An urban political ecology for a world of cities

Abstract

Chinese

The critical considerations in this commentary have been stimulated by the articles joined together in this inspiring collection. Specifically, this commentary reflects on how one might imagine an urban political ecology for the age of planetary urbanisation. While the editors of and contributors to this special issue have done an admirable job of providing intellectual coherence to this project, there remains work to do, especially on the conceptual and theoretical front. The conveners of this symposium lay out an ambitious agenda for the papers in this issue and ultimately for the field: They ask: ‘why does everyone think cities can save the planet?’. It is part real inquiry, part rhetorical question. These questions also provide the entry point into a coherent and serious theoretical project that lies at the bottom of the assembled papers here and is elegantly laid out by the special issue editors in their introduction. This commentary takes up the challenges posed by the theoretical and empirical projects discussed in this issue and discusses them in light of past advances in thinking across the city–nature divide, technological politics and the changing spaces and times of current urbanisation.

Keywords

agglomeration/urbanisation environment/sustainability politics

How might one imagine an urban political ecology for the age of planetary urbanisation?¹ The conveners of the symposium lay out an ambitious agenda for the papers in this issue and ultimately for the field: they ask: ‘why does everyone think cities can save the planet?’. It is part real inquiry, part rhetorical question. These questions also provide the entry point to a coherent and serious theoretical project that lies at the bottom of the assembled papers here and is elegantly laid out by the special issue editors in their introduction (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020). In order to approach, if not answer, these questions, there are some intellectual choices we need to make and there are political conundrums. The former do not always translate neatly into the latter. The development of political subjectivities around technological decision making in this era of climate change challenges is no automatic process (Perng and Maalsen, 2019). The papers in this special issue show in great detail that as ‘the world’– itself a chaotic concept – begins to react to climate change with a series of concrete measures to combat (the effects of) global warming, new contradictions arise constantly.

Scientists have been called upon to get (and are getting) increasingly involved, on their own account, in saving the world from the consequences of climate change by focusing their analytic thinking on cities (Bai et al., 2018). This seems especially acute as American President Donald Trump has taken a position close to climate change denial and has withdrawn all American support for international climate action. The USA has now formally withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. In this situation, scientists have turned to cities and communities as antidotes to national state inaction. Professionals, such as planners, have joined the chorus.² And while cities have been central to sustainability discourses since the Brundtland report was published in the 1980s, ‘sustainability science’ has more recently been seen as a possible paradigm from which urban planning can begin to solve its ‘wicked problems’ (Du Plessis, 2009). If we throw in discussions on resilience and urban transformation, for example, the picture gets even more complex (Satterthwaite and Dodman, 2013). In this broad and fragmented effort by humans to fix what they seem to have broken, ‘cities’ (another chaotic concept) have been given particular attention, so much so that, as the editors of this symposium insinuate, everybody thinks they can save the world! This is a sentiment evoked often in the mainstream media whose opinion pendulum has swung from painting cities in threatening hues to seeing them as arenas and actors of import in the struggle for human survival (Kunzig, 2011; although see Humphries (2016) for a related but somewhat different reading).

We know, after a generation or so of ecological modernisation, that capitalist urbanisation has been, for a while now, predicated on making certain deals with nature: no longer considered its outside, the environment has started to be involved in capital accumulation as an internal factor (for a recent critical review of this literature see Ewing, 2017). In ostensibly critical terms, this was also called ‘reflexive modernisation’. Ulrich Beck, one of its proponents, taught us that modernisation will inevitably lead to a ‘self-confrontation’ with industrial society’s legacies and a new society in which industrial (and one could add urban) excess might be reined in by new institutions, a new politics (Beck, 1994). Beck, in conjunction with Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash (Beck et al., 1994: vii), noted that:

ecological issues have come to the fore only because the ‘environment’ is in fact no longer external to human social life but thoroughly penetrated and reordered by it. If human beings once knew what ‘nature’ was, they do so no longer. What is ‘natural’ is now so thoroughly entangled with what is ‘social’ that there can be nothing taken for granted about it anymore.

Further down the road of complication lies Bruno Latour’s notion that the polarisation of nature and society (or city) is not a productive division of two possible collectives. He contends:

In the word ‘collective,’ it is precisely the work of collecting into a whole that I want to stress. The word should remind us of sewage systems where networks of small, medium, and large ‘collectors’ make it possible to evacuate waste water as well as to absorb the rain that falls on a large city. This metaphor of the cloaca maxima suits our needs perfectly, along with all the paraphernalia of adduction, sizing, purifying stations, observation points, and manholes necessary to its upkeep. (Latour, 2004: 59)

For Latour, then, ‘ecology is understood here as a new way to handle all the objects of human and non-human collective life’ (Latour, 1998: 221). In fact, he says, ‘ecology has nothing to do with taking account of nature, its own interests or goals, but that it is rather another way of considering everything’ (Latour, 1998: 235). And that leads to his dictum that: ‘Everywhere we have “modernised” we must now “ecologise”’ (1998: 235)!

