Decolonizing Urban Political Ecologies: The Production of Nature in Settler Colonial Cities

Simpson, Michael; Bagelman, Jen

doi:10.1080/24694452.2017.1392285

Cited by 46 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Given that hunting, fishing, and gathering of foods are all central to Indigenous food sovereignty and resurgence (Daigle, 2017;Poe, LeCompte, McLain, & Hurley, 2014;Simpson & Bagelman, 2018), we might ask whether a narrow, Eurocentric focus on cultivation, as opposed to a more broadly defined food system, works to erase non-White epistemologies and practices. In sum, given the extent to which discursive Othering and erasure undergird racial capitalism, how we frame UA and other food spaces-and, indeed, what we choose to focus our research on-clearly matters.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Agricultural settlements swelled to become "regional landscapes of farming hamlets, market towns, and port cities, all with residential garden plots and commons for pasturing animals" (Vitiello & Brinkley, 2014). New crops, growing techniques, and the imposition of cadastral grids and land titles transformed the landscape, mimicking British and European socio-natures (Simpson & Bagelman, 2018), while incorporating many Indigenous crops better suited to local growing conditions (McWilliams, 2004). Martin (2011, p. 117) describes settler gardening as the "literalization of settlement" through the setting of physical and metaphorical roots, where the sharing and exchange of seeds, plants, and horticultural knowledge contributed to community coherence among settlers, and even enabled class mobility and prestige, particularly for women.…”

Section: Cultivating Racialized Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Coulthard (2014, p. 172) explains, reconnecting to land-based practices in this way resists capitalist logics, fostering a "radical sustainability" that also breaks individual and community dependence on the capitalist markets. Moreover, such efforts assert self-determination grounded in multiple, nested sovereignties that contest capitalist logics and the boundaries of settler-state institutions (Daigle, 2017;Simpson, 2014;Simpson & Bagelman, 2018). Tuck and Yang (2012) caution, however, that decolonization is not simply a question of reconnecting to the land, but also of regaining control of it.…”

Section: Sowing Resistance and Resurgencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Colonialists sometimes did not recognize food production for what it was, either mistaking it as part of a lush wilderness landscape or simply discounting it as "primitive." By ignoring Indigenous cultivation practices-and the property rights that went with them-settlers undergirded European claims to land they deemed to be terra nullius (Deur, Turner, Dick, Sewid-Smith, & Recalma-Clutesi, 2013;Simpson & Bagelman, 2018), the "expansive unenclosed, green landscape" a utopian space upon which a "pastoral ideal" could mapped, often in the form of the plantation (Rusert, 2009, p. 19). Physical destruction of Indigenous gardens often accompanied such discursive violence, simultaneously creating space for settler agriculture, while eliminating Indigenous means of subsistence and territorial claims (Deur et al, 2013) and naturalizing slave gardens as an element of a utopian pastoral landscape (Rusert, 2009).…”

Section: Cultivating Racialized Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

“…But beyond providing benefits to individual households, growing food can strengthen communities in a variety of ways that counter both settler colonialism's requirement of Indigenous erasure (Simpson & Bagelman, 2018) and racial capitalism's need to rework existing social relations into new socio-spatial arrangements supportive of capitalist accumulation (on this necessity, see Melamed, 2015). Many scholars therefore point to the important educational role that gardens can play both in (re)connecting people to Indigenous and non-European foodways and forging bonds of interdependence, between members of the community and between gardeners and the non-human world (Bang, 2016;Cidro, Adekunle, Peters, & Martens, 2015;Mihesuah, 2004;Thomas, 2017).…”

Section: Sowing Resistance and Resurgencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city

McClintock

2018

Geography Compass

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Recent scholarship on urban agriculture (UA)—the production of food in cities—argues that UA can both undergird and resist capitalist accumulation, albeit often at different spatio‐temporal scales. Scholarship that explicitly examines how UA, capitalist development, and racial difference work through one another, however, is less extensive. In this review, I propose that the lens of racial capitalism can elucidate UA's contradictory motivations and outcomes. As an analytical framework, racial capitalism considers how distinct forms of colonization, settler colonialism, and White supremacy function relationally as part of a unified system of capitalist accumulation built on the exploitation of racialized human and spatial difference. By focusing on UA's contributions to racial Othering, the racialization of space, and dispossession, on the one hand, and on struggles of resistance and self‐determination, on the other, this review attempts to sheds new light on the dialectical, “both/and” nature of UA, while also addressing recent calls to consider how settler colonial logics persist in the contemporary North American city.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Cultivating Racialized Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sowing Resistance and Resurgencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Cultivating Racialized Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sowing Resistance and Resurgencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city

McClintock

2018

Geography Compass

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Biodiversity is not a luxury: Unpacking wealth and power to accommodate the complexity of urban biodiversity

Poulton Kamakura,

Bai,

Sheel

et al. 2024

Ecosphere

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A positive correlation between wealth and biodiversity within cities is a commonly documented phenomenon in urban ecology that has come to be labeled as the “luxury effect.” We contend that both this language and this framing restrict our understanding of how sociopolitical power dynamics influence biodiversity within and across cities. We describe how the term “luxury” is not appropriately applied to describe patterns of biodiversity and how the pattern depends on the form(s) of biodiversity investigated. While we recognize examples where there is a positive relationship between socioeconomic status and biodiversity, we describe numerous examples where either opposite patterns or no clear relationship between wealth and biodiversity is found. We propose an alternate framework, the POSE framework, that examines the Power, Objectives, mediating Socio‐ecological context, and Effort of specific actors and how those may influence biodiversity. The mediating socio‐ecological context includes everything from biophysical limitations to historical context and the actions of other actors. Further, it is important to understand how and to what degree we expect the actor's actions to influence biodiversity in order to design studies that are able to detect these shifts in biodiversity. We contend that complicating our analysis to focus more on power generally, rather than socioeconomic status specifically, as well as the specific objectives of actors of interest within their socio‐ecological context offers a more flexible approach that can be applied in a wider range of socio‐ecological contexts and allows for more directed policy interventions.

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Translating land justice through comparison: a US–French dialogue and research agenda

et al. 2021

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In this discussion piece, eight scholars in geography, urban planning, and agri-food studies from the United States (US) and France engage in a bi-national comparison to deepen our collective understanding of food and land justice. We specifically contextualize land justice as a critical component of food justice in both the US and France in three key areas: access to land for cultivation, urban agriculture, and non-agricultural forms of food provisioning. The US and France are interesting cases to compare, considering the differences and similarities in their colonial and agricultural histories, persistent and systemic race and class-based inequities in land access, and the roles of public bodies and social movements. In this paper, we synthesize literature, share reflections, and offer directions for future scholarship, including a broader comparative research agenda. An important difference we found is in the degree of scholarly attention to race and how it mediates access to land. We also observe that few scholars articulate a clear definition of justice in their work, nor do they share a common justice framework. We hope that this paper contributes to a more robust food and land justice framework for the use of scholars, practitioners and activists.

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Decolonizing Urban Political Ecologies: The Production of Nature in Settler Colonial Cities

Cited by 46 publications

References 22 publications

Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city

Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city

Biodiversity is not a luxury: Unpacking wealth and power to accommodate the complexity of urban biodiversity

Translating land justice through comparison: a US–French dialogue and research agenda

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