scholarly journals Exploring the urban hydrosocial cycle in tourist environments

2014 ◽  
pp. 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Ridolfi
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Environmental Sciences ◽  
Urbanization Process ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Mass Tourism ◽  
Water Flows ◽  
Fundamental Part ◽  
Social Environmental ◽  
The City

This contribution attempts to examine first how different theoretical and methodological perspectives from Geography and environmental sciences explore water flows and their physical and social dimensions in the city, as well as their changes in response to the emerging urban complexities and challenges. Using in particular the framework provided by Urban Political Ecology, I look at how the physical and social dimensions of water flows unfold and influence the urbanization process and, in turn, are influenced by urbanization. In the second part, attention is paid to urban coastal areas of the Mediterranean as candidate laboratories of analysis under urban political ecology since they are subject to rapid processes of social environmental change in which water plays a fundamental part. Case studies included to examine physical and social dimensions of water flows include heritage towns (Venice) and mass tourism resorts (Benidorm).

The City in a Glass of Water: Circulating Water, Circulating Power

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Swyngedouw
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Hydrological Cycle ◽  
Urban Sustainability ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Water ◽  
Urbanization Process ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Ecological Criteria ◽  
The City

In recent years, an impressive body of work has emerged in the wake of the resurgence of the environmental question on the political agenda, addressing the environmental implications of urban change or issues related to urban sustainability (Haughton and Hunter 1994; Satterthwaite 1999). In many, if not all, of these cases, the environment is defined in terms of a set of ecological criteria pertaining to the physical milieu. Both urban sustainability and the environmental impacts of the urban process are primarily understood in terms of physical environmental conditions and characteristics. We start from a different position. As explored in Chapter 1, urban water circulation and the urban hydrosocial cycle are the vantage points from which the urbanization process will be analysed in this book. In this Chapter, a glass of water will be my symbolic and material entry point into an—admittedly somewhat sketchy—attempt to excavate the political ecology of the urbanization process. If I were to capture some urban water in a glass, retrace the networks that brought it there and follow Ariadne’s thread through the water, ‘I would pass with continuity from the local to the global, from the human to the nonhuman’ (Latour 1993: 121). These flows would narrate many interrelated tales: of social and political actors and the powerful socio-ecological processes that produce urban and regional spaces; of participation and exclusion; of rats and bankers; of water-borne disease and speculation in water industry related futures and options; of chemical, physical, and biological reactions and transformations; of the global hydrological cycle and global warming; of uneven geographical development; of the political lobbying and investment strategies of dam builders; of urban land developers; of the knowledge of engineers; of the passage from river to urban reservoir. In sum, my glass of water embodies multiple tales of the ‘city as a hybrid’. The rhizome of underground and surface water flows, of streams, pipes and networks is a powerful metaphor for processes that are both social and ecological (Kaïka and Swyngedouw 2000). Water is a ‘hybrid’ thing that captures and embodies processes that are simultaneously material, discursive, and symbolic.

Urban political ecology III

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nik Heynen
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Feminist Political Ecology ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The City ◽  
Queer Ecology

Given the ongoing importance of nature in the city, better grappling with the gendering and queering of urban political ecology offers important insights that collectively provides important political possibilities. The cross-currents of feminist political ecology, queer ecology, queer urbanism and more general contributions to feminist urban geography create critical opportunities to expand UPE’s horizons toward more egalitarian and praxis-centered prospects. These intellectual threads in conversation with the broader Marxist roots of UPE, and other second-generation variants, including what I have previously called abolition ecology, combine to at once show the ongoing promises of heterodox UPE and at the same time contribute more broadly beyond the realm of UPE.

Producing an urban hazardscape beyond the city

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (9) ◽  
pp. 1968-1985 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Saguin
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Flood Control ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
Metro Manila ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Urban Risk ◽  
The City ◽  
Laguna Lake

Urban socioecological risk, like other urban metabolic processes, embodies relations between the city and the non-city. In this paper, I trace the production of urban risk within and beyond the city through the lens of the hazardscape using the case of Metro Manila and Laguna Lake in the Philippines. Building on recent interventions in urban political ecology that seek to map the terrains of extending urban frontiers, I examine the processes that construct city and non-city spaces in urbanization through flood control. I synthesize narratives of the material-discursive production of risk mediated by infrastructure with histories of landscape and livelihood change in an urban socioecological frontier to make two related arguments. First, discursive constructions of city and non-city and the material flows that connect them shape the production of urban ecological risk, with material consequences for non-city vulnerabilities. Second, infrastructure plays an important mediating role in the production of hazardscapes. The intersection of flows of water, discursive urban imaginaries in state plans, and livelihoods in Metro Manila and Laguna Lake exemplifies metabolic relations that reveal the spatio-temporal connections of cities with landscapes that make their functioning possible.

