ABSTRACT Urban greening is increasingly promoted as a response to environmental pressures, yet its capacity to improve air quality in arid cities remains uncertain. This study examines the relationship between urban green spaces (UGSs) and air pollution in Dubai using eight years of monitoring data from 14 stations combined with satellite-derived vegetation mapping. Results show that while vegetation expansion modestly coincides with declining nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) levels, particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) concentrations remain persistently high and well above World Health Organization guidelines. More critically, spatial analysis reveals a mismatch. UGSs are concentrated in large recreational parks and low-exposure zones, whereas high-density residential and traffic corridors, where pollution burdens are greatest, are underserved. These findings underscore the limits of UGSs as a uniform intervention for pollution mitigation. In Dubai, greening has been shaped more by aesthetic and prestige-driven agendas than by public health priorities, reflecting wider debates in urban political ecology about symbolic versus substantive environmental action. The study contributes theoretically by highlighting the context dependency of UGSs, methodologically by integrating long-term air quality and GIS analysis, and practically by calling for equity-driven, data-informed greening strategies in arid cities.

Social and spatial segregation is a significant aspect of inequality worldwide, influenced by factors such as neoliberalism and capitalism. However, it would not be right to attribute it solely to these forces. Historical factors, including caste systems and their associated notions of purity and pollution, have long contributed to territorial divisions. Despite Ambedkar’s belief that urbanization and the anonymity it brings would dismantle the caste system, this has not been borne out in reality. Urban planning still implicitly reinforces caste lines, with disadvantaged communities bearing the brunt of environmental burdens associated with industrialization. As urban areas expand, lower-caste groups face structural and spatial injustices, exacerbated by the deliberate placement of polluting industries and garbage dumps near resettlement areas. As Ambedkar stated, nature is casteized, and the allocation of land and spaces reinforces traditional discrimination through institutional biases. This research specifically focuses on the largest garbage dump in the city of Chennai, South India, known as Kodungaiyur, spanning 350 acres. This area is home to approximately 50,000 people, predominantly Dalits. Adjacent to the dumpsite is a housing board occupied by slum dwellers who were forcibly evicted from various parts of the city. The historical association of dirt and pollution with Dalits and Dalit bodies is being reproduced even today through various ways like dumping such toxic waste at their place of residence. Even when they settle down in other places, they are forcefully displaced and deprived from living through other forms of livelihood, and they end up doing cleaning or garbage management–related work or become rag pickers. Although the garbage landfill lacks legal approval, it operates under the Chennai Corporation, with around 2,500 tonnes of waste being dumped there daily. Despite politicians making empty promises to remove the dumpsite, it has been in operation for nearly 35 years. The research aims to shed light on the institutional and spatial discrimination endured by Dalit communities in North Chennai. Employing an ethnographic approach and using the lens of urban political ecology, this study seeks to understand the sociopolitical issues faced by the residents of this area. The study focuses on how these spaces are produced and how this spatial discrimination reproduces the social discrimination and hierarchy through institutional means.

The insufficient focus on power and equity in earlier resilience thinking prompted urban resilience planning scholars to explore urban political ecology for insights into the power dynamics that influence varying levels of vulnerability and resilience to urban environmental stressors. However, the predominance of neoliberal capitalist logic in Marxist urban political ecology attracted criticism and calls for a situated urban political ecology. This study employs a situated urban political ecology lens, drawing on postcolonial and strategic relational approaches to analyze how the situated knowledge of climate change among land custodians informs their land use planning practices through resilience-oriented land use planning. Using qualitative research methods in two secondary cities in Ghana, the findings show that strategic selectivity disrupts the influence of land custodians' situated knowledge in resilience-oriented land use planning. Urban poor residents suffer the negative consequences of the land use planning actions of the custodians. On the other hand, the main land use planning actors and powerholders (land custodians, private developers, and planning officials) benefit from the workings of the land use planning system. Diverse social, cultural and economic motives inform the strategic selectivity of powerholders in land use planning, contrary to the predominant neoliberal logic of Marxist urban political ecology. We recommend that efforts to enhance urban resilience through land use planning within the sub-Saharan African context should acknowledge the strategic selectivity of powerholders and simultaneously create provisions to prevent the abuse of power and mitigate negative impacts on the environment and the urban poor. • Climate change knowledge of land custodians does not translate into resilience-oriented land use planning practices. • Community mobilization, lobbying politicians and protecting climate-sensitive land uses constitute custodians’ responses. • Social, cultural and economic motives inform the strategic selectivity of land-use planning actors. • Accumulation by adaptation, acts of commission and acts of omission are the outcomes. • Land custodians, private developers, and planning officials are the winners, while poor residents are the losers.