We are creeping more closely now to cities as they have been imagined by political ecologists since the end of the world of dualisms. Erik Swyngedouw, who has been central to the debate on Urban Political Ecology (UPE) since the 1990s, frames urban natures in terms such as ‘metabolism’ and ‘circulation’ in which ‘cyborgs’ (Haraway) and ‘quasi-objects’ (Latour) are participants in joint flows of various material and discursive streams (energy, water, etc.). This leads him to see

the city as a metabolic circulatory process that materialises as an implosion of socio-natural relations, a process which is organised through socially articulated networks and conduits whose origin, movement and position is articulated through complex political, social, economic and cultural relations. These relations are invariably infused with myriad configurations of power that saturate material, symbolic, and imaginary (or imagined) practices. (Swyngedouw, 2006: 35)

In more recent work with Ernstson (Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018), Swyngedouw further dissects the dualities and ‘straightjackets’ of current capitalist societal relationships with nature in the context of debates on the so-called Anthropocene ‘during which humans have arguably acquired planetary geo-physical agency’ (2018: 2). Swyngedouw and Ernstson specifically critique ‘revolutionary new materialist ontologies [that] offer new storylines, new symbolisations of the earth’s past and future that can be corralled to help perform the ideological groundwork required to cover up the contradictions of capitalist eco-modernisation and help perform the ideological groundwork required’ (2018: 12). Swyngedouw and Ernstson warn of a new immunological biopolitics through which a ‘biopolitical frame is increasingly sutured by an immunological drive, a mission to seal off objects of government from possibly harmful intruders and recalcitrant outsiders that threaten bio-social integrity and security, if not sheer survival, of the population, and guarantees that life can continue to be lived’ (2018: 13). Likewise, Sue Ruddick (2015) and Matthew Gandy (2018) have problematised the relationships of the Anthropocene and (planetary) urbanisation in productive and thoughtful ways. Ruddick evocatively links the two concepts through ‘the hauntology of the Anthropocene and the hauntology of the urban, both implicated in a thinking of an ending: the end of the wild, the end of a world’ (2015: 1118). What that might mean in practice is the subject of newer work by Andre Ortega who reminds us that in the arsenal of strategies of world-saving measures, some cities have taken to isolating the unwanted and the disposable in nightmarish ‘necroburbs’ outside of the visible, living city (Ortega, 2017). This particular nightmare in which the world-ending scenarios are already being played out against certain ‘expendable’ (racialised, classed) populations breaks down Beck’s ‘risk society’ in manageable strategies that ‘feralise’ and ‘victimise’ those populations and their living environments (Valayden, 2016; Wilson et al., 2019). The species boundaries of the anthropogenic logic are thus internalised into racial regimes of total societal and environmental failure.

Urban futures, planetary presents

While the notion of planetary urbanisation famously implies that urbanisation has lost its ‘constitutive outside’ (see originally Brenner and Schmid, 2011; for a corrective Brenner, 2017: footnote 3; see also Ghosh, 2017 and Roy, 2016 for further debate on the matter), we are being reminded in an era of never-ending storms, floods and fires that how and where we build actual cities has never been more dramatically conditioned by the outside of seismo-geological or meteorological events. But this outside does not just include ‘natural’ forces but agricultural landscapes, mining and forestry regions and humanly altered environments of all kinds (Fernandes, 2018). Perhaps we were just not meant to live everywhere we want to and, by implication, life on a warming (urban) planet cannot be sustained everywhere either (Grunwald, 2017). We can remind ourselves here of Mike Davis’s prescient musings, in the 1990s, of the glacial territorial politics of coastal California (Davis, 1998, 2002) that we sublimate at our own peril when talking about the everyday politics of sustainability. Indeed, while on one hand the urbanist media is full of techno-utopian dreams of artificial intelligence and automation (for which we can cite here symptomatically a special issue of Wired on ‘Cities by Design’ from October 2015 as a certain prototype), there is a growing sense of global-warming-related rising threat levels that frame this view of the urban future. A recent review of two books on wildfires in the New York Times bluntly observed: ‘Blazes often churn up the hazardous remnants of old mining activity – asbestos, arsenic, even uranium. That phenomenon should be of grave concern even to city folk who never venture within a thousand miles of a burning forest’ (Koerner, 2018: 4). How close this experience comes to the wild suburbs of the resource fringe was brought home by the devastating forest fires around Fort McMurray in northern Alberta in 2016, as well as the infernos that engulfed Los Angeles and Sydney in late 2019. And when the fires burn themselves out, there is always the floods. We may, in the end, also be late to the party as ‘sunken cities’ have been real and imagined phenomena for some time (Colten, 2016; Dobraszczyk, 2017).

