Natasha Cornea

• Doctor of Philosophy, Geography
• Professor (Associate) at University of Birmingham

Urban imaginations, imageries and conceptualizations are always plural and illustrate the formation of knowledge hegemonies. In this article, we engage with the problematic of reading infrastructures with a southern theory lens. We explore multiple imaginations, imageries and conceptualizations of the Kirulapana Canal in Colombo via everyday practi...

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...

In this paper I demonstrate the ways that the everyday state is produced in and through Lusaka's rubbish, although the state is largely absent from the day‐to‐day management of the solid waste in the city. This analysis draws insight from over 90 semi‐structured interviews with a range of respondents in Lusaka, primarily focussed on the cities’ low...

Cities are critical sites for understanding, and potentially ameliorating, the effects of global ecological change, the climate emergency and natural resource depletion. Contemporary cities are sociomaterially connected through global markets, trade and transportation, placing ever‐increasing demands on the natural environment and generating danger...

To understand how our urban world is changing, we need to investigate how seemingly technical or natural objects are embedded in our understanding, or in brief, to acknowledge that knowledges (in plural) are political. There are multiple ways of knowing our environment and these multiple ways matter in how we engage with it. Understanding of some i...

In the global South, urban infrastructures and environments are marked by significant heterogeneity and the presence of multiple overlapping systems, configurations and actor networks that keep the city working – water flows, electricity is available, and waste is collected. This occurs in the face of what has been traditionally characterized as fa...

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...

Analysis of politics in urban West Bengal has focussed on the near hegemonic control of political parties and the state on daily life – overlooking or under-accounting for the complex institutional assemblages that shape spaces of the political in daily life. Addressing this empirical gap, this paper examines the role of social clubs, who discursiv...

Urban political ecology (UPE) is a conceptual approach that understands urbanization to be a political, economic, social, and ecological process, one that often results in highly uneven and inequitable landscapes. Cities are seen not as the antithesis of nature but rather as a second nature, representing the dominant form of living in the contempor...

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...

How do processes of power shape the urban environment in small Indian cities? On a day-today basis, who actually controls access to and the use of environmental resources? How is this done? Answering these questions contributes to our ability to develop a nuanced understanding the urban condition. In order to investigate these questions an actor-or...