In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism

by Heynen; Nik Prof

• ISBN13: 9780415368285
• ISBN10: 0415368286
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2006-01-20
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The question of whose nature is, or becomes, urbanized, and the uneven power relations through which this socio-metabolic transformation takes place, are the central themes debated in this book. Foregrounding the socio-ecological activism that contests the dominant forms of urbanizing nature, the contributors endeavour to open up a research agenda and a political platform that sets pointers for democratizing the politics through which nature becomes urbanized and contemporary cities are produced as both enabling and disempowering dwelling spaces for humans and non-humans alike. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
Notes on contributors	viii
Foreword	xi
Neil Smith
Urban political ecology: politicizing the production of urban natures	1	(20)
Nik Heynen
Maria Kaika
Erik Swyngedouw
Metabolic urbanization: the making of cyborg cities	21	(20)
Erik Swyngedouw
Metropolitics and metabolics: rolling out environmentalism in Toronto	41	(22)
Roger Keil
Julie-Anne Boudreau
Urban nature and the ecological imaginary	63	(12)
Matthew Gandy
Nature's carnival: the ecology of pleasure at Coney Island	75	(18)
Eliza Darling
The desire to metabolize nature: Edward Loveden Loveden, William Vanderstegen, and the disciplining of the river Thames	93	(17)
Stuart Oliver
Turfgrass subjects: the political economy of urban monoculture	110	(19)
Paul Robbins
Julie Sharp
Justice of eating in the city: the political ecology of urban hunger	129	(14)
Nik Heynen
Metabolisms of obe-city: flows of fat through bodies, cities and sewers	143	(14)
Simon Marvin
Will Medd
The political ecology of water scarcity: the 1989--1991 Athenian drought	157	(16)
Maria Kaika
The metabolic processes of capital accumulation in Durban's waterscape	173	(18)
Alex Loftus
The public/private conundrum of urban water: a view from South Africa	191	(17)
Laila Smith
Greg Ruiters
Inherited fragmentations and narratives of environmental control in entrepreneurial Philadelphia	208	(18)
Alec Brownlow
Transnational alliances and global politics: new geographies of urban environmental justice struggles	226	(19)
David N. Pellow
Urban metabolism as target: contemporary war as forced demodernization	245	(21)
Stephen Graham
Index	266