Editorial

An Agenda for the Future

In May 2022, the 5-year-old son of one of the editors made a drawing with bright colours, obviously depicting the blue sky and a yellow sun. Then he pointed at some more distinct images in the picture. A black smudge taking up a quarter of the drawing was suspended above a large blotch of vibrant yellow full of red streaks, within which stick figures were strewn about. When interviewed about the drawing he first confirmed that it was indeed the sun and the sky, but then he revealed that the rest of the picture represented the wildfires in Australia and the people dying because of them. This poignant illustration of a 5-year-old's concerns sets the stakes for the climate emergency and our future, through the inevitable eyes of upcoming generations. It is with full awareness of such high stakes and urgency that we want to introduce our new Urban Political Ecology (UPE) journal. Our aim with the journal is to move the field of UPE forward, and to open pathways and directions over what UPE scholarship can offer to the politics of climate change and urbanisation, taken to be a political as much as an ecological problem. We wish to divide this agenda into separate and interrelated but distinct aims. We take them as a starting point to orient our journal's contributors and readers.

First, although we recognise that there is advanced theoretical debate and increased empirical attention on extended urbanisation, we wish to address the lack of a concrete, integrated research agenda for a UPE beyond the city. We hope our journal can help push the UPE debate beyond this ‘centre’ in order to shed light on spaces and lives outside urban centres that have been largely overlooked, and on the socio-ecological and spatial processes and practices beyond privileged scales. This ‘includes the combination of noncentral forms of population and economic growth with spatial expansion of various forms, from “suburban,” “peri-urban,” “post suburban,” corridor urbanisation, informal settlements, gated communities, tower estates, massive production sites, logistics “cities,” brutalscapes, deforestation, and vast agricultural landscapes, but also suburban residential sites, be it concrete high-rises or picket-fenced homes, kampungs, desakota, peri-urban villages, extensive employment zones, office cities and aerotropolises, as well as extended recreational and infrastructural spaces’ (Kaika, Keil, et al., 2023; Kaika, Varvarousis, et al., 2023: 7). The journal highlights the potential of the concept of ‘extended urbanisation’ to become generative of a situated UPE theory within the context of the climate emergency, while engaging with the empirical, theoretical and methodological insights of not only traditional UPE literature but from broader feminist, intersectional and postcolonial scholarship.

Second, our journal wishes to generate situated UPE scholarship that mobilises Global South perspectives as a tool for conceptual and empirical reorientation. Such an aim puts on centre stage Indigenous political ecologies, theories and practices of decolonisation, as well as abolitionist political ecologies with the aspiration to de-centre the position from which theory itself is developed. Thus, this focus on situated scholarship emphasises the different forms and processes related to the urbanisation of nature in different geographical settings, but also refers to the politics of research and theorisation themselves. This kind of ambition is to, again, enrich and recalibrate the UPE field not only with relevant scholarship that cannot be ignored academically but that stems from the places that are and have been often disproportionally affected by environmental catastrophe and the climate emergency. This kind of new theoretical agency of the periphery can in fact transform UPE itself beyond the urban, and thus offer opportunities for the periphery to be emancipated politically.

Third, as cities are increasingly becoming the preferred sites for policy and governance experiments to address the climate emergency, ‘urban laboratories’ are sprouting across the world. Investigating these new urban governance implementations has become central in contemporary UPE literature and strengthens the original UPE focus on governance issues, particularly in the context of neoliberal reorganisations and shifting discourses and practices of urban sustainability and resilience. Important as it is to document and analyse the fast and sweeping changes in urban governance, there is also an urgent need to understand and theorise the more profound effects these changes have in the way policymaking interfaces with politics. This is not to say that we embrace techno-managerialism as a solution to the climate emergency, but rather that we focus on (socio-environmental) politics, both questioning established orders and producing new imaginaries. Our ambition is to foster and cultivate the revolutionary potential of socio-spatial movements, starting from those in the peripheries of the urban. We aspire for the knowledge that the journal creates to become instrumental in such struggles.