My commentary here is therefore embedded in a broader debate on UPE. Much has been written about this concept and this short essay is not the place to rehearse the now well-known contours of the field. Perhaps we can submit in general terms that the point about UPE in contrast to many other theories and practical discussions of environments in cities, is that UPE is critical urban theory. It is not adding nature to a priori social constructions. Nature is the city. Nature is the urban. While, as Lefebvre teaches us, ‘[c]apitalism destroys nature and ruins its own conditions, preparing and announcing its revolutionary disappearance’ (2016: 122), it also constitutes the specifically industrial and subsequently urban natures, the metabolisms and flows that we now recognise as the veins and arteries of urban society. Hence the ‘complete urbanisation of society’ (Lefebvre, 2016: 121) is also connected to the complete colonisation of first nature as ‘[u]rbanisation extends to the countryside but is degraded and degrading’ (Lefebvre, 2016: 140). As a consequence, Lefebvre further argues, ‘[t]he flow of organic exchange between society and the earth, a flow whose importance Marx pointed out in his discussion of the town, is, if not broken, at least dangerously modified. With the risk of serious, even catastrophic results’ (Lefebvre, 2016: 149). In these processes of the destruction of nature through capitalist urbanisation and the simultaneous creation of new, mostly money-based metabolisms, rests the original motivation for UPE thinking.

Epistemologically, we can initially differentiate two larger streams in critical UPE, both reactions, to a degree, to earlier shortcomings in UPE: on the one hand, there is the barrage that has been launched by those casting their lot with the planetary urbanisation discourse, including the editors of this special issue, that challenges us to overcome methodological ‘city-ism’ for a truly ‘urban’ political ecology (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015). The urban (as opposed to city-ist) political ecologists espouse a methodology that is meant to help UPE to ‘fulfil its Lefebvrian promise and contribute to a planetary, ecological, political understanding of contemporary urbanisation’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015). On the other hand, we are asked to suspend our universal assumptions in favour of a ‘situated’ urban political ecology (Lawhon et al., 2013). By that, proponents hope to create ‘the possibility for a broader range of urban experiences to inform theory on how urban environments are shaped, politicised and contested’ (Lawhon et al., 2014: 498).

As Creighton Connolly has argued in a recent piece in response to the critique by Angelo and Wachsmuth (2015) and others, there is potentially a third new critical line of thinking that has emerged in bridging the felt gap between the classical UPE and its challengers.³ Connolly intends to show ‘not only how cities are produced through socio-natural metabolic flows originating ‘elsewhere’ but also that cities and their specific sociopolitical contexts and spatial configurations have strong implications for how these various non-human natures are urbanised’ (Connolly, 2019: 64).

Connolly’s intervention reminds us that if we want to extend the reach of urban political ecology, we must be using various and variable tools. A certain intellectual promiscuity is necessary. This also implies, in my view, that general condition and situated site, or process and difference need not be in diametrical opposition to one another. We are not locked into a game that requires going down one path and leaving the other entirely untried.⁴ For his part Connolly introduces the idea of ‘the site multiple’ and the politics of risk and uncertainty in the age of climate change. Connolly bases his recent work on a previous paper by Lepawsky et al. (2015) (of which he is a co-author; see also Lepawsky and Mather, 2011) which, in turn, builds on Annemarie Mol’s writings on the human body: ‘For Mol, the body multiple indicates not plurality, but manyfoldedness’ (Lepawsky et al., 2015: 190). There are, unsurprisingly, necessary conceptual and ultimately political consequences to this insight. Lepawsky and co-authors continue:

In developing this possibility here, we suggest that the site multiple, like boundaries and edges, is an effect of ordering relations. Boundaries connote relations or associations of separation, but also of crossing and changing, of trans-formation; edges those of difference but also of contact, of adjacency, of possibilities of transformation or laminarity or friction … Boundaries and edges are results of the site multiple’s manyfoldings … If enactment ceases or changes, so does the indexicality that enables their collective possibilities. (Lepawsky et al., 2015: 190)

This last notion of ‘indexicality’ makes that all-important connection between the agency of the speaker/actor and the collective conundrum that needs solving as ‘indexicality signals that practices are ontologically generative; they enact things such as a body or a site’ (Lepawsky et al., 2015: 190). The concept points towards coming to terms with the democratic potential and perhaps imperative that is assumed to reside in ‘the city’, the unleashing of the potential, as some would argue, of ‘urban collaborative governance’ in the ‘urban commons’ (Foster and Iaione, 2016). It seems to me that this view of agency connects well to the concerns voiced by several of the authors in this special issue.

