Reading History and Power in Urban Landscapes: The Lens of Urban Political Ecology

Abstract

This essay sketches some of these features and their implications, employing five intersecting rubrics—hybrids, boundaries, histories, values, and peripheries. Together, these frames build an account of how the urban engine (or metabolism, in the language of urban political ecology), with its distinctive pace and drivers, assembles dynamic entities that defy easy categorization and carry powerful political stakes. The essay draws on a selection of empirical work across Indian cities (including my own writings on Chennai) and on the theoretical contributions of urban political ecology, to argue for a more complex understanding of urban nature as constituted through historical projects of urbanization, and of environmental sustainability as inseparable from questions of social justice.

What space for public parks in sustainable consumption corridors? Conceptual reflections on need satisfaction through social practices

“…While we were unable to uncover specific details about the use of the pond before the creation of the park, oral histories conducted with long-term residents of the neighborhood indicated that the pond had become a dumping site for garbage, and establishment of the park was advocated as a way to address this problem. Additionally, at the time of the development of this green space, various state and parastatal bodies in the city of Chennai were actively involved in a campaign to eliminate centuries-old engineered tanks and seasonal lakes known as eris through infilling as a means of enhancing the supply of housing, infrastructure, and institutions (Coelho 2018). These factors point to a tension where one type of commons was sacrificed to create other types of social infrastructure.…”

“…The acquisition of land purportedly for green spaces is also sometimes combined with commercial development. This suggests that the creation of public spaces can be used as an excuse to open up lands occupied by the poor to real-estate development, as observed in the case of the Citi Center Mall in Chennai (Coelho 2018). Promoting inclusive and accessible parks as an alternative to the hegemony of shopping malls and without population displacement becomes all the more relevant in this context.…”

“…For example, a recent decision to create an eco-park on the banks of the Adyar River in Chennai resulted in the expulsion of several hundred households and small businesses that existed along the riparian corridor. Plans to restore waterways and to create urban parks around the Cooum River in Chennai propose the eviction of slum dwellers, most of whom are being relocated to the outskirts of the city, far away from their means of livelihood and familiar communities (Coelho and Raman 2010;Coelho 2018). In each of these instances, the creation of a green public space has involved the forcible restriction of access.…”

URBAN WATERLINES: Socio‐natural Productions of Indifference in an Indian City

“…The urbanization of nature is a process of boundary‐inscription that makes land from water, parks from forests, flatlands from hills. As some scholars argue (Mathur and Da Cunha, 2008; Bhattacharya, 2018; Coelho, 2018), the land‐water boundary in lakes, rivers or flood plains is more a smudgy, shifting, seasonal zone than a line. But the urban eye on nature is focused on specific interests and sees in categorical metrics.…”

Lines in the Mud: Tank Eco-restoration and Boundary Contestations in Chennai

“…A growing body of writing in the urban political ecology (UPE) tradition has shown how urban systems—rivers, beaches, municipal water and transport—can be analysed as socio-natural assemblages of human, more-than-human, technological and natural processes (Coelho, 2018; Heynen, 2014; Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2004). But eris are especially hybrid given their engineered origins and their subsequent embedding in matrices of contested social uses.…”