The UPE Journal and the Field of UPE

If a 5-year-old's drawing is the symbolic emblem of our UPE journal, its intellectual progenitor is the 2023 book Turning up the heat: urban political ecology for a climate emergency, edited by Kaika, Keil, Mandler and Tzaninis; in fact that drawing became the book's cover. Our book is a collection of UPE scholarship that spans the globe and provides the inspiration for the journal as it engages with cutting-edge approaches for contemporary UPE. Turning up the heat was put together as a response to the urgent need to both expand and integrate UPE's theoretical, empirical and political scope in the face of extended urbanisation under the climate emergency. Our ambition emphasises that staying with urbanisation as a matter of concern allows us to address the climate emergency politically and ecologically, while not succumbing to reformist, techno-managerial suggestions for ‘cities to save the world’. This is indeed UPE's political and intellectual challenge as the field aims to remain relevant to the politics of a heating planet.

Three core elements brought the book to life and are inspiring us going forward with a UPE agenda for the journal. From page 347 of the book:

First, that the historical conditions of climate change are intimately linked to the processes and production of new (historically particular) forms of extended urbanisation. Second, that urban political ecology, as a heterodox field, is well suited to examine these linkages. Third, that such a task may nonetheless require a renewed and revitalised integrated UPE research and policy agenda. Importantly, the changing climate(s) that contextualise this book include more than global warming, ravaging wildfires, and an ongoing pandemic; there are geopolitical reorganisations, shifting academic zeitgeists informed by scholarly critical self reflection, and emerging and reinvigorated insurgent social movements.

Although we wish for our journal to take inspiration from Turning up the heat, our aim is to use it as a foundation to move beyond the book. To achieve that, the journal's primary focuses revolve around six major themes: extended urbanisation; politics and nature; more-than-human ontologies/epistemologies; post-colonialism; degrowth; and the Anthropocene/Capitalocene.

- Extended urbanisation explores the ways in which urbanisation goes beyond the traditional boundaries of the city, affecting ecological processes at different scales. As Brenner (2013: 90) describes it, ‘the emergent process of extended urbanization is producing a variegated urban fabric that, rather than being simply concentrated within nodal points or confined within bounded regions, is now woven unevenly and yet ever more densely across vast stretches of the entire world’. In the case of ecology, urban expansion not only relates to local ecosystems but can also have far-reaching consequences for regional and global biodiversity. Similarly, extended urbanisation can lead to habitat fragmentation, affecting species migration patterns and disrupting ecological networks, or to infectious disease outbreaks in peri-urban areas. UPE can guide us as an epistemological frame on the urban dimensions of such issues such as the politics of greenbelt development (Keil and Macdonald, 2016), or exurbia as a whole by moving the lens of UPE beyond the city toward rural ideals and ideologies of nature (McKinnon et al., 2021).

- The politics of the urban-nature relationship focus on the political and economic forces that drive urban development and their shifting relationship to natural environments. This includes examining how urban planning policies may prioritise certain land uses over others, often favouring commercial development at the expense of green spaces. It also involves analysing the role of political institutions in mediating conflicts over land use and resource allocation. But most importantly it engages with, and focuses on, the political process through which ecological transformations emerge. What comes to mind is Arboleda's (2016) work on spaces of extraction, engaging with how urbanization produces ‘nature’ and ‘space’ beyond the city through a homogenization and fragmentation dialectic. Or how ‘Nature’ should not be conceptualised as essential, isolated or foundational but that ‘the cultural, technical and political mediations through which the urban environment is (re-)configured… [need to] be understood [with] reference to discursive practices and how they intertwine with material processes and outcomes’ (Swyngedouw and Kaika, 2014).

- More-than-human ontologies/epistemologies examine the roles and agency of non-human entities in urban environments, challenging common anthropocentric perspectives. Urban political ecologists have already explored how other-than-human animals, plants and microorganisms shape and are shaped by the urban process. These analyses highlight that non-human actors belong to the network of processes that determine urbanisation and its products. The more-than-human epistemology is increasingly becoming relevant and useful for geography, especially when it comes to engaging with urban ecological processes. More-than-human entanglements can drive UPE's agenda toward ontological debates such as Barua and Sinha's (2019) work on how ‘commodification or metabolization affects and alters the sentient experience of animals’; or toward epistemological questions that Solomon and Kaika (2024: 2) ask with their ‘embodied’ research practices that ‘connect the researcher's lived (embodied) experience with the politics of the object of research while fostering solidarity with that object’.