Urbanizing Islands: A Critical History of Singapore's Offshore Islands

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110510
Author(s):  
Creighton Connolly ◽  
Hamzah Muzaini
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Urban Core ◽  
History Of ◽  
City State ◽  
The City ◽  
Environmental Inequalities ◽  
Over Time

While Singapore is often considered an island city in the singular sense, the city-state actually consists of many islands, with the Singapore mainland being by far the largest. While most of these islands traditionally had thriving indigenous communities, all have since been displaced over time as the islands were developed to service Singapore's economic and metabolic needs as a rapidly urbanizing and developing nation. Some of the islands have also undergone considerable transformation (through reclamation) which has had significant impacts on the ecologies of the offshore islands. This simultaneously allowed for the ‘ruralization’ of mainland Singapore to provide more green space for nature conservation, recreation and leisure. This paper will provide a brief history of these transformations, drawing on specific examples which serve to illustrate how Singapore's offshore islands have been redeveloped over time to service the nation-state and in response to the changing needs of the urban core. In doing so, the paper examines how spaces on the urban periphery are deeply bound up with processes of ‘urbanization’, given their important role in processes of urban metabolism. In this way, the paper contributes to recent work in urban political ecology which has sought to trace processes of urbanization beyond the city and render visible the socio-environmental inequalities produced therein.

An urban political ecology for a world of cities

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (11) ◽  
pp. 2357-2370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Keil
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Rhetorical Question ◽  
The City ◽  
Theoretical Project

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.

Race and the construction of city and nature

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (9) ◽  
pp. 1948-1967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Loughran
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Spatial Dynamics ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The City

Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the “hybridity” of urban–environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed “binary” relationship between “city” and “nature” that dominated historical understandings of urban–environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated this shift in city–nature boundaries have been understudied. Many explanations position accelerating urbanization or changes in global political economy as driving the decline of the city–nature binary. This paper proposes that this transformation is also a product of the changing cultural and spatial dynamics of “race” between the 19th-century and the present. Drawing on research on urban parks in Chicago, I consider the production of park space at four important historical moments: (1) the mid-to-late 19th-century, when large picturesque parks were built; (2) the early 20th-century, when reform-oriented “small parks” were constructed; (3) the post-World War II period, which was marked by the development of recreation facilities; and (4) the contemporary period, where linear parks like Chicago’s 606 (which I term “imbricated spaces”) bring together built and natural environments in new ways. Through this analysis, I argue that the social construction of “city” and “nature,” as spatialized through urban park development, was co-produced with racialized spaces and symbols and contributed to the creation of metropolitan racial boundaries. Further, I argue that historical shifts in these racialized spaces and symbols have been implicated in the weakening of the city–nature binary and the rise of the hybrid city–nature relationship.

scholarly journals Uneven urban metabolisms: toward an integrative (ex)urban political ecology of sustainability in and around the city

2021 ◽  
pp. 86-111
Author(s):  
Innisfree McKinnon ◽  
Patrick T Hurley ◽  
Colleen C Myles ◽  
Megan Maccaroni ◽  
Trina Filan
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
The City

scholarly journals Power, Nature, and the City. The Conquest of Water and the Political Ecology of Urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador: 1880–1990

1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
E Swyngedouw
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Water Control ◽  
Urbanization Process ◽  
Supply Condition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
The City

In this paper, I seek to explore how the circulation of water is embedded in the political ecology of power, through which the urbanization process unfolds. I attempt to reconstruct the urbanization process as simultaneously a political-economic and ecological process. This will be discussed through the exploration of the history of the urbanization of water in Guayaquil, Ecuador. As approximately 36% of its two million inhabitants has no access to piped potable water, water becomes subject to an intense social struggle for control and/or access. Mechanisms of exclusion from and access to water, particularly in cities which have a problematic water-supply condition, lay bare how both the transformation of nature and the urbanization process are organized in and through mechanisms of social power. In order to unravel the relations of power that are inscribed in the way the urbanization of nature unfolded I document and analyze the historical geography of water control in the context of the political ecology of Guayaquil's urbanization. In short, Guayaquil's urbanization process is written from the perspective of the drive to urbanize and domesticate nature's water and the parallel necessity to push the ecological frontier outward as the city expands. I show how this political ecology of urbanization takes place through deeply exclusive and marginalizing processes that structure relations of access to and exclusion from access to nature's water.

scholarly journals Uneven urban metabolisms: toward an integrative (ex)urban political ecology of sustainability in and around the city

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Innisfree McKinnon ◽  
Patrick T Hurley ◽  
Colleen C Myles ◽  
Megan Maccaroni ◽  
Trina Filan
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
The City

scholarly journals Hydrosocial hinterlands: An urban political ecology of Southern California’s hydrosocial territory

2020 ◽  
pp. 251484862090938 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alida Cantor
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Process Of Urbanization ◽  
Rural Places ◽  
The City ◽  
Empirical Case Studies

Urban political ecology has conceptualized the city as a process of urbanization rather than a bounded site. Yet, in practice, the majority of urban political ecology literature has focused on sites within city limits. This tension in urban political ecology evokes broader conversations in urban geography around city-as-place versus urbanization-as-process. In this paper, I bring an urban political ecology analysis to examine co-constitutive urbanization and ruralization processes, focusing on sites beyond city boundaries in three empirical case studies located within the broader hydrosocial territory of urban Southern California. By focusing on the rural components of hydrosocial territories, I show that each of the three case studies has been shaped in very different ways based on its enrollment within urban Southern California’s hydrosocial territory; in turn, the rural has also shaped the cities through flows of politics and resources. The paper demonstrates how urban political ecology can be usefully applied to understand rural places, illustrating how processes of urbanization can be involved in the production of distinctly rural—and distinctly different—landscapes. The cases demonstrate the utility of urban political ecology as an analytical framework that can examine co-constitutive urbanization/ruralization processes and impacts while maintaining enough groundedness to highlight place-based differences.

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