We might ask, though, whether and how importantly the political and policy choices we have in and through cities will actually differ depending on which of those epistemologies we follow. In fact, one might add, does the bleak and beleaguered state of the (urban-global) environment leave us any options at all? Concomitantly, the question arises whether what scholarship reveals informs action in any meaningful sense. There is a natural science/social science divide here in practice. As progressives demand, assuming an overwhelming consensus on the matter of human-induced climate change,⁵ that climate policy be driven by facts on global warming, broad schisms exists in the social sciences as to how to deal with these scientific certainties in a world of growing social uncertainty. To complicate matters, it is increasingly unclear as to whether academic debate around issues of social change is having an impact at all on social and environmental movements on the streets and in the neighbourhoods of urban society. My own take on this is evolving as I have argued to re-politicise conversations about urban (ecological) theory and to de-emphasise and de-escalate arcane discourses in the academy in favour of a re-rooted debate that involves change actors themselves (Keil, 2018a, 2018d). We might need to add that such connections are made ever more tenuous in a post-political environment (Swyngedouw, 2018; Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018). My position here is not anti-academic or even anti-intellectual. Quite the contrary is true. In particular, I value and defend critical scholarship. I am merely weary of two connected issues. First, I am concerned about the disjunction of academic debate on epistemology and ontology from the social struggles from which these debates might have originally been extracted. And second, like Alex Loftus, I am suspicious of crude binaries such as the planetary and the situated. Mobilising the incisive critique of the planetary urbanisation thesis put forth by Buckley and Strauss (2016) among others, Loftus develops an approach that involves ‘reconsidering a philosophy of praxis that begins from lived practices, always seeing them as bound up in conceptions of the world’ (Loftus, 2018: 94). While I share the sentiment of this appeal to a philosophy of praxis, it still remains to be resolved whether under the current conditions of ‘austerian realism’ and retrenchment, hard right populism and post-truth, such a symbiotic relationship of theory and practice can flourish (Davies et al., 2020). Will urban actors be receptive for such a philosophy of praxis?

Certainly, the excellent and timely papers assembled in this issue stand to prove that everywhere around the world true and trusted (as well as deceptive and untested) attempts are being made to reconcile our continued urban presence on this planet with the sphere’s dwindling natural resources. In fact, we are being told that the more urban we are, the less of a burden we are on those resources. In that conversation, we might interject immediately, it would need to be recognised that while all of us – humans and our associated natures – are complicit in the urbanisation of the world, not all of us are equal in that pursuit. At one (long durée) end, Jason Moore (2014) reminds us that a ‘consequentialist’ bias in the view that humans destroy the planet fetishises highly complex processes and tends to obscure the particular role capital has played for centuries in the destruction of those elements of its accumulation process it has been getting ‘for free’. At the other (more contemporary) end, we are being told that not all ‘anthropogenic’ environments are created equal (or creating equally). Most of the papers in this issue fall into that second camp: they tell us about differentiation in what cities are and what their options in the range of sustainability politics may be.

What we do know for sure is that it makes a huge difference whether we treat the idea of ‘city’ or ‘urban’ as somehow normatively linked to status of development or not. If, for example, we believe networked public water supply (as it is common in many cities in the Global North) is normal and positive, we will potentially miss what is happening in places that are not, in this sense, ‘normal’ (Furlong and Kooy, 2017). In this regard, it is also inevitable that we must accept the transnational nature of urban political ecologies and their metabolisms (Wright-Contreras, 2018). In fact, how do we know that ‘cities’ or actants in them or on them in one or the other kind of urban environment have something positive to offer to the project of ‘saving the world’? This question is especially pertinent as large multinational companies make a pitch for the link of technological advancement and human-ecological improvement (Badger, 2018; Hesse, 2018). As Maria Kaika (2017: 90) has noted, ‘greening by numbers and indicators, or the translation of socioenvironmental issues into “smart” techno-scientific monitoring and infrastructure technologies, means that the pursuit of urban sustainable development goals becomes increasingly identified with the pursuit of smart cities’.

In fact, from the point of view of a pluralist UPE, we can argue that technology is the lynchpin of the societal relationships with nature in cities (and suburbs) today. The current debates focus on new technologies of mobility, new morphologies and densities of housing and work, new modalities of environmental governance. We re-visited ecological modernisation already at the outset of this commentary. This remains the main field of action in late neoliberal urbanism. But the action shifts into two mostly incompatible but sometimes entwined directions. One is towards debates on the potential of urban micro-environments to contribute to climate change action (Pierre-Louis, 2018; Ziter and Turner, 2018). This includes the many food-related and energy-related, community-based initiatives that are discussed in several of the papers here. The other direction is currently winning the contest as to which technologies will be used to mould our urban ‘imperial ways of life’ (Brand and Wissen, 2018) into something more recognisably eco-friendly. In contrast to the soft and small-scale infrastructural interventions that come with the first direction, the second direction is dependent on and driven by giant corporations that connect informational technology, artificial intelligence with systems-wide infrastructural and governance disruption in reshaping urban natures dramatically. The technological fix is especially tied to new forms of tech-utopian thinking (and practice), of the kind we have seen in the competition for Amazon’s HQ2 and in the enthusiasm towards Google’s Sidewalk Lab in proposing to reshape the Toronto waterfront and the city beyond, through massive data-driven techno-social change. That the two directions provide very different answers to the question as to how cities can save the world, is imminently obvious. How they align politically with the indexicality of political action in real situations, where majorities will have to be found and change will have to be enacted, cannot be predicted. Yet, we have to take seriously any attempt to think productively about the potential of experimentation ‘to the production and contestation of new subjectivities’ (Bulkeley et al., 2015: 50; see also Perng and Maalsen, 2019).