- Post-colonial analysis of urbanisation focuses on how colonial histories and legacies influence contemporary urbanisation processes and socio-environmental dynamics. This involves exploring how colonial-era land policies and practices continue to affect urban development patterns and environmental justice issues in post-colonial cities. It also includes examining the ways in which contemporary urbanisation in the Global South is shaped by global economic and political forces rooted in colonial histories. Ranganathan and Balazs (2015: 417) suggest we undertake a ‘more critical, post-colonial pedagogy of the environment’ that doesn’t readily divide the world into ‘First’ and ‘Third’ but rather on how we come to frame particular environmental narratives, while Heynen (2016) refers to ‘Abolition ecology’ when proposing ways to understand ‘how cities have been produced through racialized logics’.

- Degrowth and post-capitalist alternatives consider political-economic, environmental models that challenge the growth-oriented paradigms of contemporary, capitalist urban development. The degrowth movement advocates for a radical rethinking of economic progress, emphasizing ecological sustainability and social well-being over GDP growth. Studies on urban degrowth typically explore how urban environments hold the potential for a transition to more sustainable and equitable economic systems. Kaika et al. (2023) explore ways for ‘operationalising’ degrowth concepts into urban and regional everyday spatial practices, while emphasizing the importance of degrowth as an alternative imaginary for the future, while Savini (2021) provides a systemic critique of urban development, arguing that growth promotes internal competition among urban areas, and suggesting that confederational institutions are at least necessary for degrowth.

- The Anthropocene/Capitalocene narrative understands urbanisation within the broader context of planetary environmental change and capitalist development. This involves examining how urbanisation contributes to and is affected by global environmental processes such as the climate emergency and biodiversity loss. It also includes analysing how capitalist dynamics shape urbanization patterns and environmental outcomes. As Gandy (2022: 32) suggests: ‘as for the dominant Anthropocene trajectory, as framed by the geophysical sciences, there is an evident tension between an adaptive Anthropocene, framed by the infinite malleability of nature, and a dystopian Anthropocene steeped in neo-Malthusian intimations of inevitable collapse’. Swyngedouw argues (2023: 46) that ‘the Anthropocene has never been “the Age of Humans”, but rather the age of the few, mainly men, through whom capital circulation was organised, nurtured, and deepened on a planetary scale’.

Format, Scope and Origins of the Journal of UPE

The journal of UPE is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes state-of-the-art scholarship primarily rooted in the field of UPE. Since its emergence in the 1990s, the field of UPE has focused on unsettling traditional understandings of the ‘city’ as entirely distinct from nature. Instead, it highlights the intricate metabolic connections between cities and ecological processes and the flow of resources. The journal encourages publications from scholars who channel their critical energies towards a politically engaged debate over the role of extensive urbanisation in addressing socio-environmental politics and inequality, especially in the context of the contemporary, global environmental emergency. We aim to go beyond rigid orthodoxies conceptually and empirically, and we welcome diverse, heterodox perspectives that challenge the canonical paradigms in the fields of urban studies, geography, sociology, anthropology, political ecology and environmental studies.

UPE is a field that is uniquely positioned to make an intervention in many urgent political questions around urbanisation and the climate emergency and UPE's ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies can readily address the systemic disaster we call the climate emergency. The field of UPE emerged in close discussion with Dona Haraway and Bruno Latour, developing a new ontological understanding of both nature and the city as fluid ontologies, as hybrids and cyborgs: neither purely human-made nor purely natural; as socio-environmental and socio-technological constructs, ridden by power relations. In that sense it unsettles the traditional understanding of ‘cities’ as distinct entities separate from their outside, from ‘nature’ or ‘the periphery’ and claims there is nothing un-natural about what we call cities. Everything we see around us in cities, bricks, steel, concrete, asphalt are metabolised and engineered flows of natural resources, which are put together through human labour, capital investment and technology, and which are governed by power relations. But equally, UPE claims that there is also nothing ‘natural’ about a forest, or a park. They are also the outcome of historical layers of metabolic flows between geological processes, human and non-human labour, capital investment and technology; there is no city as such and no nature as such. There is a perpetual process called the ‘Urbanization of Nature’ (Swyngedouw and Kaika, 2014), not only reminiscent of the process of planetary urbanisation, what Keil (2017) calls the ‘suburban planet’, but of an array of political-ecological processes that affect no less than the future of human and non-human life on the planet.

