Urban political ecology (UPE) is a conceptual approach that understands urbanization to be a political, economic, social, and ecological process, one that often results in highly uneven and inequitable landscapes. Cities are seen not as the antithesis of nature but rather as a second nature, representing the dominant form of living in the contemporary age. Those drawing on UPE reject as false any dichotomy between nature and society. A central concern of much UPE scholarship has been in unpacking the ways that urbanization and cities rely on the transformation of biophysical matter into commodities and tracing the flows of these commodities into and through cities, understood as a metabolic process. Urban political ecologists argue that these processes cannot be understood in isolation but rather are deeply embedded in the social, political, and economic systems that shape the context in which they develop. Thus, a significant strand of research in this subfield has focused on the infrastructural arrangements of capitalist modernity—particularly networked water. UPE scholarship is often characterized by a deeply historical and material understanding of the city and seeks to capture the multi-scalar processes and relationships of power that shape urban landscapes. Reflecting the origins of this approach in Marxist urban geographies, this analysis has often been underpinned by a broader critique of the ways that capitalist production shapes cities in deeply unjust and uneven ways. In recent years, a subset of scholars have been increasingly influenced by post-structuralist understandings of power and seek to illuminate how other forms of social power are (re)produced through the production of socio-natures. As the field has grown, scholars have increasingly applied a UPE lens to the analysis of a range of resources including water, urban greenery, food, waste and other discards, sanitation, electricity, and climate change. This article proceeds by introducing the reader to the field more generally through progress reports, a selection of key early texts, and a section on emerging conceptual and theoretical shifts in the field. The latter part of the article is organized around socio-material objects of analysis, reflecting the deep utility of the field in analyzing concrete environmental phenomena and problems. The review presented here is limited, with a few noted exceptions, to research that explicitly situates itself in conversation with UPE scholarship.
Out of steam: Energy, materiality, and political ecology