What we can know is that the ways in which ‘cities are saving the world’ potentially align along three lines of disruption and division: (1) technological divides such as the ones alluded to above (light rail transit versus subway is a typical one here); (2) there are territorial divides (city and suburbs and associated ways of life); and (3) discursive divides (for example in the conceived spaces of urbanist debates and planning practices) (see Addie and Keil, 2015, for an expansion of this triple concept).

City, space and nature

Another lingering question is what ‘city’ anybody might have in mind when they expect ‘cities’ to save the world. While this is not the space to rehearse this question in full, the papers here give us a breadth of different clues as to how to approach it. In no particular order, cities in these papers appear as municipalities, constellations of regionally specific metabolisms, actor constellations, economic and cultural units. In any of these definitions is embedded the necessity of allowing for all manner of internal contradictions, privileges and deprivations in these units, be it environmental racism, class differentiation, gender differences (Pulido, 2000). The imagination of what makes a city is linked to the imagination on what are urban practices that intervene in the societal relationships with nature at the urban level or at the municipal scale (two quite different things). While there is a general tendency towards greener practice (see Angelo and Wachsmuth in the introduction to this issue) and a commitment to sustainability, resiliency and climate change abatement, it is quite a different story whether we think of the terrain of our intervention as a bounded municipality or an urban world (Wachsmuth et al., 2016).

To many of us who are thinking about the relationships of the urban, the ecological and the democratic, the political space in which action is necessary and possible is spatially extensive. For Lepawsky et al. (2015) who are examining the reach of rubbish electronics in relationship to cityness, the political arena is decentred in multiple ways: ‘These huge industrial-scale recycling operations make their profit from producing information about the destruction of information. They are their customers’ other brand managers, litigation mitigators and public-relations consultants, here in the peri-urban industrial zones on the edges of the FIRE’ (Lepawsky et al., 2015: 192).

Spatially, there are echoes here of the decentring of UPE that Sara Macdonald and I (Keil and Macdonald, 2016) have proposed in looking at the boundaries issues in suburban extension and the problem of increased water use following urban sprawl that has been highlighted in the study by Parés et al. (2013) on the creeping ‘Atlantic’ greening of Barcelona’s suburban gardens. In these cases, two aspects of Lefebvre’s urban explosion coincide as urban ecological problems: the extension of the urban as a global presence and the ‘suburban’ as a particular form and process of its constitution (see also Keil 2018b, 2018c; Tzaninis et al., 2020). This expansion of the question of what ‘cityness’ might entail broadens the palette of the actor networks involved in ‘cities saving the world’ fundamentally beyond the municipal. Students of local and urban politics have long reminded us of the complex and contradictory character of local states (Kirby, 1993; Magnusson, 2015) and the difficulties involved in implementing climate change policies in light of long-range operation by ‘[o]verlapping bureaucracies, economic interests and an effective civil society’ in the local state (Kirby, 2019: 5). Kirby even concludes that ‘While much analysis of climate policy has focused on cities, much less attention has been given to systematic analysis of local governments and no studies have placed themselves in the context of “the local state”’ (Kirby, 2019: 9). Rectifying this, then, involves thinking differently about the scope and scale of city/urban environmental politics more generally. In the past, urban green politics were tied to place and local ills.⁶ Kevin Loughran (2020) notes in his paper that ‘the history of urban parks is in large measure a history of planners’ efforts to spatially mediate social problems’ (2020: 2323). The assumption here has historically been that this meant local social problems and this has been the assumption that rules much place-based policy and politics today (see the ongoing debates on bringing greenspaces to the high density condominium concentrations of concrete and glass in Toronto and Vancouver).⁷ This, lastly, leads me to contemplating the notion of time in the context of what cities might do to save the world.

City, time and nature

Time, or our sense of it, is just as important as space as we assess the role of cities in the climate change battles ahead. If we take the long view, there has been a slow but constant dance of urbanisation (and land cultivation) with the natural challenges at our coasts, under our skies, along our earthquake zones, etc. As Goh (2020) reports in this special issue, the Dutch have developed a centuries-old rhythm in dealing with living below sea level. The resulting knowledge is now export material in a vulnerable world that experiences rising oceans. At the same time, though, the glacial pace of change and adaptation is disrupted right now as both the speed of urban extension and the consequences of climate change have grown exponentially in recent years. As we scramble to stay on top of yet the next record hurricane or typhoon hurling themselves against coastal mangroves or misplaced developments on shore, we have arrived in an era of permanent catastrophe. While Hurricane Katrina was an event of a century, we are now getting used to multiple Katrinas each year (Irma, Maria, etc., in 2017; Beryl and Chris in 2018 in the Atlantic; Lane and Jebi over the Pacific). In this situation, as once again even the most sophisticated flood control systems fail, as they did in Venice, Italy in late 2019, we ask ourselves whether cities or anybody are up to the task that lies ahead.⁸ As we continue being challenged to save the world in the political arenas we call cities and with the actors we identify with cities, we must come to terms with the difference between, on the one hand, challenges from beyond the city as much as they are themselves capitalocenic monsters that come to haunt us (hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.) and, on the other, challenges from within the city (unequal distribution of access, safety, resiliency, etc.) which are always of our own doing (Kirby, 2019).

