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Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE Through African Urbanism
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Urban political ecology (UPE) has provided critical insights into the sociomaterial construction of urban environments, their unequal distribution of resources, and contestation over power and resources. Most of this work is rooted in Marxist urban geographical theory, which provides a useful but limited analysis. Such works typically begin with a historical-materialist theory of power, then examine particular artifacts and infrastructure to provide a critique of society. We argue that there are multiple ways of expanding this framing, including through political ecology or wider currents of Marxism. Here, we demonstrate one possibility: starting from theory and empirics in the South, specifically, African urbanism. We show how African urbanism can inform UPE and the associated research methods, theory and practice to create a more situated UPE. We begin suggesting what a situated UPE might entail: starting with everyday practices, examining diffuse forms of power, and opening the scope for radical incrementalism.
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... UPE approaches pay special attention to how power is exercised to shape the city. Urban development is a process infused with power relations that shape who will have access to or control urban spaces and water resources (Lawhon et al., 2014;Swyngedouw, 1997;Swyngedouw et al., 2002). One can even say that all human actions evolve around the capacity to act with effect, as "to engage in a practice is to exercise a power" (Cetina et al., 2005, p. 28) and power relations are built in the "ordering and the churn of innumerable Practices and politics of urban water | 69 moments of practices" (Watson, 2016, p. 181). ...
... physical layout of a city or infrastructures) and the social environment (e.g. social identities of class, gender, and race) -that together configure social practices -carry structural features that shape social interaction (Lawhon et al., 2014). The capacity to mobilise power allows actors to either uphold or challenge social orders, resulting in divergent sociomaterial geographies. ...
... In the context of African urbanism, closely related to the concept of everyday urbanism regularly used in this dissertation, Lawhon et al. (2014) ...
... To urbanise degrowth, we put it in dialogue with UPE, which studies the urbanisation of nature (Tzaninis et al. 2021) or society-nature relation. We engage with the notions of provincialised UPE (Lawhon, Ernstson, and Silver 2014) and degrowth in/from the south to appreciate Semarang as a Southern city, a city of Global South, with the latter as a site of resurgences (see Nirmal and Rocheleau 2019). ...
... We subscribe to the argument that there is a need for degrowth in/from the south, an engagement of degrowth with environmental justice movements (see Martínez-Alier 2012), as we do to the idea of provincialising UPE (Lawhon, Ernstson, and Silver 2014). Here, the experience of Semarang as a Southern city in pumping and conserving groundwater is our device to provincialise UPE. ...
This article brings degrowth into conversation with urbanisation through our analysis of environmental transformations in the coastal Southern city of Semarang, Indonesia. We analyse two collective activisms to build a theoretical dialogue between degrowth and provincialised urban political ecology (UPE). The first activism contests the ongoing development of pro-growth giant flood infrastructure and is politically rooted in mangrove ecosystem conservation. The second activism conserves groundwater. We identify mangrove and groundwater conservations as spatial practices of degrowth in/from the south. We make connections between the two scholarships and activisms to expand their political and pragmatic possibilities and, therefore, open space for more hopeful alternatives for the city's future.
... By investigating diverse agencies of mountain ecology in the governing of settlements, the study extends the critical scholarship on more-than-human governance (Harris, 2017). In doing so, this work answers recent calls from urban political ecology scholars to incorporate the ideas of new materialism (Tzaninis et al., 2021) and think outside the Global North (Lawhon et al., 2014). ...
Macropaintings have gained popularity as a tool employed by urban authorities and artists to uplift marginalized communities in cities across the Global South through the painting of their physical environments. However, despite the significant visibility of these paintings and their potential impacts on cities, there is limited knowledge regarding the conditions of their creation as well as the circumstances of their “fading.” Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Bogotá, Colombia, I analyze how urban authorities, artists, and the community, in conjunction with ecological and environmental aspects, distinctly contributed to the emergence and eventual fading of the macromural La Mariposa. I reveal how the mountain ecology of La Mariposa significantly influenced policy and politics through its articulation in particular relational conceptions of the territory mobilized by different actors in the project. This ecology became an actor in governance, not as a site of response to an event or a potential event but as an ontologically formed entity co-creating policy through its various conceptions and registers. I contend that macromurals are the product of tipping point urbanism, a hopeful approach to governing self-built settlements in which the intended transformation lies not in the macromural itself but in the process of its implementation. I further claim that the category “fading,” with its physical and symbolic dimensions, represents a fundamental heuristic to comprehend the outcomes of macromurals and other social interventions.
