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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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... We suggest that such activities enable rent-seeking behaviour that mirrors features of feudalism, with local administrators managing the economic property, and ecological value of parks, while scaling them to their political positions. In this regard, our approach addresses the debates on green spaces in overlooked contexts (Lawhon, Ernstson, and Silver 2014;Zimmer, Cornea, and Véron 2017) where regulations aimed at commodification and primitive accumulation take shape. It also responds to the call for critical scrutiny of how the green in urban space has evolved in the course of the political and economic interventions of the recent decades (Anguelovski et al. 2019), especially in the context of post-socialist cities where green gentrification actions have a rather recent imprint. ...
... Echoing the need for situated understanding and attention to everyday practices (Lawhon, Ernstson, and Silver 2014), fresh directions in research have explored emerging economies, examining state coercion (Özkaynak et al. 2015), local elites' involvement (Zimmer, Cornea, and Véron 2017), and assemblage of groups of landed interests (Chung, Zhang, and Wu 2018), meanwhile critiquing political encroachment on democracy and greening in cities. These studies have uncovered new dynamics in park transformations, identifying them as "arenas of struggles over identities and moralities, over values and meaning" (Zimmer, Cornea, and Véron 2017, 50). ...
... To overcome the predicament of refeudalisation, parks and people must seek out a politics of responsibility and cooperation to reduce the confusion caused by the overlapping responsibilities of the planning agencies, and the lack of coordination between the city's administration bodies and NGO involvement. This is not the case of Bucharest because the solutions demand a radical approach to be viable, which might be answered by the incremental (Lawhon, Ernstson, and Silver 2014) development and critique of skills leading to connected, collective empowerment. Only then the democratic exercise might foster common sense, unfreezing the political from its hyper-focus on capturing the socio-natural. ...
... What might proposals and pathways to degrowth look like if we considered the actuallyexisting conditions of Global South cities in theorising its alternatives? Such a situated approach, as practiced by urban political ecologists, would entail starting with everyday practices and examining diffuse forms of power relationally (Lawhon et al., 2014). It would work from the premise that both the politics of and pathways to degrowth would manifest differently in different contexts, and that history, culture and context matter. ...
... Offering such services without vexing middle-class sensitivities around park making as essentially associated with leisure and aesthetics would require both challenging these hegemonic interests, as well as setting aside more urban space for public and commons purposes, and thus limiting the privatisation of urban space. While these recommendations might sound trivial and marginal compared to the scale of the challenge, we speculate that they open scope for radical incrementalism (Lawhon et al., 2014) -the more ways in which park-making supports parks functioning as socially-shared spaces that meet people's needs, the less people depend on privatised consumerism. It also expands the spheres and strengthens the practices of care, conviviality and sharing in the city, prefiguring alternatives to the 'imperial mode of living'. ...
Answering the call in this special issue to spatialise degrowth studies beyond the Global North, this paper examines practices of ‘park-making’ in Chennai and Metro Manila as a potential degrowth pathway. Parks in the coastal mega cities of Metro Manila and Chennai can be seen as relics of a colonial era, and spaces coherent with capitalist, growth-oriented and consumerist logics. At the same time, however, they become spaces that prefigure alternative ways of organising social life in the city based upon values of conviviality, care and sharing. Using qualitative methods of analysis, this paper examines what practices people engage with to satisfy their everyday needs in parks, but also the dynamics of exclusion and contestation that play out in these spaces. In doing so, we evaluate when and under what conditions park-making supports practices of de-growth and commoning beyond consumerist culture. Both commoning and uncommoning practices are detailed, revealing the role of provisioning systems that lead to the satisfaction of needs for some at the expense of others. Further, writing from cities that are highly unequal, and where the basic needs of many are yet to be met, we assert that understanding how degrowth manifests in these contexts can only be revealed through a situated urban political ecology approach. Spatialising degrowth in cities of the Global South should start with a focus on everyday practices, study power relationally and explore the scope for a radical incrementalism.
... In this direction, UPE studies have conceptualized and empirically tested the concept of provincialization. In their seminal study, Lawhon, Ernstson, and Silver (2014) explain that building a provincialized UPE requires a framework that is sensitive to theories developed in relation to particular places and plural urban experiences, which can question universalizing assumptions that are taken for granted. In their definition, they draw upon the postcolonial perspective of Chakrabarty (2007), who explains that provincializing is not about rejecting Western thought, but rather requesting that general notions of modernity be confronted with the geohistorical specific practices that may contribute to a different theorization that can coexist alongside Western theories. ...
... Based on Lawhon, Ernstson, and Silver (2014), we build our analysis of GSSHE in Bucharest on a framework of provincialized UPE through the lens of (post) socialist urban theories. To further guide our understanding of (post) socialist urbanity and its relation to dominant epistemologies, we turn to Stenning and Hörschelmann (2008). ...
