<scp>ENDURING HARM</scp>: Unlikely Comparisons, Slow Violence and the Administration of Urban Injustice

Anand, Nikhil; Wiggin, Bethany; Kamath, Lalitha; Deekshit, Pranjal

doi:10.1111/1468-2427.13090

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Further, as Anand et al . (2022) argue in their comparison of Mumbai and Philadelphia, we must consider both contextual differences and similarities at the same time to restore the emancipatory potential of critical research in this era of neocolonial developmental narratives in cahoots with the forward march of racialized capitalism. The key point to take from our case is that the displacement and fragmentation of African families for what we consider to be slave labour is neither historical nor forced, but contemporary and voluntary.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Proactive and direct engagement with dissenting urban communities can advance a shared just transition. Impactful critical research is needed on the exclusionary representation of social and environmental issues in postcolonial urban communities, where complex injustices may be obscured by violent forms of public dissent that perpetuate the unsustainable ‘slow violence’ of dominant sociopolitical regimes (Nixon, 2011; Chancel, 2020; Anand et al ., 2022). We recommend open and regular meetings of powerful interscalar organizations (including the third sector, academia, government at all levels, financial organizations and businesses) and free agents to provide platforms where critical voices in postcolonial cities effect policy change on the basis of a shared ‘duty to resist’ environmental injustice (Delmas, 2018; Chancel, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This approach thus explores sociopolitical innovation that is counter‐hegemonic and environmentally just. Innovative confluences of state and non‐state dissent might counteract bureaucratic practices of ‘forgetting and unseeing’ that appear to serve the beneficiaries of remnant colonial logics until palpable disasters expose systemic environmental injustices (Novalia et al ., 2020; Anand et al ., 2022: 4). Such lessons should be learned from post colonial practices and experiences.…”

Section: Critical Reviewmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Environmental Justice and Dissent for Postcolonial Urban Sustainability Transitions

Johnston¹,

Darkey²,

Ibsen³

2023

Int J Urban Regional Res

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Environmental justice principles are widespread at national and global levels of transition discourse, but this is sometimes irrelevant to marginalized communities. To address this issue, we apply environmental justice theory to a participatory postcolonial urban case study where poverty, unemployment and inequality continue to incentivize unregulated exploitation of vulnerable environments and people. It is unclear how national legislation can provide for indiscriminate access to environments that promote wellbeing in complex postcolonial communities, where xenophobic and economic discrimination reproduces colonial‐style inequalities. To resist this injustice, the combination of academic and ordinary expressions of critique that confront regressive praxis and orthodoxies becomes a valuable and constructive political innovation for transitions. Empirical results suggest that enfranchising the most vulnerable proponents of transformation could advance their political capital to advocate for themselves, formulate and enculturate decolonized visions of urban sustainability, demand governmental and commercial accountability and foster urban reform that is relevant to them.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Critical Reviewmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Environmental Justice and Dissent for Postcolonial Urban Sustainability Transitions

Johnston¹,

Darkey²,

Ibsen³

2023

Int J Urban Regional Res

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“…Together with the city's industries, municipal domestic waste infrastructures also discharge their waste into the creek. Discharged slowly and silently, it is unclear how mixtures of water and in/organic matter affect the city's human and non-human populations (Anand et al, 2022;Nixon, 2011). Thane Creek is at once an intensively policed, securitized space, and at the same time a "data desert"; an area where questions of water quality, ecology and social life are actively left unknown (Wiggin, 2022).…”

Section: Perfect Pollutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anthroposea: Planning future ecologies in Mumbai’s wetscapes

Anand

2023

Environ Plan D

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In this article, I describe Mumbai’s sea as an “anthroposea” – a sea made with ongoing anthropogenic processes across landwaters – to draw attention to the ways in which it troubles both urban planning and the making of environmental futures. I focus on three moments in which Mumbai’s more-than-human life now emerges in the anthroposea. First, I describe the surprising proliferations of lobsters, gulls, and fishers in a sewage outfall. Second, I draw attention to the city’s flourishing flamingo population amidst industrial effluents in the city’s industrial zone. Finally, the article floats towards a popular city beach where citizen scientists at Marine Life of Mumbai show the ways in which the city’s phenomenal biodiversity is making homes in and with the city’s plastic waste. I argue that these ongoing and dynamic relations between urban waste and more-than-human life make unstable and tenuous the modernist distinctions of nature/culture on which environmental and urban projects depend. The anthroposea does not easily permit the making of near futures. Instead, by crossing spatial scales and epistemological boundaries, the anthroposea holds the city and its citizens in the muddy materialities of an ongoing present; a present in which the vitalities of waste are intransigent, permanent, and generate life in the city’s landwaters.