... Here, further research is needed to investigate alternatives to mitigate adverse social impacts whilst providing conservation benefits. A fruitful starting point for further research could be to expand on studies that seek to uncover inscribed injustices in urban environments [12,39,80], or research focusing on the participatory design of NbS and bottom-up approaches [15,81]. ...
Urban Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly promoted globally as a multifunctional and cost-effective
way to address social and environmental challenges in cities. Based on these premises, there is a growing
municipal interest in promoting NbS in cities of the so-called ’Global South’. However, current research is still
clearly biased towards the ’Global North’, with particularly few studies focusing on cities in Sub-Saharan Africa
(SSA). As a result of these research gaps, there is a high risk that maladapted NbS – modelled on examples from
other regions that do not meet local requirements and needs – will be adopted.
Against this background, this article examines barriers to the adoption of urban Nature-based Solutions and
the opportunities for successful implementation of NbS in cities in Malawi. Drawing on qualitative data
(workshops, narrative expert interviews, group discussions) collected during five research stays in Lilongwe
(2022–2024), the article outlines and analyses in detail the strategies employed to overcome these barriers by
those actors in charge for implementing the Lilongwe Ecological Corridor Initiative (LECI), a large-scale NbS in
the country’s capital city. By empirically exploring the particularities of the implementation of the LECI, the
article characterises features of NbS in SSA rarely explored in other contexts, such as the reframing of existing
greenspaces, the pragmatic adaptation of NbS-plans and the formulation of by-laws as part of their planning.
These insights can serve as a basis for further conceptual developments and critical engagement and to promote a
deeper understanding of the potentials and pitfalls of implementation strategies seeking to manoeuvre persistent
barriers.
... FPE addresses social justice issues and aims to enhance agricultural sustainability by integrating feminist theories. This framework exposes the gendered dimensions of environmental risks, rights, and responsibilities, showing how gender inequalities intersect with environmental issues (Lawhon et al., 2013). Moreover, it links individual experiences to broader socio-political and economic structures, exploring how gendered power relations impact resource access, decision-making processes, and environmental outcomes (Nightingale, 2006). ...
Agriculture is pivotal in the global economy but is challenged by unsustainable practices that harm the environment and aggravate social inequalities, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Women, making up half the agricultural workforce, often do not benefit equitably from their labour due to systemic gender inequalities. Applying a Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) lens reveals the unequal gendered power dynamics that influence access to resources, decision-making, and the distribution of benefits within agricultural value chains. In a narrative literature review, I integrate FPE principles with agroecological approaches to address gaps in understanding gender dynamics within food systems and highlight positive outcomes from integrating FPE, such as improved crop diversity, food security, and economic stability, while acknowledging challenges like entrenched gender norms, intersecting inequalities, and resistance to change. I explore how gender-sensitive agroecology can promote sustainable and equitable food systems and examine how patriarchal systems marginalize women in agriculture, restricting their access to resources and decision-making. The analysis asserts ongoing debates around the scalability of gender-sensitive agroecological approaches and the challenges of implementing FPE insights within existing policy frameworks. Identified gaps include the need for more longitudinal studies on the impacts of FPE-informed interventions and greater attention to women's diverse experiences across different agroecological zones. Overall, this review contributes to academic discourse and policy discussions, seeking to advance a critical understanding of gender equality and sustainable agriculture in smallholder farming.
... Floods are therefore understood as part of wider processes of uneven urbanization shaped by capitalism [98]. Thus, our analysis contributes to UPE's situated theory on how "urban environments are shaped, politicised, and contested" [99]. ...