Abstract Urban political ecology has developed as a critique of capitalist urbanization. This article develops the concept of alter‐urban political ecology to define urban environments emerging not from capitalist urbanization but from efforts to transform it. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in five urban farms in socialist Cuba, I argue that a Marxist critique of colonial capitalism matters less as an analytical tool and more as a reference point within Cuban politics for understanding urban–rural restructuring since the 1960s. The article brings debates on socialist cities into conversation with urban political ecology to analyse two moments of radical transformation: first, the Cordón de La Habana—a project that in 1968 mobilized Havana's urban workforce in periurban agriculture to disrupt the uneven development of colonial capitalism. Second, the practices of ‘organopónico’ urban farmers in Pinar del Río, who in 2013 navigated a political economy blending socialized land ownership, state planning, market sales and moral incentives. These experiences of urban and periurban agriculture demonstrate how urban–rural relations have been reimagined and transformed within Cuban socialism, offering new directions for urban political ecology beyond its capitalist foundations.

This article analyses the 2019 dredging operations conducted as part of the Mombasa Port Development Program (MPDP) and focuses on the political-ecological conflicts generated by this flagship project of Kenya's Vision 2030 . Adopted in cooperation with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the MPDP aims to adapt to rapidly evolving global logistics standards and reinforce Mombasa Port's position as a leading regional logistics hub. The article highlights how the extraction of offshore sand along the southern coast of Mombasa for land reclamation has generated important ecological uncertainties around dredging's impacts on coastal ecosystems and local livelihoods. It demonstrates how these uncertainties became eminently political as they were reframed through dominant planning paradigms, leading to eventual contestations by marginalized and peripheral actors in Mombasa when expert narratives revealed their limits and biases. I highlight how, fundamentally, this process crystallized an epistemic rift between different actors and social groups with variegated socio-spatial trajectories and uneven political-economic power, resulting in conflicting representations of coastal environments. The article emphasizes two main conflicting representations of coastal landscapes that underpin this rift: one favored by powerful domestic and foreign actors who frame coastal areas as exploitable spaces of logistics circulation and the other emerging from peripheral and marginalized communities in the city who perceive coastal areas as endangered spaces of preservation . Empirically, these translate into three interrelated areas of contestation that culminated in legal disputes surrounding the impacts of dredging: knowledge controversies resulting from the questioning of dominant expertise on the impacts of dredging, rent and economic distribution conflicts around uses of coastal environments, and conflicting visions of coastal development.

Understanding Mosquito Burdens through an Urban Political Ecology of Singapore’s Residential Landscapes

Land governance in Nairobi is shaped by hybrid systems that blur the boundaries between formality and informality, especially in informal settlements which houses over 60 per cent of the city's population. Land cartels have emerged as powerful intermediaries, controlling access to land and services through “informal” channels. This article examines how cartels operate, sustain authority, and influence urban development in Korogocho, one of Nairobi's largest informal settlements. Using a Critical Urban Political Ecology framework, the study reframes cartels as structurally embedded actors central to Nairobi's urban metabolism. Based on a systematic literature review, 45 interviews, six focus group discussions, participatory mapping, and field observation, we find that cartels exploit both state tools and community legitimacy. Their power is rooted in long-standing relationships, trust, and entanglements that cast them as protectors and gatekeepers. Both they and officials engage in performative politics to mask systemic failures. These findings challenge legality/illegality binaries and call for rethinking governance through embedded informality and political performance.

