Moving urban political ecology beyond the 'urbanization of nature'.

Yannis Tzaninis,Roger Keil,Tait Mandler,Maria Kaika

doi:10.1177/0309132520903350

Yannis Tzaninis, Roger Keil + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132520903350

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Abstract

Urban political ecology (UPE) focuses on unsettling traditional understandings of ‘cities’ as ontological entities separate from ‘nature’ and on how the production of settlements is metabolically linked with flows of capital and more-than-human ecological processes. The contribution of this paper is to recalibrate UPE to new urban forms and processes of extended urbanization. This exploration goes against the reduction of what goes on outside of cities to processes that emanate unidirectionally from cities. Acknowledging UPE’s rich intellectual history and aiming to enrich rather than split the field, this paper identifies four emerging discourses that go beyond UPE’s original formulation.

Highlights

No outside left to conquerIn the opening scene of Blade Runner 2049 we Progress in Human Geography 45(2)labor and mass-produced synthetic food (Astley, 2018)
We may not be quite there yet, but the fires that burned in Alberta’s tar sands in 2016, across California in 2018–19 (Serna, 2019), and across Australia in 2019, bring into sharp relief the consequences of a violent ‘feral’ suburban development (Shields, 2012); development ‘where there shouldn’t be any’ (Arellano, 2018); development that has burned in the past only to be rebuilt with public blessings and even subsidies (Arellano, 2018); development that led to new waves of destruction
Following McKinnon et al (2017), who note that the spaces and lives of those outside urban centers have been largely overlooked by urban geography, despite being part of the ‘urban’ population, we call for an integrated political ecology that examines processes and management practices beyond the privileged scales and places that have been the focal point of earlier Urban political ecology (UPE) analysis

Summary

Introduction

Labor and mass-produced synthetic food (Astley, 2018). In a fantastic extrapolation and inversion of the original, Blade Runner 2049 moves our gaze away from the smoggy and rainy streets of a dystopian downtown LA to the horizontal planes of everywhere, a horrorscenario of a ‘continuous city’ sprawling over an ever-warming planet (Berger et al, 2017; Hern and Johal, 2018; Lerup, 2017). Following McKinnon et al (2017), who note that the spaces and lives of those outside urban centers have been largely overlooked by urban geography, despite being part of the ‘urban’ population, we call for an integrated political ecology that examines processes and management practices beyond the privileged scales and places that have been the focal point of earlier UPE analysis We suggest that this perspective has much to contribute in exploring far neglected actors and relations between institutions and political and economic forces involved in the urbanization of nature

Moving urban political ecology beyond the ‘urbanization of nature’ thesis

Lefebvre’s planetary urbanization thesis and UPE

The call for a situated UPE

Rethinking ‘invading’ species

Addressing empirical and conceptual challenges

Conclusion