As indicated at the outset, we are still children of Ulrich Beck (1994). The late sociologist’s prescient predictions on the reflexive risk society that structures our lives are of relevance for any city action en route to ‘saving the world’. The dilemma that even the most democratic of urban ecological political practices will continue to push us further on a path of modernisation underlies many if not most of the papers in this current collection. And, as Valayden (2016) has warned us, ‘risk’ may be unevenly shared in the age of planetary urbanisation. The more sophisticated our possible solutions, the more intricate might be the socio-ecological issues we engender along the way. ‘Best practices’ in the toolbox of how cities can potentially make the world better are inevitably and invariably contextualised in a modern neoliberal environment for the time being. This is even more the case for what city councils and other local actors in Seattle (Janos, 2020) or Bogotá (Montero, 2020), for example, decide. What do we really know about long-term, sustainable urban living at the dawn of the urban revolution? If the debates on autonomous vehicles (and their alleged positive/negative impact on human life) are any indication, we may be in for a rough ride. The narratives spun on our urban socio-technical futures are almost entirely corporate despite a mounting critical literature that exposes the contradictions and fissures of those futures (for example, Graeber, 2015; Graham, 2010; Hodson and Marvin, 2009, 2016).

By way of conclusion

The preceding thoughts have been stimulated by the papers in this inspiring collection. While the editors of this special issue have done an admirable job of providing intellectual coherence to this project, there remains work to do, especially on the conceptual and theoretical front. While there is lamenting of urban parochialism and lip service to concepts such as ‘planetary urbanisation’, the more-than-local, the transnational, rarely explicitly feature in theoretical terms. The question remains what kind of shared critique we might distil from the broad palette of experiences related here. Technologies of urban ecological modernisation remain the easy go-to solution for most city governments and are often supported by local NGOs. Multiple variegations of neoliberalism have provided a stage for such ‘local climate action’. It is a bit more difficult to keep track of the actor constellations in such action and to keep a tally on who benefits and who loses, long and short term. The most difficult question remains, ultimately, what it all means. Knowing theoretically how urban political ecology as critical urban theory will further our understanding of life (and survival) in the millenarian climate of climate change will be critical to unlock the potentials of democracy and justice that make the world worth saving. The urban ecological politics we need to enter this path, however, may involve rejecting, as Maria Kaika (2017: 96) seems to suggest, ‘the usual “inclusiveness”, “safety”, “sustainability” or “resilience” indicators’ with which cities are measuring their progress in staving off climate change consequences. We may need an approach that is based on questioning the very premises of such alleged harmonies – practical and theoretical.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

References

Addie

Keil

(2015) Real existing regionalism: The region between talk, territory and technology. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(2): 407–417.

Angelo

Wachsmuth

(2015) Urbanizing urban political ecology: A critique of methodological cityism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(1): 16–27.

Angelo

Wachsmuth

(2020) Why does everyone think cities can save the planet? Urban Studies 57(11): 2201–2221.

Badger

(2018) Tech envisions the ultimate start-up: An entire city: Silicon Valley wants to save cities. What could go wrong? New York Times, 24 February. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/24/upshot/tech-envisions-the-ultimate-start-up-an-entire-city.html

Bai

Dawson

Ürge-Vorsatz

, et al. (2018) Six research priorities for cities and climate change. Nature, 27 February. Available at: https://www-nature-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/articles/d41586-018-02409-z

Beck

(1994) The reinvention of politics: Towards a theory of reflexive modernization. In: Beck

Giddens

Lash

(eds) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 1–55.

Beck

Giddens

Lash

(1994) Preface. In: Beck

Giddens

Lash

(eds) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. vi–viii.

Brand

Wissen

(2013) Crisis and continuity of capitalist society–nature relationships: The imperial mode of living and the limits to environmental governance. Review of International Political Economy 20(4): 687–711.

Brand

Wissen

(2018) The Limits to Capitalist Nature: Theorizing and Overcoming the Imperial Mode of Living. London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

10.

Brand

Boos

Brad

(2017) Degrowth and post-extractivism: Two debates with suggestions for the inclusive development framework. Environmental Sustainability 24: 36–41.

11.

Brenner

(2017) Debating Planetary Urbanization: For an Engaged Pluralism. Available at: http://urbantheorylab.net/uploads/Engaged-pluralism_Brenner.pdf

12.

Brenner

Schmid

(2011) Planetary urbanisation. In: Gandy

(ed.) Urban Constellations. Berlin: Jovis, pp. 11–14.

13.

Buckley

Strauss

(2016) With, against and beyond Lefebvre: Planetary urbanization and epistemic plurality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(4): 617–636.