ABSTRACT Despite the close connection between urbanization and the ecology of rivers, the co‐constitution of rivers and urban space remains undertheorized. This advanced review asks how scholars across social science and humanities disciplines have understood the relationships between rivers and the cities they make possible. This review is aimed toward advancing an urban river research agenda that centers the mutual production of the urban nature space of rivers and the socially uneven geographies of the modern city. To this end, I draw from the literatures of environmental history, urban history, urban political ecology, and postcolonial studies. Urban and environmental history provide historical accounts of the role of rivers in the urbanization process. Urban political ecology usefully theorizes nature‐society relations as a dialectic wherein the metabolization of nature produces historically contingent forms of urban socio‐nature, always already imbued with asymmetrical power relations. More recent urban political ecology writing has incorporated insights from scholars of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, broadening the field for a deeper engagement with the role of social difference in the production of uneven urban natures. A postcolonial reading of the concept of the river‐as‐line highlights the continued imposition of colonial epistemologies upon both human and non‐human worlds. An engagement with Indigenous scholarship further troubles the epistemological basis for modern forms of social and environmental inquiry. An effective urban river research agenda will incorporate the insights of these literatures and center the historical, geographical, and social processes that constitute the urban river as both a material and discursive object. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Human Water > Value of Water Engineering Water > Planning Water

Abstract Urban agriculture in densely populated areas is significantly constrained by space, leading to interest in vertical farming solutions like hydroponics. This study evaluates hydroponics’ viability in Cape Town's low‐income urban areas as a useful supplement to most research, which focuses on cities in the Global North. Using surveys and interviews, the article assesses whether farmers believe hydroponics can address challenges, such as water scarcity and limited space. The findings highlight several perceived benefits, including improved yields, water conservation, and efficient land use allvaluable features in Cape Town's urban environment. Significant challenges remain, notably the high setup costs and limited government support. This study draws on urban political ecology to explore how broader systemic inequalities influence the adoption of hydroponics. Financial and institutional barriers are rooted in historically produced conditions of inequality, reflecting ongoing capitalist dynamics of urban development. While hydroponics has potential as a sustainable alternative, its high costs hinder broader applicability, particularly in low‐income areas with unequal resource distribution. Therefore, hydroponics is not yet considered a viable large‐scale alternative for addressing food security in such contexts. For hydroponics to meaningfully contribute to urban food security and sustainable agriculture in Cape Town's low‐income communities, supporting actors must address systemic issues around financial feasibility and local expertise.

ABSTRACT This paper introduces and develops the concept of infrastructural contact zones to analyse how cross-class, socio-material interactions shape urban environmental governance. Urban infrastructures materialise global efforts to live within ecological limits. Yet dominant theoretical approaches often obscure their relational and political dimensions. Using the case of DIY-infrastructures in Bengaluru, India, I theorise materially-mediated forms of collective action that emerge within infrastructure. Drawing from relational poverty studies and situated urban political ecology, I analyse how waste infrastructures become arenas for negotiation between middle-class environmentalists and informal waste workers. Empirically, the paper examines a decade-long struggle over decentralised recycling infrastructure in Bengaluru. Amid municipal failures and a mounting waste crisis, middle-class environmentalists and waste picker organisations co-produced informal infrastructures, revealing the interdependence of sustainability initiatives and precarious labour. By examining how socio-technical networks shape political subjectivities and ecological politics, the concept of ‘infrastructural contact zones’ rethinks urban prefiguration as a socio-material process operating in and through hierarchical social relations.

Introduction: In Bangladesh’s complex urban spaces, poor people living in cities’ informal settlements struggle to access affordable public health services. Through a political ecology analysis, this paper explores how residents in informal urban settlements navigate everyday governance to access health services. Methods: This qualitative participatory research was conducted in two informal settlements in Dhaka city, one of the world’s most densely populated megacities. Stories of 16 families were captured through the Governance Diaries method, where repeated in-depth interviews and group discussions were conducted with each family over a period of four months between February and May 2023. Thematic framework analysis was conducted by applying the Urban Political Ecology (UPE) framework. Results: Residents employed various strategies to access essential public health services (healthcare, water, sanitation) by navigating local governance networks and negotiating with service providers. Success in these negotiations was shaped by residents’ socioeconomic status, access to information, political affiliations, and social networks. The ability to manage governance mechanisms for accessing public health services relied on three interconnected resources: 1) Financial resources (internal and external financial support); 2) Social resources (social networks - connections with governance actors and NGOs); and 3) Personal resources (negotiation skills, social and political positions, and personal wealth). Limitations in any of these resources restricted access to services. Conclusion: Personal, social, and financial resources influence the degree to which informal settlement residents can access public health services. Supporting the development of these three resources is crucial for enhancing the ability of diverse residents to engage in local governance networks and improve their access to public health services. Action is required to advance universal health coverage in Bangladesh and ensure that marginalised urban populations have equitable access to essential healthcare services.

