Abstract
In Gaza, a genocide is brutally unfolding in full view, compelling us to assess and assert our moral, political, and intellectual commitments. We, the editors of the newly launched Journal of Urban Political Ecology, believe that one cannot publish, think, or research in a vacuum, and it is imperative to take a position. We vehemently oppose the widespread response of academic institutions to remain ‘neutral’ or to silence dissenting voices in the face of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians – which also involves historical erasure, scholasticide, urbicide, and ecocide. For UPE, knowledges, infrastructures, and ecologies are always already political, meaning there is no firm moral or material ground for such ‘neutrality’.
Urban political ecology as a field studies relationships between environments, infrastructures, and inequalities. It focuses on how material forces are shaped by political, economic, colonial, racialised, and gendered structures, and how people suffer, resist and reimagine. These frameworks have long roots and haunting legacies: environmental injustices in colonial formations, extractive logics and dispossession, urbanisation as enclosure, war impacting ecologies. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is not a rupture outside of history but a continuity of histories and the enduring logics of settler colonialism and racialised capital accumulation.
So what does it mean to have a journal devoted to urban political ecology in a time of genocide?
For us it means recognising that roads, power, water, healthcare, housing, are not neutral carriers of everyday life but active sites of violence when weaponised or abandoned. It means seeing climate and ecology not only as resources to be managed but as contested fields of domination, dispossession, survival and refusal. It means foregrounding the voices, knowledge, histories, and struggles of those whose lives are under genocidal assault and annihilation that continues even in the time of a so-called ceasefire.
As the editors of UPE, we commit to scholarly work that documents, analyses, theorises, and reckons with these violences, not as peripheral but as central to urban political ecology. We believe in research that does not merely record destruction and death-dealing but sustains imagination and hope towards life-making and building worlds otherwise. We call for scholarship that shapes solidarities, helps envision urban ecologies that are just, and can support struggles for climate justice and the right to the city. We believe in reparative academic practices that seek not only analysis but responsibility; praxes that connect what is happening in Gaza to racial capitalism's vortexes of accumulation and dispossession, including in solidarity with other peoples under genocidal assault, like the people of the Congo, the Rohingya, those in Sudan and beyond. We do not pretend to have all the answers and we know that the work for solidarity and hope is contested and difficult. Nonetheless, we commit to publishing work that resists the naturalisation of systematic annihilation of peoples and planet, that highlights interconnections among urban political ecologies across the world and that fosters a space for critical thought and emancipatory action. Our journal is new but the UPE community has an established history of commitment to justice and radicalism. We only hope to continue to nurture and sustain such ethical commitments.