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The growing field of urban political ecology (UPE) has greatly advanced understandings of the socio-ecological transformations through which urban economies and environments are produced. However, this field has thus far failed to fully consider subjective (and subject-forming) dimensions of urban environmental struggle. I argue that this can be overcome through bringing urban political ecology into...
This paper traces changes in the political ecology of insects and chemicals in US public housing since Congress founded public housing in 1937. Drawing upon the literature of critical geographies of home, urban political ecology, and medical history, it argues that the constitution of “public” and “private” space within public housing was deeply entangled with pest control practices there. Prior to...
The residents of Kathmandu Valley in Nepal face increasing water shortages that worsen during the dry season. Against this situation, the Melamchi Water Supply megaproject, supported by several foreign investors, was launched in 2000 to quench Kathmanduties’ thirst by bringing water from Melamchi River through a 26km-long tunnel. After more than 10years, progress has been very modest. Besides the...
This paper examines the complexities of producing fish for the city and substituting wild with farmed fish. Using the urban metabolism framework and commodity biographies approach, it takes the case of peri-urban aquaculture in Laguna Lake, Philippines and focuses on the metabolic transformations of bighead carp, an introduced lake fish primarily consumed in nearby Metro Manila. Increased lake production...
In 2014, approximately 100,000 lots lie “vacant” in Detroit after decades of industrial decline, white flight, and poverty. Planners and government officials have proposed to repurpose Detroit’s highest vacancy neighborhoods, deemed to have “no market value,” as blue and green infrastructure (retention ponds, carbon forests, urban farms, greenways). According to the Detroit Future City plan, traditional...
This paper develops a political–industrial ecology approach to explore the urban water metabolism of Los Angeles, which sprawls for thousands of miles across the American West. Conventional approaches to quantify urban carbon footprints rely on global, national, or regional averages and focus narrowly on improving the efficiency of flows of resources moving into and out of the city. These approaches...
Commissioned by the State legislature after a succession of deadly and damaging landslides and decades of exurban growth on steep mountain slopes, the North Carolina Geological Survey produced a series of landslide hazard maps detailing for the public landslide prone areas of Macon County, North Carolina, USA. While widely supported at the state and local levels in 2005, by 2011, the mapping program...
Anthropogenic lead (Pb) is ubiquitous in urban soils given its widespread deposition over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries from a range of point- and non-point sources, including industrial waste and pollution, leaded paint, and automobile exhaust. While soil scientists and urban ecologists have documented soil Pb contamination in cities around the world, such analyses usually focus on proximal...
The university campus is often considered a key site for the development of environmental sustainability initiatives. At the same time, the concept and practice of sustainability has been critiqued for its lack of conceptual clarity and its proneness to co-optation by neoliberal institutions and organizations. Using a just sustainabilities framework, this article strives to respond to this tension...
Energy poverty – or the condition of households that cannot adequately heat their homes – is produced at the confluence of multi-scalar processes, from regional labor market restructuring, to urban disinvestment, to geopolitical and geoeconomic struggles over extraction. Critical theorization of the concept is in its nascent phase and the notion itself has received relatively little attention in the...
Urban political ecology attempts to unravel and politicize the socio-ecological processes that produce uneven waterscapes. At the core of this analysis are the choreographies of power that influence how much water flows through urban infrastructure as well as where it flows, thereby shaping conditions and quality of access in cities. If these analyses have been prolific in demonstrating uneven distribution...
This paper engages with emergent conceptualizations of political–industrial ecology to understand the politics surrounding how the volume, composition, and material throughput of stormwater in Los Angeles is calculated and applied by experts. The intent is to examine the unfolding relationship between the volume and material flow of stormwater, and the social, political, and technical practices involved...
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