In the Nature of Cities

Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism

Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, Erik Swyngedouw, Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, Erik Swyngedouw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134206469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geologia e scienze della terra

The social and material production of urban nature has recently emerged as an important area in urban studies, human/environmental interactions and social studies. This has been prompted by the recognition that the material conditions that comprise urban environments are not independent from social, political, and economic processes, or from the cultural construction of what constitutes the 'urban' or the 'natural'. Through both theoretical and empirical analysis, this groundbreaking collection offers an integrated and relational approach to untangling the interconnected processes involved in forming urban landscapes.

The essays in this book attest that the re-entry of the ecological agenda into urban theory is vital both in terms of understanding contemporary urbanization processes, and of engaging in a meaningful environmental politics. They debate the central themes of whose nature is, or becomes, urbanized, and the uneven power relations through which this socio-metabolic transformation takes place.

Including urban case studies, international research and contributions from prominent urban scholars, this volume will enable students, scholars and researchers of geographical, environmental and urban studies to better understand how interrelated, everyday economic, political and cultural processes form and transform urban environments.

1 Urban political ecology
Politicizing the production of urban natures

Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw

It is in practice, hard to see where “society” begins and “nature” ends …

[I]n a fundamental sense, there is in the final analysis nothing unnatural about New York City.

(Harvey 1993: 31, 28)

Urbanization as a process has constituted the city and the countryside, society and nature, a “unity of opposites” constructed from the integrated, lived world of human social experience. At the same time, the “urbanization of consciousness” constitutes Nature as well as Space.

(FitzSimmons 1989: 108)

The “city” as a form of life is a specific, historically developed model of the regulation of the societal relationship with nature … [U]rban struggles are predominantly socio-ecological struggles, since they are always about the social and material regulation and socio-cultural symbolization of societal relationships with nature.

(Jahn 1991: 54 – translation Keil 1995)

INTRODUCTION

In the summer of 1998, the Southeast Asian financial bubble imploded. Global capital moved spasmodically from place to place, leaving cities like Jakarta with a social and physical wasteland where dozens of unfinished skyscrapers were dotted over the landscape while thousands of unemployed children, women, and men were roaming the streets in search of survival. In the meantime, El Niño’s global dynamic was wrecking havoc in the region with its climatic disturbances. Puddles of stagnant water in the defunct concrete buildings that had once promised continuing capital accumulation for Indonesia became great ecological niches for a rapid explosion of mosquitoes. Malaria and Dengue Fever suddenly joined unemployment and social and political mayhem in shaping Jakarta’s cityscape. Global capital fused with global climate, with local power struggles, and with socio-ecological conditions to re-shape Jakarta’s urban socio-ecological conditions in profound, radical, and deeply troubling ways.

This example is just one among many to suggest how cities are dense networks of interwoven socio-spatial processes that are simultaneously local and global, human and physical, cultural and organic. The myriad transformations and metabolisms that support and maintain urban life, such as, for example, water, food, computers or hamburgers always combine infinitely connected physical and social processes (Latour 1993; Latour and Hermant 1998; Swyngedouw 1999).

The world is rapidly approaching a situation in which most people live in cities, often mega-cities. It is surprising, therefore, that in the burgeoning literature on environmental sustainability and environmental politics, the urban environment is often neglected or forgotten as attention is focused on “global” problems like climate change, deforestation, desertification, and the like. Similarly, much of the urban studies literature is symptomatically silent about the physical-environmental foundations on which the urbanization process rests. Even in the emerging literature on political ecology (see for example Walker 2005), little attention has been paid so far to the urban as a process of socio-ecological change, while discussions about global environmental problems and the possibilities for a “sustainable” future customarily ignore the urban origin of many of these problems. Similarly, the growing literature on the technical aspects of urban environments, geared primarily to planners and environmental policy makers, fails to acknowledge the intimate relationship between the antinomies of capitalist urbanization processes and socio-environmental injustices (Whitehead 2003). This book seeks to address this gap and to chart the contours of a critical academic and political project that foregrounds the urban condition as fundamentally a socio-environmental process.