This paper employs the Urban Political Ecology (UPE) framework in order to decipher the unequal geohistorical developments of the Green Spaces of Socialist Housing Estates (GSSHE) in Bucharest under socialist and post-socialist urban political economies. We respond to the call for provincializing and expanding UPE research beyond the Western world with our theoretically informed, empirically grounded study, as literature on socialist and post-socialist socio-natures is virtually non-existent. Bucharest’s GSSHE developed during the socialist era through an allocation of informal temporary land use rights that engendered practices of gardening and agriculture. During post-socialism, residents retained informal rights to use the land, engaging in activities such as gardening, temporary constructions, and house expansion. Simultaneously, patterns of both formal and informal privatization also began to emerge. The last decade brought strong institutional-led change, as district mayors of Bucharest redeveloped green spaces to serve the shifting conditions within the capitalist urban political economy. As some spaces have been completely destroyed, converted to parking spaces, bulldozed for temporary and illegal constructions, or placed under a green revitalization program, these more recent developments have come into conflict with, and partially into a negotiated relationship with, the past legacies of gardening, alternative welfare, and their preserved inequalities.
... UPE has successfully evaluated these approaches, raising questions of inequality, justice and poverty in the Global South (Schroeder et al., 2006;Walker, 2007), especially focusing on water flows (Swyngedouw, 1999). Keeping the power questions as central to the UPE analyses, various scholars have discussed the role of formal and informal actors in urban water regimes (Gandy, 2006;Lawhon et al., 2014). Marxist UPE scholars have used the notions of urban metabolism and flow to analyse power and critique the structure of the formal actors or the state. ...
Science and technology studies and urban political ecology have made important contributions to the understanding of water provision in the Global South. In this article we develop insights from these fields with the aim to understand the blurring boundaries of urban water regimes and their power relations mediated by actors, institutions and technology. Furthermore, we explore how urban water regimes can form a critical interface which is a form of institutional–actor space where formal and informal water regimes encounter each other through conflict and cooperation.
Mosquito-borne disease presents a significant threat to urban populations, but risk can be uneven across a city due to underlying environmental patterns. Urban residents rely on social and economic processes to control the environment and mediate disease risk, a phenomenon known as everyday governance. We studied how households employed everyday governance of urban infrastructure relevant to mosquito-borne disease in Bengaluru, India to examine if and how inequalities in everyday governance manifest in differences in mosquito control. We found that governance mechanisms differed for water access and mosquitoes. Economic and social capital served different roles for each, influenced by global narratives of water and vector control.
This paper investigates opportunities to connect divided cities by analysing ways in which occupation practices operate alongside, subvert and potentially transform historic, and presently developing urban infrastructure divisions in Tshwane’s eastern urban region. Through a critical theory lens existing and perpetuating conditions of infrastructural segregation are examined in order to understand scenarios through which built environments, as assemblages, maintain conditions of extreme inequality and power. In this respect, urban spatial research projects, analysing formal and informal settlement patterns are presented. The projects form part of an architecture design lead research studio that focuses on discovering alternative scenarios for urban environments by examining existing infrastructure barriers, and unpacking methods for the transformation of segregative systemic forms. Extracts of the projects are presented as case studies with a focus on areas around Mamelodi east and Moreleta Park in rapidly growing parts of Tshwane. These projects demonstrate conditions through which urban divisions of scarcity are established and constructed along infrastructure development zones in the region. They also raise key spatial questions pertaining to inequality and the role of capital investment in its perpetuation.
The second part of the project involves socio-spatial methods of mapping self-build situations occurring alongside hard infrastructure zones in the region. The studies focus on the composition of building fabrics that actively attempt to circumvent issues of scarcity and unequal access to material and social infrastructures. Through the establishment of physical interfaces, people form modes of operation despite extreme resource limitations. The project aims to identify alternative ways of reading territorialised urban infrastructure assemblages by examining critical zones of urban occupation. While the examples expose many of the volatile situations that the urban majority experience on a perpetual basis, the primary aim is to reveal - from the everyday – urban spatial emergence and methods of coding and mapping these emergences towards an adaptive, reparative and transformative approach to divided cities.
wWe use the urban political ecology perspective to explore how communities of homo religiosus (re)configure politics of COVID-19 in India and Pakistan. This urban health crisis unfolds in five parallel registers of conflictualities: (i) where religious communities carve out a domain for self-governance of the pandemic with their own ‘knowledge and truths’, (ii) where embodied religious practices challenge or undermine state biopower and transform governmentalities, (iii) where the spatial dimension of conflict evolves into the crisis of technologies of governance, (iv) where religious identities are stigmatized and the minority groups are excluded and (v) where communalism organizes around international relations. It is argued that religious groups in South Asia influenced the urban political (eco)pathology with their disruptive potential which transformed biosecurity regimes and enhanced health risks on the one hand and on the other, they embraced and internalized discords of disease within their antagonistic communal and sectarian memories and histories and weaponized the pandemic to produce more cracks in the social fabric. This essay underscores the significance of unusual actors in the urban political ecology framework and calls for a renewed understanding of human–nature interface by incorporating religion and religious beliefs and how they view and shape the metabolic flows in the urban spaces for social sustainability of the city as a ‘natural object’.
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.
Introduction The Routes of Theorizing Urban Neoliberalism Conclusion References