14.

Bulkeley

Castán Broto

Edwards

GAS

(2015) An Urban Politics of Climate Change: Experimentation and the Governing of Socio-technical Transitions. London; New York: Routledge.

15.

Colten

(2016) Suburban sprawl and poor preparation worsened flood damage. The Conversation, 22 August. Available at: https://theconversation.com/suburban-sprawl-and-poor-preparation-worsened-flood-damage-in-louisiana-64087

16.

Connolly

(2019) Urban political ecology beyond methodological cityism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43(1): 63–75.

17.

Davies

Bua

Oriol

, et al. (2020) Why is austerity governable? A Gramscian urban regime analysis of Leicester, UK. Journal of Urban Affairs 42(1): 56–74.

18.

Davis

(1998) Ecologies of Fear. London: Verso.

19.

Davis

(2002) Dead Cities. New York: The New Press.

20.

Dobraszczyk

(2017) Sunken cities: Climate change, urban futures and the imagination of submergence. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41(6): 868–887.

21.

Du Plessis

(2009) Urban sustainability science as a new paradigm for planning. In: Van den Dobbelsteen Van Dorst Van Timmeren (eds) Smart Building in a Changing Climate. Amsterdam: Techne Press, pp. 31–46.

22.

Ekers

Prudham

(2017) The metabolism of socioecological fixes: Capital switching, spatial fixes, and the production of nature. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107(6): 1370–1388.

23.

Ewing

(2017) Hollow ecology: Ecological modernization theory and the death of nature. Journal of World-Systems Research 23(1): 126–155.

24.

Fernandes

PCA

(2018) Landscape as a mediator between mining and urbanisation: The case of Minas Gerais and Nova Lima, Brazil. Urban Transcripts 1(4) Winter 2017/18.

25.

Foster

Iaione

(2016) The city as a commons. Yale Law & Policy Review 34(2): 281.

26.

Furlong

Kooy

(2017) Worlding water supply: Thinking beyond the network in Jakarta. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41(6): 888–903.

27.

Gandy

(2018) Cities in deep time: Bio-diversity, metabolic rift, and the urban question. City 22(1): 96–105.

28.

Ghosh

(2017) Notes on rurality or the theoretical usefulness of the not-urban. Avery Review, 27 November. Available at: http://averyreview.com/issues/27/notes-on-rurality

29.

Goh

(2020) Flows in formation: The global-urban networks of climate change adaptation. Urban Studies 57(11): 2222–2240.

30.

Graeber

(2015) The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY; London: Melville House.

31.

Graham

(ed.) (2010) Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails. New York: Routledge.

32.

Grunwald

(2017) A requiem for Florida, the paradise that should have never been. Politico Magazine, 8 September. Available at: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/08/hurricane-irma-florida-215586

33.

Hausfather

(2017) Why scientists think 100% of global warming is due to humans. CarbonBrief, 13 December. Available at: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-scientists-think-100-of-global-warming-is-due-to-humans

34.

Hesse

(2018) The logics and politics of circulation: Exploring the urban and non-urban spaces of Amazon.com. In: Kevin

Ward

Andrew

Jonas

Byron

Miller

, et al (eds) The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics. London: Routledge, pp. 404–415.

35.

Heynen

(2014) Urban political ecology I: The urban century. Progress in Human Geography 38(4): 598–604.

36.

Heynen

(2016) Urban political ecology II: The abolitionist century. Progress in Human Geography 40(6): 839–845.

37.

Heynen

(2018) Urban political ecology III: The feminist and queer century. Progress in Human Geography 42(3): 446–452.

38.

Heynen

Kaika

Swyngedouw

(eds) (2006) In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London; New York: Routledge.

39.

Hodson

Marvin

(2009) ‘Urban ecological security’: A new urban paradigm? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33(1): 193–215.

40.

Hodson

Marvin

(2016) Retrofitting Cities: Priorities, Governance and Experimentation. New York: Routledge.

41.

Humphries

(2016) Cities are not as big a deal as you think. Undark, 6 June. Available at: https://undark.org/article/cities-suburbs-urban-social-environmental/

42.

Janos

(2020) Urbanising territory: The contradictions of eco-cityism at the industrial margins, Duwamish River, Seattle. Urban Studies 57(11): 2282–2299.

43.

Kaika

(2017) ‘Don’t call me resilient again!’: The new urban agenda as immunology … or what happens when communities refuse to be vaccinated with ‘smart cities’ and indicators. Environment and Urbanization 29(1): 89–102.

44.

Keil

(2018a) After suburbia: Research and action in the suburban century. Urban Geography. DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2018.1548828.

45.

Keil

(2018b) Suburban Planet: Making the World Urban from the Outside In. Cambridge: Polity.

46.

Keil

(2018c) Extended urbanization, ‘disjunct fragments’ and global suburbanisms. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(3): 494–511.

47.

Keil

(2018d) The empty shell of the planetary: Re-rooting the urban in the experience of the urbanites. Urban Geography 39(10): 1589–1602.