The global expansion of digital infrastructure depends not only on technological innovation but also on the transformation of land, water, and governance systems. Taiwan's semiconductor boom—driven by worldwide demand for AI chips—has transformed the island's resource governance and territorial planning amid mounting climate stress and industrial urgency. While recent work in urban political ecology and infrastructure studies have analyzed the uneven impacts of megaprojects, less attention has been given to how strategic industries like semiconductors actively reshape environmental governance across both rural and urban landscapes. Focusing on Taiwan, this article argues that semiconductor-led development is sustained by a largely invisible infrastructure of water management. Based on fieldwork, spatial analysis, and policy review, the study shows how planning institutions, resource agencies, and emergency protocols have been retooled to prioritize industrial water use through inter-basin transfers, fallowing programs, and recycled water systems. These mechanisms ensure operational continuity for the semiconductor sector while displacing burdens onto rural communities and the environment. Even amid recent spatial planning reforms, science parks remain institutionally exceptional—operating outside standard oversight processes and securing preferential access to key infrastructure designed to sustain high-tech growth. By analyzing these dynamics, the article contributes to debates in environmental planning, water governance, and digital infrastructure, demonstrating how high-tech expansion deepens socio-ecological inequalities in the name of national security and competitiveness. Taiwan's case highlights a broader pattern in which digital economies are underpinned by extractive territorial strategies that reorganize the political economy of natural resource use to secure strategic industries.

This article explores how the visceral acts of being bitten by and killing mosquitoes can underpin the formation of ecological citizenship. This form of citizenship is premised on human-nature entanglement and raises questions concerning how the rights and responsibilities stemming from such entanglement become distributed across the public and private domains. As a space in which mosquito cohabitation is contested daily, the home is a key site through which ecological citizenship can be forged and theoretical debates concerning urban political ecology can be extended. Human-mosquito entanglements in the home can reveal the limits of public pest management strategies, the partiality of nature as both an implicit good and an implicit threat, and how everyday acts of killing can shape the ecological subjectivities of city dwellers. Drawing on qualitative data from focus groups with residents living in areas at-risk of dengue, follow-up in-home ethnographies, and a series of interviews with government stakeholders and representatives of pest management companies, we consider how the act of killing mosquitoes can provide insight into the place of the home in nature, and the importance of nature in the home.

In this paper, we examine environmental injustice using distributional justice theory. Using Environment and Climate Change Canada Enforcement Branch data, we show that the most vulnerable communities experience a greater number of environmental violations. We show that Census Sub-divisions (CSDs) with a higher percentage of Indigenous population, as well as CSDs with a higher percentage of visible minority populations, experience more violations of environmental regulations. Also, we find that median after-tax income does not moderate the impact of environmental violations. Our results support the predictions of the distributional justice theory as well as the urban political ecology theory.

Abstract In the early 20 th century, when oil was discovered in Khuzestan, the native Arab population was the dominant socio‐political group in most parts of the region. A century later, they are among the most marginalised in Iran. What role did the oil industry play in this transformation? Drawing on archival research, this paper argues that the racialisation of native populations has been central to the logic of oil capitalism. In Khuzestan, this began with the exclusion of Arabs from employment in the colonial oil company, severing their access to new forms of social reproduction and rendering them external to an industry that relied on their land. This exclusion persisted even after oil nationalisation, revealing how oil capitalism operates through domestic colonialism. The paper contends that addressing the social and ecological consequences of the fossil fuel industry requires closer attention to how it disrupts the social reproduction of affected communities.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is interwoven with uneven development and increasing socioeconomic demands that shape nature-society relations and place vulnerable groups at increased risk of resistant infections. While equity is integral to AMR governance, its relevance for AMR surveillance systems has not been fully conceptualized. An Urban Political Ecology (UPE) lens premised on equity and sustainable nature-society relations is used to both conceptualize and operationalize equity considerations in the governance of AMR surveillance. Key informant interviews with experts engaged in the Quadripartite Joint Secretariat on AMR, government agencies, academia, and the private sector were conducted to saturation. Exploring equity in AMR surveillance involves clarifying the pathways AMR-related policies and programs impact different sectors of society. Themes identified include global resource distribution, framings and intersectoral collaborations, capacity building, program feasibility, data accessibility, equity-deserving groups, Global North-South divide, sectoral balance, surveillance of root causes, social determinants of health. Greater understanding of these themes could help explain why biomedical approaches alone may not lead to a decline in AMR prevalence in some contexts. Our findings contribute a conceptual understanding of how a UPE lens focused on nature-society relations may assist states in explicitly incorporating equity considerations within One Health AMR surveillance to better address the main drivers of AMR.

