What is an everyday urban ecology?

Abstract

Urbanisation is one of the defining features of today’s crowded and climate-changed world, contributing to significant declines in biodiversity and ecosystems globally (Mcdonald et al. 2008). Yet, cities, as unsustainable as they currently are, can also be a source of solutions. Contrary to notions that the city is devoid of the ‘natural’, cities habour diverse assemblages of wildlife communities and can potentially enhance biodiversity conservation efforts (Faeth et al. 2011). Moreover, as Dearborn and Kark (2010) and McKinney (2002) note, cities are sites of economic and political power. Thus, an ecologically-connected and informed urban population could generate the public pressure necessary to drive pro-conservation policy. For instance, the reversal of plans to develop Chek Jawa in Singapore stemmed from the ‘groundswell of public opinion that was garnered through outreach programmes, where the public was totally convinced of the value of the habitat’ (Wee and Hale 2008: 48). However, as Clover (2002) warns, the one-directional flow of information typical of education and outreach campaigns can be problematic because it ‘dismisses or ignores people’s knowledge and reinforces the idea that we can attribute different levels of status to knowledge, based on the rationale that, say, professionals Bknow^ and Bothers^ do not’ (317). Accordingly, public and intellectual environmental discourses are typically divorced from the complexities of everyday life (Pellandini-Simanyi 2014). Thus, ‘the everyday has not been seen as a realm from which alternative, competing, normative visions can potentially emanate, but one that needs to conform to norms defined outside it’ (Ibid: 8). Consequently, this sets up a fallacious dichotomy between environmental and non-environmental action respectively associated with normative goods and bads, thus alienating large segments of the population. Not surprisingly then, such a disconnect has resulted in substantial value-action and behaviour-impact gaps across most of the industrialised world—where professed environmental concern does not translate into meaningful action or substantial environmental improvements (Kennedy et al. 2015). Yet, as Sahasrabudhey (2009) acknowledges, it is the realm of ordinary everyday life that (re)produces social life. ‘People constantly produce new knowledge based on their genius, experiences and the needs of everyday life. [And so], [t]here has perhaps never been a greater source of knowledge than ordinary life’ (Ibid: 43). Notwithstanding, as Shove’s widelyinfluential work (2003) highlights, the everyday is usually marginalised by a sociological fixation on the ‘explicit, the visible and the dramatic’ (1). Moreover, the challenge of studying everyday life lies in its ‘sheer ambiguity... its ostensibly Bordinary^ nature... its unavoidable associations with the familiar, the taken-for-granted, [and] the commonsensical’ (Bennett 2005: 1). So, how can we conceptualise an everyday urban ecology? What would it look like? And to what ends would such an everyday urban ecology serve? In the following sections, I weave together two disparate theoretical threads—that of more-than-human geographies andMarxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s ‘critique of everyday life’ and the ‘right to the city’—to elaborate the ethics, agency and politics around an everyday urban ecology. * Ezra Ho ezra_ho@live.com