance. Those issues were the object of fieldwork research carried out in Greengairs and Ravenscraig, two towns in North Lanarkshire, near Glasgow, with the goal of unravelling the understanding and the coping mechanisms of environmentally deprived residents. The towns are permeated by a widespread, often dissimulated, political ecology that is nonetheless always present. Empirical results demonstrate that a more comprehensive handling of the political ecology of the urban is crucial in order to halt the sources of marginalisation and ecological degradation.