We were faced with two major challenges while moving this intellectual project forward. First, there is a need to revisit the overtly “sociological” nature of much of twentieth-century urban theory. If we take David Harvey’s dictum that “there is nothing unnatural about New York City” seriously, this impels interrogating the failure of twentieth-century urban social theory to take account of physical or ecological processes. While late-nineteenth-century urban perspectives were acutely sensitive to the ecological imperatives of urbanization, these considerations disappeared almost completely in the decades that followed (with the exception of a thoroughly “de-natured” Chicago school of urban social ecology). Re-naturing urban theory is, therefore, vital to urban analysis as well as to urban political activism. Second, most of environmental theory has unjustifiably largely ignored the urbanization process as both one of the driving forces behind many environmental issues and as the place where socio-environmental problems are experienced most acutely. The excavation of these processes also constitutes one of the central concerns of an evolving urban political ecology.

The central message that emerges from urban political ecology is a decidedly political one. To the extent that cities are produced through socio-ecological processes, attention has to be paid to the political processes through which particular socio-environmental urban conditions are made and remade. From a progressive or emancipatory position, then, urban political ecology asks questions about who produces what kind of socio-ecological configurations for whom. In other words, urban political ecology is about formulating political projects that are radically democratic in terms of the organization of the processes through which the environments that we (humans and non-humans) inhabit become produced.

As global/local forms of capitalism have become more entrenched in social life, there are still powerful tendencies to externalize nature. Yet, the intricate and ultimately vulnerable dependence of capital accumulation on nature deepens and widens continuously. It is on the terrain of the urban that this accelerating metabolic transformation of nature becomes most visible, both in its physical form and its socio-ecological consequences.

In this introductory chapter, we chart the contours of such an ambitious urban political ecological (UPE) perspective. Obviously, our perspective is filtered through our own critical theoretical lens and political sensitivities. In the first part, we explore how urbanization is very much a process of socio-metabolic transformations and insist that the re-entry of the ecological in urban theory is vital both in terms of understanding the urban and of engaging in a meaningful environmental politics. The second part suggests how critical theory, and in particular political economy, can and should be reformulated in a way that permits taking the environment politically seriously. The third part explores the implications of urban political ecology and frames the contributions that form the core of this collection. We consider the deeply uneven power relations through which contemporary “cyborg” cities become produced. Evidently, these uneven and often outright oppressive socio-ecological processes do not go uncontested. All manner of socio-ecological activism and movements have arisen that both contest the dominant forms of urbanizing nature and chart the contours for both transforming and democratizing the production of urban natures. In the final part of this introductory chapter, the structure of the book and the main lines of the contributions are briefly outlined.

THE CITY AS SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL PROCESS

Within the last couple of decades, theorization about human/environment relations has made substantial progress. In particular, a perspective that attempts to transcend the dualist nature/culture logic and the moral codes inscribed therein has replaced this crude binary ruling of city versus the environment. Critical to this progress has been the realization that the split between humanity and environment that first became prominent during the seventeenth century (Gold 1984) has long impeded understanding of environmental issues. Along these lines Swyngedouw (1999: 445) suggests that “[c]ontemporary scholars increasingly recognize that natural or ecological conditions and processes do not operate separately from social processes, and that the actually existing socionatural conditions are always the result of intricate transformations of pre-existing configurations that are themselves inherently natural and social”. This had of course already been recognized by Marx more than 150 years ago, and only recently regained the attention it deserves, from Marxists and non-Marxists alike (Pulido 1996; Whatmore 2002; see Swyngedouw, this volume). While the notion that all kinds of environments are socially produced is not new, the idea still holds much promise for exploration, discussion and illustration. In his landmark book, Smith (1984: xiv) suggests:

What jars us so much about this idea of the production of nature is that it defies the conventional, sacrosanct separation of nature and society, and it does so with such abandon and without shame. We are used to conceiving of nature as external to society, pristine and pre-human, or else a grand universal in which human beings are but small and simple cogs. But … our concepts have not caught up with our reality. It is capitalism which ardently defies the inherited separation of nature and society, and with pride rather than shame.

