Urban political ecology III

Abstract

Given the ongoing importance of nature in the city, better grappling with the gendering and queering of urban political ecology offers important insights that collectively provides important political possibilities. The cross-currents of feminist political ecology, queer ecology, queer urbanism and more general contributions to feminist urban geography create critical opportunities to expand UPE’s horizons toward more egalitarian and praxis-centered prospects. These intellectual threads in conversation with the broader Marxist roots of UPE, and other second-generation variants, including what I have previously called abolition ecology, combine to at once show the ongoing promises of heterodox UPE and at the same time contribute more broadly beyond the realm of UPE.

Beyond wishful thinking: a FPE perspective on commoning, care, and the promise of co-housing

“…FPE is an interdisciplinary and multi-focal lens that applies key insights from feminist geographical, ecofeminist, and gender, environment and development scholarship (among others) to critically analyze the human-environment nexus. Although there is no universal definition, what all feminist political ecologists share is an interest in how gendered power relations combine with other axes of inequality, such as race, class and caste, to shape the material and ideological contours of environmental politics (Rocheleau et al 1996;Elmhirst 2011;Heynen 2018). We begin by explaining how the FPE perspective that we bring to our research intersects with how commoning is presented in the equally broad field of commons studies.…”

Towards conceptions of green gentrification as more-than-human

“…Recent scholarship, however, has exposed an increasing number of ways that green gentrification occurs discursively and materially through racial capitalism and intersections of social difference to more explicitly illustrate how “human difference is essential to the production of differential value” (Pulido, 2017: 527). Combined with UPE, recent analyses emphasizing social difference include antiracist and postcolonial approaches like “abolition ecology” (Heynen, 2016: 839) and those that feminize and queer UPE (Heynen, 2018). This includes the practices, discourses, and aesthetic representations that reveal the makings of “gender” or “race” in space (Brahinsky et al., 2014; Haraway, 2000).…”

“…This article has two main parts. First, I briefly review existing green gentrification literature, including scholarship emphasizing first wave Marxist urban political ecology (UPE) approaches that aggregate green amenities as tools of capital accumulation (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003) and second wave UPE approaches that expose a variety of racialized discourses that illustrate how different green amenities impact people differently according to intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality (Heynen, 2016(Heynen, , 2018. Here, I use key findings from the literature, including studies on resistance efforts like "just green enough," to argue how a more-than-human approach can offer new ways of understanding and analyzing injustice and resistance.…”

TikTok’s Falco tinnunculus: Getting to Know Urban Wildlife through Social Media

“…Urban space, albeit created by humans, has increasingly evolved into a complicated “more-than-human” space where human and non-human lives (wildlife) are intertwined in meaningful ways [ 1 ]. As urbanization and modernization progress, to offset the inherent conflicts created by the struggle between economic development, finite resources, and environmental conservation, green spaces in the form of community greenbelts, urban parks, and gardens have been created [ 2 , 3 , 4 ]. As the natural environment gets restored, some wildlife species are drawn to cities for permanent residency rather than as temporary stopovers or food scavenging places [ 5 ].…”