Extending the boundaries of ‘urban society’: The urban political ecologies and pathologies of Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa

A disease outbreak is an emergent product of social and ecological processes. To more fully understand disease outbreaks and their response, we must therefore consider how these dual processes interact in specific locales within the context of an increasingly urbanized world. As such, in this paper we examine the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak and its response in West Africa by adopting the lenses of two approaches that are usually treated separately – namely, urban political ecology (UPE) and urban political pathology (UPP). The UPE approach sheds light on how the material/biophysical basis of the EVD outbreak was influenced by the socio-political-economic and vice versa. The UPP approach gives us insight into how the EVD response was influenced by broader socio-political-economic forces, particularly the historical legacy of colonialism. Through the adoption of this dual lens we are able to gain greater insights and a more comprehensive understanding of the EVD outbreak and response in West Africa.

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

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.

Urban political ecology in prospect and retrospect

The contemporary theorization of the urban biosphere has reached something of an impasse between the perceived limitations of urban political ecology, the neo-Lefebvrian emphasis on global patterns of urbanization, and the rise of “new materialisms”. Since its emergence in the mid-1990s, urban political ecology has made a series of distinctive contributions to the study of urban environmental issues yet in recent years a series of conceptual tensions and empirical lacunae have become apparent. In this essay I reflect on the legacy of the “first wave” of urban political ecology scholarship and consider a series of contemporary challenges including more complex interpretations of agency, materiality, and subjectivity.

Urban political ecology: a critical reconfiguration

Urban political ecology now finds itself at a crossroads between gradual marginalization or renewed intellectual impetus. Despite some recent critical re-evaluations of the field, there remain a series of conceptual tensions that have only been partially explored. I consider six issues in particular: the uncertain relations between urban political ecology and the biophysical sciences; the emergence of extended conceptions of agency and subjectivity; the redefinition of space, scale, and the urban realm; renewed interest in urban epidemiology; the delineation of urban ecological imaginaries; and finally, the emergence of evidentiary materialism as an alternative posthuman configuration to new materialist ontologies. I conclude that a conceptually enriched urban political ecology could play an enhanced role in critical environmental research.

Towards conceptions of green gentrification as more-than-human

This article seeks to expand scholarly conceptions of green gentrification by emphasizing the complex and contradictory connections between nonhumans and humans as critical for understanding neighborhood change. Drawing from posthumanist scholarship, as well as literature on urban political ecology, urban greening, gentrification and “just green enough,” this article argues that to understand green amenities not only as sites of injustice, but rather as dynamic sites of injustice and resistance, requires disaggregating amenities from traditional conceptions of green gentrification. In doing so, it is possible to analyze the complex agencies of greenspace itself as connected to pluralized forms of (in)justice associated with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. To illustrate this, I use a more-than-human framework to reconceptualize three existing “just green enough” case studies of (1) riverfront development, (2) urban linear parks, and (3) community gardens to show how injustice and resistance are not only broad-based, but unique to amenity and place. The aim of this review is to offer new ways of understanding and analyzing the dialectic of injustice and resistance associated with green gentrification.