This paper examines the intersection of urban land appropriation with greening and ungreening in informal settlements, focusing on how internal power struggles drive displacement and exacerbate inequality. Using Nairobi’s Pumwani–Majengo as a case study, the research applies the Situated Urban Political Ecology (SUPE) framework, grounded in environmental justice, to analyse disputes over green spaces. Fieldwork combined semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, life histories, field observations, and archival review with GIS and Landsat-based spatial analysis. Adaptive sampling, reflexivity, and methodological triangulation were used to navigate sensitive contexts and ensure data robustness. Displacement extends beyond physical relocation, severing social, cultural, and economic ties that are vital to resilience. Residents respond through resignation, negotiation, or active resistance. ‘Greening’ and ‘ungreening’ occur simultaneously, politicised and tied to dispossession, enclosure, and green ‘evictions’ that disproportionately affect vulnerable groups, particularly in riparian areas. Land changes create socioeconomic enclaves, privileging wealthier newcomers and marginalising low-income residents. The study challenges the notion of urban green spaces as neutral public goods, showing their appropriation for elite interests, and contributes to debates on environmental governance and land commodification in informal contexts by illustrating how green space disputes reproduce socio-spatial inequalities in rapidly growing cities.

This essay contributes to the 10th Anniversary Special Issue of plaNext – Next Generation Planning by offering reflections and ideas for inspiring a renewed roadmap in planning theory and practice that more systematically incorporates tools and contents from emerging critical disciplines. It emphasizes the crucial contributions that young researchers and planners can make through their work, as well as the potential of a journal led by early-career scholars—such as plaNext—to shape the field. The paper introduces the contemporary challenges facing planners within the context of the current global polycrisis, i.e., crisis of the ecosystem, society, democracy, and knowledge. Such a polycrisis will be linked to the urgent need for renewal in the field and a rethinking of how planning scholars and practitioners contribute to and engage with societal transformation and existing inequities and injustices. Drawing on emerging critical disciplines—including critical ecofeminism, critical disability studies, critical environmental justice, critical heritage studies and critical eco-museology, multispecies justice and critical animal studies, critical food studies, and urban political ecology—the essay explores how these perspectives have brought an ecosystemic understanding of the axes of power that drive inequality and injustice. It examines the extent to which these perspectives have already been incorporated into planning studies, the added value of integrating their critical tools, and the potential for planners and policymakers to engage in spatial and practical experimentation with these provocative concepts. Finally, the essay outlines some ideas for what a journal like plaNext could do for providing a space for innovative theoretical developments while supporting action- and justice-oriented work—both of which are increasingly crucial in today’s global context.

Urban political ecology in a time of genocide: A statement from the editors

The shift toward green and sustainable economies has led to the integration of ecological goals into land development strategies, resulting in diverse urban renaturing practices. These practices are often embedded within property-driven development processes, yet the co-productive relationship between urban greening and housing has remained under-theorized. Rather than treating greening and development as sequential stages, this study examines how they are operationalized in tandem, often reinforcing subtle forms of exclusion not captured by conventional analyses of displacement or gentrification. Drawing on the lens of urban political ecology (UPE), we develop the concept of metabolic greening to unpack a housing-featured renaturing apparatus. Based on a case study of the Unit Two land readjustment district in Taichung City, Taiwan, we analyze how greening practices and housing development are co-produced through iterative and interlocking processes. The research design integrates semi-structured interviews, policy and document analysis, and field observation to investigate the dynamics under study. We developed the 3Cs framework—conversion, coordination, and care—to serve two key purposes: to explain how housing-featured urban greening is organized, and to critically examine the exclusionary effects embedded in these processes. By repositioning greening as an integral part of property redevelopment, the framework advances a more relational understanding of urban nature production. The findings contribute to UPE debates by offering conceptual tools to examine how ecological interventions are not only organized through property but also implicated in shaping differentiated access, right, and control over urban green space.