48.

Keil

Macdonald

(2016) Rethinking urban political ecology from the outside in: Greenbelts and boundaries in the post-suburban city. Local Environment 21(12): 1516–1533.

49.

Kirby

(1993) Power/Resistance. Local Politics and the Chaotic State. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

50.

Kirby

(2019) Sustainability, adaptation and the local state: An overview. Journal of Sustainability Research. 1:e190012.

51.

Koerner

(2018) The fire next time. The New York Times Book Review, 6–7 January, p. 4.

52.

Kunzig

(2011) The city solution: Why cities are the best cure for our planet’s growing pains. National Geographic, December. Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/12/city-solutions/

53.

Latour

(1998) To modernize or to ecologize? That’s the question. In: Castree

Willems-Braun

(editors) Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London; New York: Routledge, pp. 221–242.

54.

Latour

(2004) Politics of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

55.

Lawhon

Ernstson

Silver

(2013) Provincializing urban political ecology: Towards a situated UPE through African urbanism. Antipode 46(2): 497–516.

56.

Lefebvre

(2016) Marxist Thought and the City. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

57.

Lepawsky

Mather

(2011) From beginnings and endings to boundaries and edges: Rethinking circulation and exchange through electronic waste. Area 43(3): 242–249.

58.

Lepawsky

Akese

Billah

, et al. (2015) Composing urban orders from rubbish electronics: Cityness and the site multiple. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(2): 185–199.

59.

Loftus

(2018) Planetary concerns. City 22(1): 88–95.

60.

Loughran

(2020) Urban parks and urban problems: An historical perspective on green space development as a spatial fix. Urban Studies 57(11): 2321–2338.

61.

Magnusson

(2015) Local Self-Government and the Right to the City. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

62.

Montero

(2020) Leveraging Bogotá: Sustainable development, global philanthropy and the rise of urban solutionism. Urban Studies 57(11): 2263–2281.

63.

Moore

(2014) The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis. Available at: http://www.jasonwmoore.com/Essays.html

64.

Ortega

(2017) Postcolonial suburbanisms: A view from Manila’s fringe and beyond. Presentation, Towards Suburbia Seminar Series, Global Suburbanisms, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 8 November.

65.

Parés

March

Sauri

(2013) Atlantic gardens in Mediterranean climates: Understanding the production of suburban natures in Barcelona. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(1): 328–347.

66.

Perng

S-Y

Maalsen

(2019) Civic infrastructure and the appropriation of the corporate smart city. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110(2): 507–515.

67.

Pierre-Louis

(2018) A secret superpower, right in your backyard. New York Times, 6 March. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/climate/yard-garden-global-warming.html

68.

Pulido

(2000) Rethinking environmental racism: White privilege and urban development in Southern California. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(1): 12–40.

69.

Pulido

(2015) Geographies of race and ethnicity 1: White supremacy vs white privilege in environmental racism research. Progress in Human Geography 39(6): 809–817.

70.

Roy

(2016) What is urban about critical urban theory? Urban Geography 37(6): 810–823.

71.

Ruddick

(2015) Situating the Anthropocene: Planetary urbanization and the anthropological machine. Urban Geography 36(8): 1113–1130.

72.

Satterthwaite

Dodman

(2013) Editorial: Towards resilience and transformation for cities within a finite planet. Environment & Urbanization 25(2): 291–298.

73.

Swyngedouw

(2006) Metabolic urbanization: The making of cyborg cities. In: Heynen

Kaika

Swyngedouw

(eds) In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, pp. 21–40.

74.

Swyngedouw

(2018) Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Post-Political Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

75.

Swyngedouw

Ernstson

(2018) Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene: Immuno-biopolitics and depoliticizing ontologies in the anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society 35(6): 3–30.

76.

Tzaninis

Mandler

Kaika

, et al. (2020) Moving urban political ecology beyond the ‘urbanization of nature’. Progress in Human Geography. Epub ahead of print 24 February 2020. DOI: 10.1177/0309132520903350.

77.

Valayden

(2016) Racial feralization: Targeting race in the age of ‘planetary urbanization’. Theory, Culture & Society 33(7–8): 159–182.

78.

Wachsmuth

Cohen

Angelo

(2016) Expand the frontiers of urban sustainability. Nature 536(7616): 391–393.

79.

Wilson

Boodram

Smith

(2019) Public housing, heroin addiction, America’s industrial suburbs: A planetary urbanist perspective. In: Guney

Keil

Ucoglu

(eds) Massive Suburbanization: (Re) Building the Global Periphery. Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press, pp. 56–78.

80.

Wired (2015) Cities by Design. October. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/design-issue-future-of-cities/

81.

Wright-Contreras

(2018) A transnational urban political ecology of water infrastructures: Global water policies and water management in Hanoi. Public Works Management & Policy 24(2): 195–212.

82.

Ziter

Turner

(2018) Current and historical land use influence soil-based ecosystem services in an urban landscape. Ecological Applications 28(3): 643–654.