Despite often being neglected by urban studies, “environmental” issues have always been central to urban change and urban politics. Throughout the nineteenth century, visionaries of all sorts lamented the “unsustainable” character of early modern cities and proposed solutions and plans that would remedy the socio-environmental dystopias that characterized much of urban life. Friedrich Engels (1987 [1845]) had already noted in the mid-nineteenth century how the depressing sanitary and ecological conditions of England’s great cities are related to the class character of industrial urbanization. Much later, Raymond Williams pointed out in The Country and the City (Williams 1985 [1973]) that the transformation of nature and the social relations inscribed therein are inextricably connected to the process of urbanization. Indeed, the urbanization process is predicated upon a particular set of socio-spatial relations that produce “an ecological transformation, which requires the reproduction of those relations in order to sustain it” (Harvey 1996: 94). The production of the city through socio-environmental changes results in the continuous production of new urban “natures”, of new urban social and physical environmental conditions (Cronon 1991). All of these processes occur in the realms of power in which social actors strive to defend and create their own environments in a context of class, ethnic, racialized and/or gender conflicts and power struggles (Davis 1996).

The relationship between cities and nature has long been a point of contention for both environmentally minded social theorists and socially minded environmental theorists. Urbanization has long been discussed as a process whereby one kind of environment, namely the “natural” environment, is traded in for, or rather taken over by, a much more crude and unsavoury “built” environment. Bookchin (1979: 26) makes this point by suggesting that “[t]he modern city represents a regressive encroachment of the synthetic on the natural, of the inorganic (concrete, metals, and glass) on the organic, or crude, elemental stimuli on variegated wide-ranging ones”. The city is here posited as the antithesis of nature, the organic is pitted against the artificial, and, in the process, a normative ideal is inscribed in the moral order of nature.

Although many view the notion of urban environmental landscapes as an oxymoron, Jacobs (1992 [1961]: 443) long ago already suggested that urban environments “are as natural as colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters”. David Harvey substantiates his claim that there is nothing intrinsically unnaturalabout New York City by suggesting that human activity cannot be viewed as external to ecosystem function (Harvey 1996: 186). “It is inconsistent”, Harvey (1996: 187) continues, “to hold that everything in the world relates to everything else, as ecologists tend to, and then decide that the built environment and the urban structures that go into it are somehow outside of both theoretical and practical consideration. The effect has been to evade integrating understandings of the urbanizing process into environmental-ecological analysis.” The conclusion then that there is nothing unnatural about produced environments like cities, dammed rivers, or irrigated fields comes out of the realization that produced environments are specific historical results of socio-environmental processes. This scenario can be summed up by simply stating that cities are built out of natural resources, through socially mediated natural processes.

Lefebvre’s take on the notion of “second nature” provides an often-neglected platform from which to discuss the social production of urban environments. Regarding the social production of urban environments, Lefebvre (1976: 15) suggests:

Nature, destroyed as such, has already had to be reconstructed at another level, the level of “second nature” i.e. the town and the urban. The town, anti-nature or non-nature and yet second nature, heralds the future world, the world of the generalized urban. Nature, as the sum of particularities which are external to each other and dispersed in space, dies. It gives way to produced space, to the urban. The urban, defined as assemblies and encounters, is therefore the simultaneity (or centrality) of all that exists socially.

While perhaps relinquishing some of the inherent “natural” qualities of cities, e.g. water, vegetation, air etc., Lefebvre’s explanation of second nature defines urban environments as necessarily socially produced and thus paves the way to understand the complex mix of political, economic and social processes that shape and reshape urban landscapes. In addition, for Lef...