Discrepant Ecologies in a North Indian Qasba

Ethnographic fieldwork in the municipality of Jahazpur, a market town and sub-district headquarters in North India, reveals contrasting roles of religiosity and identity in environmental protection. Hilltop shrines, one Hindu and one Muslim, are surrounded by successfully sustained groves. Each shrine belongs to a distinct and demographically significant group with political clout. Vigilant devotees as much as fear of divine retribution effectively protect shrine environments from wood-hungry neighbors. The Nagdi River had offered both utility and beauty to the entire population, but its flow dwindled, choked on trash and sewage. Aware that an important part of shared environmental and cultural heritage was in dire peril, Jahazpur residents and local government made sporadic efforts to mobilize restoration, but it proved discouraging to sustain alignments across community and class. Recently, however, young shopkeepers collaborating across lines of difference have partially reversed the river's deterioration. Comparing discrepant ecological pasts and present of Jahazpur's hilltops and river shows diverse and shifting configurations at the emotional and volatile intersection of religion, politics and urban environments.

Hong Kong’s Artificial Anti-Archipelago and the Unnaturing of the Natural

This chapter examines a proposal made by Hong Kong tycoon Gordon Wu to construct an artificial island in Hong Kong’s territorial waters in the late 1980s. His scheme has echoes in the Hong Kong government’s current plan to construct an “East Lantau Metropolis” on an artificial island in a similar same location. A close examination of Wu’s proposition reveals how it served not just commercial ambitions, but also expressed a more complex set of aims playing out through geopolitical intrigue and late-colonial domestic politics, as well as maneuverings for private dominance of urban and regional infrastructure. At an even more ulterior level, these activities additionally attempted an unconscious restructuring of the intercultural formations of nature(s) and landscape as they have emerged in Hong Kong.

Ecologies of Possibility

This chapter describes the shifting ecologies of the spaces along the railway tracks in the provincial capital city of Northeastern Thailand, Khon Kaen. It traces the land’s history by describing how the Thai state railway transformed from a national infrastructural project into a space of dwelling. By intertwining infrastructural histories with stories of dwelling, the chapter shows how state actors remake the land through their efforts to govern it and how residents have transformed it through political struggles to secure their homes, assert their political status, improve their communities, and maintain their rights to the city. The interrelationship between these histories reveals the ways ecologies—both actual and possible—make and are made through social relations, political struggles, and spatial policy.

Urban Leopards Are Good Cartographers

In Mumbai, the Sanjay Gandhi National Park is besieged by a sprawling urban agglomeration of 20 million inhabitants. The first part of this paper documents the dangerous and sometimes deadly presence of leopards in and around the park. In the second section, it is argued that leopards in Mumbai are not only a matter of human-nonhuman conflict: the panther attacks reveal conflicts of other kinds, between human stakeholders, and in particular highlight graduated levels of citizenship. Lastly, the leopards also reveal (or generate) spatial tensions – though they are also efficient go-betweens to help solve these conflicts.

Inquisitive Legacies

In keeping with the shift of the modern Indian nation-state to the religio-political right, minority legacies in such regions as the Malabar and Konkan coasts are either being obfuscated or rehistoricized. To prove my point, I employ two botanical texts from the 16th and 17th centuries. The former, the Colóquios dos Simples e Drogas e Cousas Medicinias da Índia, was written by Garcia da Orta, a Jewish-Catholic converso who lived and died in Portuguese Goa under the threat of the Inquisition. In its efforts to represent its past and present as a modern quasi city-state in line with other Indian metros, the Goan State chose, in 2012, to commemorate the 17th century Hortus Malabaricus, an ecological treatise that, curiously, comes from the Malabar, because among its contributors were Saraswat Brahmins with a dubious connection to Goan history. That this commemoration occurred on the uncelebrated 450th anniversary publication of da Orta's opus - one of the earliest texts to be published in South Asia - underscores the State's investment in legacy-making and forgetting.

