Abstract
A manifesto for Urban Political Ecology
The story of the Urban Political Ecology (UPE) journal starts in 2019, when the four of us started working on Turning Up the Heat, a book that attempts to show how UPE's insight and methods can be mobilised to tackle the socio-environmental catastrophe we call climate change. UPE did not drop out of the sky in 2019 of course. It is an established field with a rich, 35-year-long intellectual history, built on foundational texts by Neil Smith, William Cronon, Mike Davis, Erik Swyngedouw, Matthew Gandy, Gene Desfor, Karen Bakker, Paul Robbins, Nik Heynen, and many others. Today, however, UPE scholarship has become more relevant than ever for two key reasons: first, because its central question, namely ‘who wins and who loses from socio-environmental interventions and disasters?’, has never been politically more urgent. Second, because UPE is not just about analysing problems, but it is also about exploring alternative socio-environmental practices and politics. And this particular historical moment urgently demands such alternative imaginaries. So when Sage approached us to explore the launch of a new UPE journal, we wanted to create a journal that responds not only to an academic need but also to an urgent political need.
Yet, our enthusiasm for the journal also came from frustration. Over the last three decades, UPE scholars have provided rigorous theoretical and empirical insight but we have not only published papers. We have also been on the ground, working with activists, communities, and policymakers worldwide, hoping to make our scientific insight relevant to the politics of climate change. And even though we adhere to the old saying ‘science gives foresight, and foresight can lead to action’, when UPE's research agendas started seeping into policy, it did not quite play out as we had hoped. Yes, we did help put urbanisation at the centre of global environmental debates. Yes, cities are now the go-to sites for climate interventions. And yes, thousands of urban labs are being funded across the world. But we should not be celebrating. When our work got translated into policy under neoliberal urbanisation and ecological modernisation, UPE's core question—who wins and who loses?—was conveniently sidelined. Instead, our insights were repackaged into techno-managerial fixes: smart cities, circular cities, resilient cities, and green consumerism. Our contribution was translated into all these totems of the belief that we can supposedly ‘fix’ the environment ills, while keeping capitalist exploitation intact. This is not what we advocated: smart and resilient cities are not the solution but are actually part of the problem. One's ‘smartness’ is always someone else's environmental disaster. Becoming more resilient means becoming prepared to take on even more socio-environmental destruction in the future, while technocratic solutions de-politicize social and environmental questions. And these shortcomings are precisely why we decided to start this journal. Not just to move the field of UPE forward, but to reignite its political fire. We wish for a journal that:
- Puts at centre stage voices and places identified for too long as peripheral. - Actively commissions knowledge from the so-called margins. - Expands methodological horizons by engaging more with the natural sciences. - Sets bold agendas for (re)imagining urban futures—futures built on solidarity, not extractivism. - Centres on labour and work, and explores new ways of organising social relations of production. - Engages in prefigurative thinking and action around solidary or post-capitalist economies and ways of living.
The collection of imagining with Urban Political Ecology
Part of this effort is the inaugural special issue of the UPE journal. This first issue serves as a foundational statement of what is to come for the journal, showcasing current conceptual and epistemological frontiers of UPE scholarship. We are excited for this initial collection of articles as it manages to take UPE forward in diverse topics and concerns, while still maintaining the cohesion that the field of UPE provides. Seeing the world with UPE eyes has been a way to incorporate several layers of reality and many sides of a question, while still able to converse with each other in the same language. The contributions in this special issue not only exemplify the nature of UPE scholarship, but support the cross-pollination of UPE with other fields that we have often advocated for. As today's UPE scholarship confronts the urgent reality of the climate emergency and the increasingly violent, ‘feral’ forms of urbanisation, produced by racial capitalism's twin vortexes of accumulation and dispossession, the contributions here revisit foundational questions in UPE. These articles potentially challenge established paradigms, explore new directions, and encourage political debates over urbanisation and socio-environmental injustice.
