This article focuses on the major in situ slum rehabilitation project of Ramapir no Tekro , the largest slum in Gujarat State. As in situ approaches gain political momentum in India as a more inclusive mechanism for producing the articulated goal of “slum-free cities,” the promises and practices surrounding in situ projects remain under-scrutinized in critical urban scholarship. This case study contributes to feminist theorizations of urban political ecology (UPE) and infrastructure by tracing the everyday and affective experiences of self-employed women working as waste pickers and who reside in the settlement over a span of 8 years and across the project's many promises and extended pauses. This case enables an analysis of how a major reconfiguration of urban space and infrastructure intersect with gender, caste, and class identities to reproduce marginalization for residents across the interim periods of the project. I argue that the discursively “pro-poor” approach of in situ slum redevelopment policy must still be read as a significant economic and social shock for residents as they navigate material challenges and affective uncertainties that map across the in-between phases and temporary displacements necessitated by in situ slum redevelopment. By taking care seriously, this case highlights how residents articulate their own urban environmental desires and envision their infrastructural futures. However, in doing so, it also suggests that this case of in situ rehabilitation in a long-established schedule caste Hindu settlement must be read alongside the ongoing and socially differentiated regimes of punitive housing evictions and demolitions among Muslim and Tribal migrant settlements across urban India.
Urban scholars are increasingly calling for greater attention to care, as both a practice and ethic, in response to socio-environmental issues. In the urban transportation literature, care has helped to underscore uneven mobility patterns and the need for inclusive planning frameworks. Likewise, urban political ecology perspectives have foregrounded care by examining the everyday practices, ethical relations and uneven labour through which urban environments are sustained, contested or made livable. While discussions on gender and care inequities are gaining prominence in these fields, this literature has tended to neglect people with disabilities and the role of their leadership and care relations in the movement for sustainable urban transitions. This provocation paper brings the literature on care-full transitions into conversation with critical disability theory and activism. We do so through a specific focus on two large-scale transformations reshaping public transportation in the United States: the retrofitting of legacy subway systems and the roll-out of micro-transit services. In light of ongoing issues of universal inaccessibility and disability exclusion, we underscore the importance of working to address disabling environments and adopting an ethic of care that honours the leadership of disability communities in the transition to sustainable urban ecologies.
In this article I trace evolving conceptions of the human subject through successive waves of urban political ecology literature. My argument proceeds via a series of loosely chronological archetypes: the collective subject; the embodied subject; the multiple subject; the porous subject; the creative subject; the occluded subject; and the neo-human subject. I suggest that there is significant potential for reworking existing conceptions of agency and subjectivity within the field. I conclude that a more conceptually refined vantage point for urban political ecology offers a distinctive alternative to the more diffuse or flattened ontologies associated with new materialism.
In this article, we aim to highlight the importance of practices of commoning as a way to rethink politics, particularly in the context of the Capitalocene. Specifically, we argue for greater attention to the spatial dimension of commons by emphasising the collective practices of commoning. We suggest that commoning can offer a promising way to approach the existential crises we face through a process of reterritorialisation. This approach highlights the importance of space for cultivating collective values, ways of seeing, being, and acting in solidarity and care, challenging the capitalocentric logic that spatially dominates our times.
Urban commons have been innovating European municipal politics for more than a decade through the establishment of new institutions. Naples is a laboratory where artists, activists, and residents engage in commoning practices proposing alternative forms of self-governing the commons and the city. Providing a narrative from l’Asilo—a cultural commons based in the city center—this work highlights the emergence of a logic of commons institutionalization that challenges the usual binary division between human communities and non-human resources found in the literature on the theme. The paper addresses Ostrom's theory of commons through the lens of Barad's New Materialist thought, proposing a diffractive reading methodology and a case study analysis. Barad's Agential Realism inspires a new ecological deal in commons institutions theory, whereas governance is no more grounded on binary relationships between human subjects and non-human objects. If relationality pre-exists separation and the formation of borders among entities, commons institutions deserve to be imagined and narrated following a non-linear axis of causality and temporality. The case study focuses on three particular aspects of a-binary commons institutionalization: the arising of the practice; its condition of permanence and duration; and the entanglement between collective institutional norms and the commoners. This initial experimentation, this work argues, can guide the study and the narratives of commons institutions toward an ecological reconsideration of agency: from a human community in a binary relation with a resource aimed to its mere efficient productive management, to a non-finite and indeterminate creation of space–time.
Large-scale industrial investments are currently initiated in Northern Sweden, targeting regions previously considered metropolitan peripheries. A turning point in Sweden's spatial policy and planning practice, which, since the 1970s, has been predominantly oriented towards city-centric policy and focused on a service- and knowledge-based economy. The paper re-operationalizes the concept of ‘Ecologies’, used by Rayner Banham in the 70s to articulate the productive capacity of specific material and discursive configurations and to analyse conflicts and potentials in the ongoing process of re-industrialization. The national planning initiative Visions: In the North is used as a paradigmatic case where the Swedish state elaborates on new design-based approaches for multi-level collaboration and support to the municipalities where new large investments are currently taking place. The process includes to move from ‘the middle’ and to articulate the dynamics between specific material and discursive ecologies. By decomposing the planning processes as a multi-scalar and multi-temporal system and re-composing new ecologies, the process seeks a holistic approach of articulating the very specific components and the very specific configurations. The ecologies have been useful to guide the design process and initiate a both critical and constructive discussion about city-centric spatial transformation. The result from Visions: In the North is a call for a new institutional mega system, a discursive ecology and approach to national, regional and municipal planning that emphasizes conditions for inclusion of alternative urbanization and articulates ruptures for institutional change of the Swedish planning system.