Re-imagining the Indian Underground

Long heralded as a crucial technological input for the successes of the Green Revolution in South Asia, for over half a century tubewell technologies have played a decisive, yet unacknowledged role in sustaining cities and towns as well as farms and factories across India. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork and archival research, this chapter recounts the biography of this fantastic technology and its importance to farmers and urbanites as well as its shifting position within larger geopolitical debates and technology transfers. As cities and towns continue to compete with industry and agriculture for groundwater, distribution and access to tubewells will become central to landscape and urban development within the region.

Tales from the Concrete Cave

Explicitly artificial “nature” (animals, trees, mountains, the colour green) proliferates intensely in contemporary India, notably in peri-urban theme parks. While this could be seen as post-liberalization “Disneyfication” or as a symptom of modernity more broadly, this chapter argues that there are other aesthetico-moral economies at work alongside such universalizing formulations of a hegemonic capitalist modernity and its “nature-culture.” It does so through a focus on the Lakshminarayan Temple or Birla Mandir, built in the 1930s as a “native” addendum to colonial New Delhi. The temple’s innovative architecture, and particularly its theme park-like garden, inaugurated a new, inclusive public (sarvajanik) religious space at the nexus of colonial planning, momentous debates on caste, religious patronage in the late colonial economy, and resignifications of nature and the sacred through new visual forms. This genealogy of the post-reform theme park illuminates the nature of “nature” on an uneven postcolonial terrain that both discursively negotiates and performatively refutes the separation of culture, religion and the social from “nature” and from political economy.

Eco-Socialism and Green City Making in Postwar Vietnam

This chapter examines shifts in the meaning and use of green space in socialist housing blocks in Vinh City, Vietnam, a ‘model’ socialist city rebuilt by East Germany (GDR) after its destruction by US aerial bombing. Unique to the eight-year project was the central role that ecological design played in urban reconstruction owing to financial and material constraints on the one hand, and ideological imperatives on the other. Green technology transfers served to radically transform the landscape with parks and cultivated green spaces that catered to the needs of workers and their families. These ‘eco-socialist’ practices, as I refer to them, constituted a fundamental effort on the part of GDR planners to rationally manage and order urban space that was deemed disorderly and too rural for the city. Yet utopian visions of urban modernity often came up short as they revealed more about East German lifestyles than about the pragmatic possibilities for recovery in postwar Vietnam. Ensuing struggles over the appropriate use of urban nature emerged at the center of the modernizing project and the creation of new socialist persons in Vietnam.

Introduction

This chapter outlines the “ecologies of urbanism” analytic employed by contributors to this volume. Unlike a singular ecology that might suggest a unified experience of urban nature, this approach compels us to identify the multiple forms of nature—in biophysical, cultural, and political terms—that have discernable impact on power relations and human social action in Asian cities. In a manner that distinguishes ecologies of urbanism from other approaches to urban environmental change, this analytical approach presupposes a multi-scalar perspective that varies its analytical parameters according to the social and/or biophysical processes under consideration. It also allows the reader to distinguish between “ecology” and “nature” in meaningful and consequential ways.

Courts, Public Cultures of Legality, and Urban Ecological Imagination in Delhi

Courts, Public Cultures of Legality, and Urban Ecological Imagination in Delhi Chapter abstract: This essay provides an analysis of the legal contests over the forests and groundwater in the city of Delhi over the last three decades. It examines the ways in which the iconic Delhi Ridge, which runs along a north to south axis through most of the city, is imagined and litigated as a natural resource, an environmental amenity, and a provider of ecosystem services for the national capital region of India. Based on research in courts and among litigators, with activists and technocrats, this study describes the formation of legal public spheres around environmental disputes and the rights of urban residents of all classes in Delhi. This essay identifies emergent environmental jurisprudence in India; even as it considers the material consequences of the biotic and sedimentary ecologies of the Delhi Ridge for urban environmental change in the national capital territory.