This ontological shift has made an epistemological intervention to both Urban Studies and Political Ecology: for Urban Studies, UPE disrupts ‘the canon’ that conceptualizes cities as bound and purely social spaces separated from the outside and the non-human world. With respect to political ecology, UPE urges to focus not only on the extractivist politics in the Global South or on the productive and extractivist landscapes of the Global North, but also on the dialectic between increasingly urbanised and luxurious lifestyles and the destruction of environments and livelihoods in the Global South and North. Thus, UPE examines how the imperial mode of living in core urban centres is made possible only through the extraction of unlimited and underpaid power, energy, land and natural resources, and the creation of waste sinks at a global scale. Core cities can afford to become smarter and cleaner only because they can dump their externalities elsewhere. In short, UPE's epistemology examines the climate emergency not as collateral damage, but as the very modus operandi of capitalist urbanisation.

The field of UPE established itself in the 2000s, culminating in the 2006 volume In the Nature of Cities (Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw). Since then, the contemporary questions and debates the field engages with have advanced in remarkable ways and are addressed by an array of diverse scholarship that enriches the field even further. Such contributions include Goh's (2021) Form and flow, Angelo's (2021) How green became good, Stoetzer's (2022) Ruderal City, or Post-growth planning (Savini et al., 2022), as well as Pandemic Urbanism (Ali et al., 2023) or Cugurullo's (2021) Frankenstein Urbanism and Jon's (2021) Cities in the Anthropocene, and of course the 2023 edited book Turning up the Heat. Today, UPE scholarship spans over three decades of cross fertilization, and self-criticism, while the dynamics of growth produce even more violent and ‘feral’ forms of extended urbanisation that blur further the boundaries between the urban inside and the outside, and lead to new waves of destruction, and inequality. That is the moment in time when we strongly assert that our journal is necessary.

The journal of UPE publishes three issues annually, in April, August and December, including potential Special Issues. We welcome contributions in the form of research articles, commentaries, book reviews, debates and interventions (generally the maximum wordcount is 9000). We seek pluralism for the journal, thus we embrace the inherent interdisciplinarity of the UPE field, including Sociology, Geography, Anthropology, Political Science, Economics, and research cultures and fields, like Planning Studies, Urban Studies, STS, Political Economy and Environmental Science. We hope to develop cross-pollination with such fields, encouraging the enrichment of UPE through scholarship that can ultimately contribute in addressing the global environmental/climate emergency with crucial, generative and inspiring insights. We similarly encourage diverse and novel methodologies, including art and embodied research. All these aims hopefully provide inspiration and fertile ground especially for early-career researchers to submit to journal. We are humbly hoping for the journal of UPE to offer representation for minority and oppressed peoples, giving the possibility for contributions and scholarship from the Global South. We aim for this journal to become a space of innovation and originality, as is fitting for an interdisciplinary and radical field like UPE.

Ultimately we aspire for this journal to be a radical outlet that aims to not only interpret the world but change it. We have been, and still are, bombarded by apocalyptic landscapes, politics and rhetoric, both imagined and real, that seem to dominate the contemporary zeitgeist; such ‘urbicidal’ imaginaries (Wakefield, 2022) present a grim fate in their firm belief of inevitability, that we are all doomed beyond salvation. But we disagree. As Wakefield also argues, there is transformative potential in other ways of living, beyond these catastrophic visions. We hope that with UPE as a toolset we can synthesise and generate new imaginaries that are not apocalyptic but best described as narratives ‘between catastrophe and revolution’ (Monk and Sorkin, 2021), as in the title of the collection of essays in honour of the late Mike Davis. And then we can hope to reach a moment when 5-year-olds can have more trivial concerns than wildfires and human and non-human casualties.