We begin with ‘Filth and the city’, a paper by Jamie Lorimer, Roger Keil, Simon Goldhill, and Julie-Anne Boudreau, who undertake a fundamental reappraisal of the concept of ‘filth’ in urbanisation. They discuss urbanisation and densification as a central element of the (pre)microbiological, material, and semiotic character of filth. As cities proliferated, they were commonly seen as ‘dirty, filthy, and unhealthy’, especially with the rise of microbiology in the late nineteenth century. Eventually, as urbanisation continued and spread, the cities of the twentieth century saw heavy investment in public health, and sanitation and hygiene infrastructure. Yet, such investment and growth come at a cost, and as the authors highlight, ‘the eradication of filth in some places is connected to the production of political economies of filth elsewhere’. Meanwhile, recent research has revealed the salutary role of some microbes for human well-being, demonstrating the value of materials previously categorised as dirty, leading to a nascent ‘probiotic turn’ in urban theory and practice, which recognises the need for beneficial microbial exposure. The authors argue that ultimately contemporary challenges, including the tension between managing infectious disease risks (exacerbated by zoonoses and antimicrobial resistance) and the need for beneficial microbial exposure, require a rethinking of filth. Hence, they argue that this demands a radically interdisciplinary research agenda that attends to the discourse and rhetoric of filth, its integral role in the definition of the urban, its function in structuring urban metabolism and reproducing colonial relations, and how the discovery of the microbiome recalibrates notions of health, hygiene, and urbanity. By proposing such key research questions, the authors push us to explore how filth operates as an instigator of action, identity, and space, highlighting the need to analyse it from situatedness and self-awareness.
Next, Miriam Matthiessen's commentary ‘Urban political ecology between the planetary and the situated: Extending the debate through critical logistics’ engages with a key debate in UPE regarding its future orientations: the tension between planetary and situated approaches. Matthiessen argues for synthesis instead of dichotomy, suggesting that the planetary and the situated, despite representing independent approaches, can come together through critical logistics. She thus proposes a rapprochement between UPE and the field of critical logistics, namely the study of the infrastructures and logics of circulation and global commodity production. In fact, by discussing the IJmuiden Sea Lock, Matthiessen exactly shows the simultaneity of locally embedded infrastructures and nodes of planetary networks: a mega-infrastructure deemed the largest sea lock in the world, designed for ‘just-in-time planetary supply chains, compromising local ecosystems and compounding the spatial contradictions of capital accumulation’. She further demonstrates the processual potential of such a UPE-critical logistics rapprochement and epistemology for understanding urbanisation, flows, and circulation, but especially for its politicising potential. As we mention above, there is a need to reignite UPE's political fire, and Matthiessen delivers as she proposes the articulation of counterlogistics: ‘collective attempts rooted in labour, grassroots, and indigenous movements’ that can foster international solidarity, social struggles, and activism.
In the following paper comes the nexus of UPE and AI by Federico Cugurullo, Federico Caprotti, Jennie Day, Shona Geoghegan, Casey R Lynch, Filippo Menga, Caitlin Robinson, and Joe Williams’ paper, ‘The nature of AI: Metabolism, energy, water, labour and justice in the urban political ecology of artificial intelligence’. The authors explore the development of AI in contemporary urban systems and the implications for (in)justice. In the paper, they link UPE and urban AI, arguing that the integration of AI technology and urbanisation greatly impacts urban metabolism. This is obvious especially when it comes to the environmental costs of data processing and cooling data centres due to energy and water consumption. The paper further examines how AI reproduces uneven development and injustice through algorithmic bias embedded in datasets that can perpetuate infrastructure inequalities. For instance maintenance may reflect the power asymmetries and geographical disparities between marginalised communities and the elite. In other words, we are faced with a kind of data colonialism, leading to technological dependency by the Global South on the Global North. The authors conclude with certain key themes for future research: infrastructural fragmentation, divisions of urban labour, multiple intelligences and posthuman labour, environmental costs, and finally political action. Sticking with the need for radical politics, the authors call for a political engagement with urban AI, advocating for democratic and emancipatory action that steers urbanisation and AI away from environmentally unsustainable and socially unjust futures.
The special issue continues with a book review of Victoria Jane Marshall's Periurban Cartographies - Kolkata's Ecologies and Settled Ruralities by Xiang (Yenny) Li. Li discusses how the book centres on Kolkata's overlooked periurban margins, challenging the conventional view of these areas as mere transitional zones. As Li points out ‘the monograph's brilliance manifests in revolutionizing mapmaking processes as political praxis against dominant knowledge production’. Marshall's approach, utilising ‘reversed gazing’ and alternative perspectives and technologies, blends critical cartography and multispecies ethnography to dismantle existing narratives and to challenge official maps and reveal socio-ecological networks beyond dominant knowledge production. Li highlights how the book in fact unsettles developmental teleologies and challenges various forms of centrism, thus resonating with our issue's broader themes of situatedness, contestation, and re-politicization. This situated approach offers a challenge for urban scholars to explore the informality of ecologies and how peripheries might provide original epistemologies. Through this engagement, the book review reinforces our call for a UPE that amplifies subaltern spatial practices, integrates non-human agency, and it helps us reimagine urban futures, advocating for practices rooted in co-creation and solidarity, in direct contrast to accumulation and dispossession.
