Anna Zimmer

• PhD in Geography
• Independent Researcher

India’s 74th Constitutional Amendment obliges state governments to devolve responsibilities related to urban environmental resources and services to the Urban Local Bodies. However, the existing literature points to deficiencies in urban decentralization, including a mismatch between resources and responsibilities, financial constraints, and a lack...

Urban ponds in India have for a long time been used for multiple purposes and have been accessible to a wide range of social groups; they thus often represent an urban commons. However, recent transformations of urban ponds into infrastructure that serves more limited uses have been accompanied by enclosure and social exclusion. Using an urban poli...

The 74th Constitutional Amendment obliges state governments to devolve responsibilities related to urban environmental resources and services, such as water supply, drainage and sewerage, solid waste management, green spaces and environmental protection, to the Urban Local Bodies (ULBs). However, the literature, largely based on macro-level analyse...

In this article, we identify different types of urban nature, more or less "wild" or "artificialized", that are produced through the interaction of different actors and the natural environment. Taking cues from Urban Political Ecology, we analyze power relations and environmental imaginaries that result in the production of different urban ecologie...

This chapter attempts to map different understandings of the "urban" in Urban Political Ecology (UPE) and to render these more explicit while pushing the field for greater conceptual clarity. It discusses the question of how the different strands of UPE understand the "urban": the traditional Marxist UPE as metabolic process shaped by power and the...

Urban political ecology (UPE) has mainly evolved within the discipline of geography to examine the power relations that produce uneven urban spaces (infrastructures and natures) and unequal access to resources in cities. Its increasingly poststructuralist orientation demands the questioning of received categories and concepts, including those of (n...

Urban parks in India are often discussed as positive environmental projects, and their creation appears as unproblematic in public discourse. This paper presents the creation of a municipal park in a small city in Gujarat, India. Using insights from history and architecture, we stress the importance of reading parks as political and to some extent...

Solid waste management is often perceived as one of the most pressing environmental problems facing local governments in urban India and elsewhere in the global south. However, solid waste is not simply a managerial problem but is in many ways a highly political issue that involves diverse political actors at different scales. Particularly at the l...

This special issue of SAMAJ, composed of six empirical papers and this introduction seeks to throw light on environmental politics in contemporary urban India. Adopting a deliberately broad understanding of the environment, to include environmental amenities, urban natural resources and the built environment, the diverse case studies within this is...

While researchers in the growing field of urban political ecology have given significant attention to the fragmented hydroscape that characterizes access to drinking water in the global South, so far the (re)production of other urban waters and its related power relations have been underexplored. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap...

The notion of waterscape has been proposed by urban political ecology (UPE) scholars as a conceptual lens for understanding urban hydro-social flows. So far, however, there has been little attention by UPE scholars to the importance of wastewater in urban waterscapes. This study demonstrates how wastewater is embedded in an arena of social relation...

Urban political ecology (UPE) has only recently witnessed a substantial investigation of non-Western cities. Yet much of this literature has concentrated thus far on perceived environmental problems, which seems to suggest that Southern cities are understood in UPE, as in some other fields of study, as being inherently problematic. To counter such...

Megacities in Asia face tremendous environmental challenges. One of these is the drainage and treatment of waste water—a problem which ironically grows when access to water supply and water-borne toilets improves, leading to increasing per capita water consumption as well as water pollution. In Delhi, the overall waste water problem is huge with an...

The management of waste water and solid waste remains a substantial challenge of urban governance in India's agglomerations. This challenge is especially pronounced in unplanned settlements, such as slums, where the overall situation of environmental sanitation is highly problematic. Till date, the conflict potential that this situation holds has h...

The integration of the human rights framework in water policy and management is slowly gaining strength. What is too often overlooked, though, is the ‘other’ side of the water cycle: wastewater governance. What do human rights have to do with sewage, sludge, and septage? What are the links between human rights and water contamination? The article s...

Twelve years after the discussions on development and institutions at the meeting of the Geographischer Arbeitskreis Entwicklungstheorien (GAF, 2000) in Zurich, this paper seeks to put institutions back on the research agenda in development geography. The authors explore recent trends in institutional theory and propose a dialectic understanding of...

Delhi’s slums face recurrent and disturbing waste water-related problems: overflowing drains, stagnation of sewerage near or within houses, and subsequent mosquito breeding cause difficulties for everyday life and serious health hazards. The question arises for the affected people as well as administration, how to deal with this tremendous challeng...

While unplanned colonies retain a negative image for most city planners, pragmatic reasons favour their regularisation. A large number of Delhi's residents live in such unauthorised colonies, most of which are now being regularised. But just how many people, and what changes for them through regularisation? This process does not come without precon...

The wastewater crisis in megacities of the Global South is increasingly recognised. However, sector-driven approaches (of river pollution, sewerage, or city-wide drainage) have had limited success in tackling this multifaceted problem. This article seeks to dynamise debates by positioning the current crisis in relation to contests of knowledge. Foc...

Waste water governance presents a major challenge in India’s cities and megacities. High rainfall variability, partial sewer networks, and waste water discharge through often dilapidated and silted storm water drains lead to impracticalities of daily life, health hazards, and environmental pollution, among other problems. Mostly located in the blan...

Political Ecology is a highly dynamic research field within geographical studies on development. Since Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) laid the foundations of the approach and formulated its first definition, the field has evolved in many different directions (among others, see Blaikie 1999). Only in recent years, however, have we seen a tendency, es...

In the overall context of the Millennium Development Goals, Pakistan recently embarked on an effort to collect data regarding crucial issues of human development, such as health, poverty, and education. For their effective use in policy formulation, however, governments need to find ways of making the data easily accessible. It is argued that Geogr...

The Segura basin in southeast Spain is characterised by massive over-use of its water resources. Groundwater resources are being depleted, desertification risk is high and the river ecosystem is near to collapse with merely 4% of its original runoff reaching the mouth. Meanwhile, the water cycle has been deeply technologized to meet the needs of an...