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“…This stunning set of intervention essays on Philadelphia and Mumbai come together in their attention to the making of racial ecologies; specifically, the making of ‘Toxic urbanscapes at the margins of land and water’ (Anand et al ., 2022: 688, this issue). In this brief coda, I want to highlight how this intervention makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on comparative racial ecologies, extending the concept of racialization to related logics such as casteism and religious and ethnic discrimination.…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

CODA: The Racial Ecologies of Urban Wetlands

Ranganathan¹

2022

Int J Urban Regional Res

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In this coda to the intervention on slow violence and the administration of urban injustice I reflect on the role of racialization--broadly defined--in creating deeply unequal and risk-laden wetland ecologies. I identify 'racial ecologies' and 'ambivalence' as two key concepts tying together wetland politics across the contexts of Philadelphia and Mumbai. While the concept of 'racial ecologies' underscores how systems of human valuation (including racism, casteism and religious discrimination) are ordered through ecological and property valuation, the concept of 'ambivalence' stresses the materiality and strategic governing logic which underpins wetland ecologies.Watery lands--in the form of wetlands, mangroves, marshes, swamps, peats, bogs or shoals--are, in the words of literary theorist William Howarth (1999: 520), 'hybrid and multivalent: neither land nor water alone, they are water-land; a continuum between terra and aqua'. This quintessentially hybrid and equivocal materiality of wetlands, existing as they do in a liminal state between fluidity and fixity, between water and land, has long made them subject to violent--yet also morally ambivalent--racial projects. Untamed and Edenic, the swamp served as a literary trope for white settlers in America seeking escape from the strictures of heteropatriarchy, urbanity and modernity, as in the poems of Emily Dickinson (Parks, 2013). Yet in the European colonial imagination, swamps were also racialized as malaria-infested, fetid thickets. They were to be dredged and tamed through colonial and capitalist infrastructures deploying--in the case of the American West, for instance--Chinese indentured labor (Dillon, 2022). Such labor was imagined as 'uncivilized', much like the swamps it was forced to dredge.So too in the American antebellum South, wetlands were perceived as impenetrable, if fecund landscapes, where back-breaking labor by the enslaved was necessary to clear land for profitable agriculture. Later, in the time of urban red-lining in the twentieth century, marshy, riverine areas of the American city received a reddened 'hazardous' or 'D' rating, which--not coincidentally--were also areas co-inhabited by African American 'encroachers' and polluting industries (Villarosa, 2020). Today, toxic wetlands continue to be the most degraded and abandoned regions of the city. Yet historically, wetlands also served as concealed maroons for runaway enslaved African and Indigenous peoples on their way to freedom. Watery lands thus simultaneously make possible and disrupt the ecologies of racial capitalism.This stunning set of intervention essays on Philadelphia and Mumbai come together in their attention to the making of racial ecologies; specifically, the making of 'Toxic urbanscapes at the margins of land and water' (Anand et al., 2022: 688, this issue). In this brief coda, I want to highlight how this intervention makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on comparative racial ecologies, extending the concept of racialization to related logics such as casteism and...

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ENDURING HARM: Unlikely Comparisons, Slow Violence and the Administration of Urban Injustice

Cited by 6 publications

References 29 publications

Environmental Justice and Dissent for Postcolonial Urban Sustainability Transitions

Environmental Justice and Dissent for Postcolonial Urban Sustainability Transitions

Anthroposea: Planning future ecologies in Mumbai’s wetscapes

CODA: The Racial Ecologies of Urban Wetlands

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