The next contribution in the issue is the commentary ‘Prefiguring Communist Urban Political Ecologies’ by Erik Swyngedouw. The paper gives a sharp critique of UPE and suggests that while it has become adept at critical analysis, it refrains from providing the explicit political desire needed to translate insights into effective action. The paper highlights the deepening global socio-ecological crisis, driven by a radical restructuring of capitalism dominated by tech and platform corporations. Concurrently, the rise of oppressive regimes shifts policy away from environmental concerns. In line with his iconoclastic point, Swyngedouw advocates for embracing a ‘Lacanian-Marxist communist urban political ecology’, arguing for a move to a ‘positive dialectic of thinking and acting’. Drawing on a Lacanian-Marxist framework, he explains that capitalist urbanity is sustained by ‘ideological fantasies’, particularly the illusion that ‘green capitalism’ can resolve ecological crises without dismantling capitalism itself. This perspective insists on confronting the ‘the fundamental impossibility of reconciling profit-driven urbanization with sustainability’. The author proposes that a Lacanian-Marxist communist UPE must deconstruct these ideological fantasies, expose capitalism's inherent contradictions, and aim to seize urban space for collective control and democratic management of the commons. Ultimately, Swyngedouw argues for the necessity of a radical commitment to a communist horizon to achieve ‘ecological survival and human liberation’.
Featured next in our special issue is Valentine Opanga's contribution ‘Negotiating Green Urbanism: Colonial Legacies, Governance Contradictions, And Resistance In Nairobi's Informal Settlements’, offering a critical interrogation of how global sustainability agendas are locally contested and reworked. Through a rich ethnographic and policy analysis of Korogocho and Pumwani-Majengo, the paper demonstrates how state-led greening efforts can reinforce colonial legacies, displace people, and obscure spatial inequalities under the ‘guise of ecological improvement’. Yet, the article does not stop at critique. Drawing on feminist UPE and postcolonial urbanism, it engages with the ‘environmental agency’ of grassroots actors, particularly women and youth, whose everyday practices of care, resistance, and survival enact and suggest alternative models of urban greening. In doing so, the paper not only challenges the dominating technocratic and aesthetic approaches to green urbanism but also urges us to confront structures of inequality and oppression in terms of gender, race, and class, exemplifying the kind of politically attuned scholarship we envision in this issue.
The final paper of the special issue is ‘Mapping Everyday Urban Political Ecologies: Experiential Cartography as Embodied Methodology’, by Philippe Rekacewicz, Tait Mandler, Doms Cordero, Precious Angelica A. Echague, Anita Hardon, Bryan Pauchano, Sophia Pelagio, Mariana Rios Sandoval, and Michael Lim Tan. The authors introduce an innovative mapping approach named experiential cartography as a methodological enriching of UPE. This approach incorporates not only empirical data but also senses, feelings, emotions, and personal perceptions, offering a more intricate and nuanced understanding of urban environments. The authors contend that while UPE has traditionally critiqued cartography, mainly due to its historical ties to systems of power and domination, this new method enables scholars to conduct critical research and ‘generate new constructive engagements with both dominant and subaltern urban actors, like planners, policymakers, activist groups, and local communities’. Grounded largely in Henri Lefebvre, experiential cartography allows for the mapping of individuals’ experiences in space, the generation of alternative conceptualizations of space, and new symbolic meanings of everyday life. Drawing from their own ‘Embodied Ecologies’ project, the authors apply this method to investigate how people sense and react to cumulative toxicities, namely pervasive human-made chemicals, highlighting their integration into daily life and planetary urbanisation. By emphasising the senses, experiential cartography offers a path for collectively ‘intervening into the production of urban spaces and ecologies’.
We find ourselves extremely fortunate at this juncture to present such a poignant collection of provocative, ambitious, diverse, and impactful papers. We are also fortunate to have an incredible community in and around the journal, represented by the editorial team and the board, colleagues who are often at the forefront of global and local struggles and urgent politics. But perhaps these are no coincidences, as the UPE community has grown into a significant force that feeds the fire of radicalism. Collectively, the contributions in this inaugural special issue demonstrate how UPE has matured into a field that not only helps us understand complex socio-environmental processes, but also provides a tool for imagination and politics. These articles particularly showcase how UPE scholars are engaging with numerous sites and issues, while drawing on UPE's rich experience. By revisiting foundational questions, exploring new theoretical, epistemological and methodological directions, and maintaining an unwavering commitment to radical politics, this issue sets the stage for what is to come for the Urban Political Ecology journal.