Urban Political Ecology

The Urbanization of Nature

Great Promises, Impasse and New

Beginnings?

Erik SwyngedouwUniversity of ManchesterGraduate Summer School on Environmental Conflict, Autonomous University of Barcelona, 8 July 2011

“There is nothing unnatural about New

York City” (Harvey, 1996)

“However far we go, we can never leave the city” (after Italo

Calvino)

“Capitalism today as global urbanism” (Lefebvre, 1989)

The Urbanization of nature1. The Urban Question and Socio-

Environmental Conflict: 19th century

2. The de-naturalization of the city: 20th century nature/city separation

3. RE-naturing the city in the late 20th century: Promises

1. Nature in the city2. The fantasy of urban sustainability 3. Urban Environmental Injustice4. Urban Political Ecology5. IMPASSE

4. Re-Politicizing Urban Political Ecology: New Beginnings?

The Urban Question as an Environmental Issue: 19th and 20th

century antecedents• The Conditions of the Working Class in England (F. Engels)

• ‘Metabolic Rift’ and capitalist urbanization (K. Marx)

“… large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism … The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country” (Marx, 1981 [1867], p. 949).

• Early Sociology as socio-ecological understanding: Spencer, Compte, Schaffle• The ‘Bacteriological City’ and the urban sanitation movement: The ‘sustainable’ city avant-la-lettre

• The Urban Question as an Environmental Issue: 19th and 20th

century antecedents

•Natural Ecology – Social Ecology – Socio-Ecological Systems -- Social Harmony – Socializing Nature (Chicago School and Modern(ist) Urban Planning and Green Spaces)

•The ‘denaturalization’ of the Urban Problem: from the Chicago School to Critical Urban Political Economy

Re-naturing the City• Foregrounding Urban Nature again:

• The ecological problem as socio-political problem (> 1960s)

• System theory – Urban ‘Design with Nature’ (McHarg)

• Nuclear energy as ‘symptomatic torsion point’

• Resource Depletion and the Malthusian Spectre (CoR)

• Galloping Urbanization in Global South and the Urban as socio-environmental problem

A New Relationship with Nature: Sustainability as Romantic Ideology and a Particular scripting of Nature

Neglecting Socio-environmental inequality and persistent conditions of socio-ecological exclusion

Two Perspectives: Nature in the City versus the Urbanization of Nature

1. Urban Sustainability: The Fantasy of Socio-Ecological

Urban Cohesion• 1987 Brundtland Report – 1992 Rio Summit

• Two interconnected perspectives• Ecological rationality: efficient resource use• Technology-mediated management: eco-technocracy and ecological modernization

• Occasionally attention to wider socio-ecological networks and the conflicts/compromises involved in delivering urban sustainability

Sustainability as Imaginary Fantasy Predicated on the possibility of socio-ecological Harmony and on a particular ‘scientific’ understanding of Nature as singular, ordered and inherently harmonious

Silencing of questions of inequality/inequity

2. Urban Environmental Injustice: The Distribution of

Environmental Bads• Normative concept AND Social Movement

• Originated in the US as a socio-environmental movement:• Distributional notion of Justice (Rawlsian)

– absence of political demands of equity/equality – liberal notions of justice (as fairness)

• Foregrounding race• Procedural • Focus on environmental ‘bads’• Localised (NIMBY-ism)

Urban Environmental Injustice: The Distribution

of Environmental Bads• Socializing urban natures• Extending injustices ad-infinitum: gender, class, disability, age, inter-generational, scale, ….• Focus on PATTERNS of socio-spatial environmental injustices• We are all victims

Socio-ecological (In)Justices in the City VERSUS the political-ecology processes of Urbanization and its inequalities.

3. Urban Political Ecology• The Production of Urban Socio-Environmental

Inequalities through human/non-human assembling./flows.

• Nature does not exist – natures become

• natures become increasingly enrolled in a capital accumulation and circulation process as a socio-metabolic process. Metabolism is the process whereby ”physical matter such as water or cows are transformed into useable, ownable and tradable commodities.” Environments are produced == “there is nothing unnatural about NYC”

• This is predicated upon the incorporation of natures within the social relations of property/ownership, appropriation and distribution of nature/value: the commodification of nature.

Urban Political Ecology• Large-scale urbanization of all manner of natures is THE spatial form of capital accumulation (with all manner of unintended outcomes).

• Anti-Malthusian: scarcity as a socially produced: twin imperative of ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake on the one hand and ‘the market’ as allocation instrument on the other – accelerating socio-ecological transformation.

• The urban socio-physical environment embodies and reflects the power relations inscribed in socio-ecological metabolism: control/ownership/access, quality of resources, and their utilization/distribution

• State/policies matter, class and other forms of social power are vital or ….. In other words, politics resides in the state, the political resides in social struggle/conflict

Urban Political Ecology• The urbanization of natures is multi-scaled: for example, the political ecology of urban water and the water/money/capital nexus.

• The urbanization of nature is never just LOCAL, it always also is trans-local and often global. -- urban socio-ecological metabolism produces combined and uneven socio-ecological development.

• POLITICAL EMPHASIS: Not on (In)Justice (as ethical or moral imperative), but on EQUALITY as founding political gesture/demand.

4. Re-Politicizing Urban Political Ecology: From Urban Environmental Movements to Eco-Political Demands

• The failures of critical thought: IMPASSE – the disappearance of the environment post-crisis• Bringing the political back into POLITICAL-Ecology • From socio-environmental analysis to political action• Thinking the political (vs. politics)• The democratic political as the presumption of equality of each and all.• The common management of the commons

Re-Politicizing Urban Political Ecology: From Urban

Environmental Movements to Eco-Political Demands1. Urbanizing Global Environments:

Urbanising globalization as a socio-environmental project: the territorialization and de-territorialization of metabolic circulatory flows organized trough socio-physical conduits or networks of ‘metabolic vehicles’

(The commodification/financialization of H2O, CO2, land, wastes, Genes, etc….; multi-scalar and multi-networked struggle;

DEMANDING THE RIGHT TO URBANITY AS METABOLIC

VEHICLE.

From urban environmental movements to Eco-Political

Demands2. Post neo-liberalizing urban environments:

• Neo-liberalism as the privatisation/commodification of everything as a political/class project

• State authoritarianism and post-neoliberalization: Capitalism with Asian values?

• The Socialist Elite State and the Tyranny of Participatory Governance

• Socio-Ecological Inequality and De-Democratization:

RECLAIMING DEMOCRACY AS FOUNDATIONAL POLITICAL

GESTURE.


Demands3. Urban environmental movements

• Reactionary• Localised• Repertoires of Action: Victims and Grievances

• The presumed egalitarianism of urban environmental movements (disavowing conflict – internal power relations)

MULTI-SCALAR AND RELATIONAL-ECOLOGICAL

POLITICAL DEMANDS


Demands4. Radical Urban Socio-Ecological Imaginaries and The

Discourses of Urban Natures • Nature or Sustainability are ‘empty’ signifiers

• Ecology as the ‘New Opium of the People’• Ecologies of Fear• Ecological coherence as panacea• Inviting radical change so that nothing really

has to change• Nature does not exist

• Producing egalitarian socio-environmental urban imaginaries and material assemblages

STAGING EQUALITY = RECAPTURING DEMOCRACY: Towards a slow city