This article examines a debate regarding future orientations for the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE). Anchored in two UPE discourses toward a more planetary or a more situated UPE, I argue that these discourses present two critical yet independent responses to early UPE scholarship, opening up the possibility for a more synthesising position. Building off of this debate as well as some of UPE's intellectual traditions, I then argue for a rapprochement between UPE and the field of critical logistics, using the 2022 expansion of the IJmuiden sea lock in the Netherlands as an illustrative case for demonstrating how applying the combined theoretical and methodological insights of UPE and critical logistics can turn a seemingly mundane sea lock infrastructure into a key site from which to draw out the political stakes of urban and climate futures as they play out in a city like Amsterdam. A closer engagement with critical logistics can not only extend UPE's existing themes and empirical focal points, but also attend to theoretical tensions regarding the politics of scale and place central to the debate between a more planetary and a more situated UPE. Finally, I argue that this rapprochement is not only theoretical and methodological but also political, as the wealth of work in critical logistics on articulating a counterlogistics can help UPE expand its political project in a time of climate emergency and interlocking capitalist crises.
The phenomenon of unregulated urbanization is the central axis of social and ecological transformations to coexist with ecosystems worldwide. In Latin America, there is a challenge to understand these impacts from everyday life, as there are various initiatives and resistances when interaction with nature has been threatened. This document proposes Narrative Productions as a novel research technique to identify sociocultural valuations towards urban nature and thus know the thoughts and actions that are strained by the impacts of urbanization in a municipality located in southern Chile. The chapter indicates the theoretical aspects of the research project to situate social and ecological problems of urbanization in everyday life; describes the origin and procedure of the Narrative Productions technique and presents the main results to understand the sociocultural valuations of nature situated in the municipality of Chiguayante, which in this case express the loss of native forests due to business logics that promote the growth of the city under particular interests and the need of the inhabitants to recover ancestral wisdom related to food supply.
Taking as his case-study the city of Guayaquil in Ecuador, where 600,000 people lack easy access to potable water, Erik Swyngedouw aims to reconstruct, theoretically and empirically, the political, social, and economic conduits through which water flows, and to identify how power relations infuse the metabolic transformation of water as it becomes urban. These flows of water which are simultaneously physical and social carry in their currents the embodiment of myriad social struggles and conflicts. The excavation of these flows narrates stories about the city's structure and development. Yet these flows also carry the potential for an improved, more just, and more equitable right to the city and its water. The flows of power that are captured by urban water circulation also suggest that the question of urban sustainability is not just about achieving sound ecological and environmental conditions, but first and foremost about a social struggle for access and control; a struggle not just for the right to water, but for the right to the city itself.
Typically, cities and nature are perceived as geographic opposites, cities being manufactured social creations, and nature being outside of human construction. Through a historical geography of water in the modern city, Kaika shows that this is not the case. Rather, nature and the modern city are fully intertwined, with cities integrating nature at every level of activity. While her empirical focus is on Athens, she discusses other major cities in the West, including London and New York.
This book develops a conversation between Marxist theories of everyday life and recent work in urban political ecology, arguing for a philosophy of praxis in relation to the politics of urban environments. Grounding its theoretical debate in empirical studies of struggles to obtain water in the informal settlements of Durban, South Africa, as well as in the creative acts of insurgent art activists in London, the book builds on the work of key Marxist thinkers to redefine “environmental politics.” A Marxist philosophy of praxis—that world-changing ideas emerge from the acts of everyday people—undergirds the book. Our daily reality, states the book, is woven out of the entanglements of social and natural relations, and as such a kind of environmental politics is automatically incorporated into our lives. Nevertheless, one effect of the public recognition of global environmental change, asserts Loftus, has been a resurgence of dualistic understandings of the world: for example, that nature is inflicting revenge on arrogant human societies. The book reformulates—with the assistance of such philosophers as Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre, and others—a politics of the environment in which everyday subjectivity is at the heart of a revolutionary politics.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/an-uncooperative-commodity-9780199253654?cc=ca&lang=en&
Introduction The Routes of Theorizing Urban Neoliberalism Conclusion References