Politicizing urban political ecologies

Abstract

The paper starts from the premise that it is vitally important to recognize that the rapid rate of planetary urbanization is the main driver of environmental change and the making of the Anthropocene. This paper is, therefore, not so much concerned with the question of nature IN the city, as it is with the urbanization OF nature, understood as the process through which all forms of nature are socially mobilized, economically incorporated and physically metabolized / transformed in order to support the urbanization process. We argue that our urban fate and natures’ transformations are irrevocably bound up in an intimate and intensifying metabolic – but highly contentious – symbiosis, one characterized by extraordinarily uneven socio-ecological patterning. The configuration of this urban metabolic relationship has now been elevated to the dignity of global public concern, and a feverish search for all manner of eco-prophylactic ‘sustainable’ remedies has entered the standard vocabulary of both governmental and private actors. Nature as the externally conditioning frame for urban life has indeed come to an end. The Anthropocenic inauguration of a socio-physical historical and thoroughly globally urbanized nature forces a profound reconsideration and re-scripting of both nature and urbanization in political terms. The question is not any longer about bringing environmental issues into the domain of urban politics, but rather about how to bring the political into the urban environment.