In societies where both labour power and care have been commodified and care further systemically devalued, ‘care’ has emerged as a critical concept for social transformation. However, care transformation cannot be separated from labour transformation. This paper redefines care as the affective-ethical dimension inherent in labour (metabolic activity) and theorises labour-care transformation as a political-ecological process of world-making from an urban political ecology perspective. The study examines Chinbotsukazoku (Sinking Family), a childcare experiment in 1990’s Tokyo emerging when the Japanese welfare model began to collapse. Forged through encounters with Japan's disability movements, participants rejected the dominant care infrastructure—wage labour, the nuclear family, and state welfare—and actively invited strangers into care spaces, constituting what this paper calls ‘the urban care infrastructure’—relational and affective patterns through which strangers meet, correspond, and build shared forms of life, becoming a commons with others . Drawing on 11 volumes of childcare diaries and rich socio-historical contextualisation, this study reveals how the alternative infrastructure was created through ‘unproductive work’ and ‘relaxed care’. Theoretically, the paper extends UPE's metabolic analysis to subjectivity production. Empirically, it demonstrates how alternative infrastructure is constituted through open metabolism. Politically, it decentres care and UPE scholarship by showing how diverse alternatives emerge within specific socio-historical contexts, embodying the legacy of autonomous movements. Ultimately, the paper reveals that care transformation requires cultivating bodily capacities to entangle with others through working together, building forms of interdependence that spread through countless variations rather than universal forms.
In India's urban coasts, fisher communities experience climate change through sea attacks—powerful wave events that disrupt livelihoods and destroy homes. This paper examines how Kochi's urban fishers articulate environmental change through experiential knowledge, contrasting this with their systematic absence from the scientific literature on coastal hazards. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with women from fisher communities (2020-2024) and a systematic review of scientific papers on Indian coastal hazards, this research engages science and technology studies and the epistemic communities framework to reveal a structural disconnect between lived experience and scientific discourse. Coastal and climate scientists share disciplinary commitments to instrumental observation, model-based prediction, and credentialed expertise that structurally exclude community knowledge. Analysis identifies five mechanisms through which this exclusion operates: complete erasure of pre-1990 events from datasets; epistemological stripping that documents community action but erases its expertise; selective visibility that records physical phenomena but ignores community forecasting practices; parallel epistemologies that describe the same events through divergent frameworks; and gendered invisibility that doubly marginalizes women's environmental expertise. Sea attacks embody a complex understanding of compound environmental events that scientific frameworks disaggregate. Community narratives reveal detailed ecological knowledge—experiential and observational, transmitted through relational idioms but separable from them—that guides practical responses. These exclusion mechanisms do not merely produce epistemic injustice; they produce science that governance relies upon, but that cannot anticipate the hazards communities already navigate. Bridging community and scientific knowledge is a precondition for effective and just climate adaptation at the urban-ocean interface.
The global food regime crucially revolves around the circulation and metabolism of proteins, notably soy. In the context of ecological crisis, faltering supply chains and rising populism, European countries are developing a National Protein Strategy (NPS) for addressing their crucial dependency on the import of vegetal proteins. This paper aims to understand how the metabolic politics of protein is (re)shaped in the context of geopolitical turmoil, environmental and climate crises. It focuses on the case of the NPS of the Netherlands, a major hub for the global livestock complex, grappling with ecological crises and the rise of right-wing populism in the context of agricultural transformations. Through a genealogical policy analysis, extending the concept of metabolic politics, this paper reveals how the governance of protein circulation at various scales has shifted to more comprehensive protein strategies, integrating different policy domains, but is increasingly challenged by the rise of right-wing agrarian populism, aligned with the interests of livestock industries.
Transformative sustainability education can empower us to change the dominant human story – a story that features societies working against nature – to one where all humans and the natural world coexist in a deep relationship. In this conceptual paper, we argue that key sustainability competencies , the cherished ‘learning outcomes’ of sustainability education (which focus on knowledge and skills development), disregard important moral qualities (such as values and commitments) that drive sustainability activism. We put forth a holistic set of learning outcomes that better align with the objectives of transformative sustainability education. We then propose that these outcomes can be encapsulated in and recognized through an ‘ecocentric disposition’, making nurturing such a disposition the ultimate ambition of transformative sustainability education. The term ‘ecocentric’ derives from ecocentrism, an environmental ethic maintaining that the natural world has intrinsic value despite its usefulness to humans. We define ecocentric disposition as a tendency or a pattern of behaviour linked to nurturing the well-being of every being (plants, animals, minerals, etc.) on the planet. An illustrative case study of a teacher education course entitled Education, Schools, and Social Institutions at the University of British Columbia serves to highlight the curriculum and pedagogies that align with both transformative sustainability education and urban political ecology to nurture an ecocentric disposition in students. The significance of this conceptual paper relates to how ecocentric dispositions possess the power to support the infrastructure of care and facilitate the sociocultural transformations we urgently require. It contributes to an actively developing embodied urban political ecology that highlights more-than-human ontologies, advocating for an approach that helps people see cities as ‘second nature’. Ultimately, this paper symbolizes the value of interdisciplinary dialogue in urban political ecology.
Energy transition debates too often conceal the political ecology of the urban heat transition; they do not explain the politics underlying the shift to post- or low-carbon heating systems. As a residue of commonplace activities within urbanized environments, the ecology of heat is, in fact, highly distinctive. To unveil the politics of the urban heat transition, this paper develops and uses the concept of urban heat metabolism: the politically shaped, territorially bounded, and institutionally regulated system of heat stocks, flows, and infrastructures. A close look at the urban heat metabolism exposes the intricate politics—of source, profit, and scale—driving the heat transition. Applying this lens to the Amsterdam Metropolitan Region reveals the potential of new heating technologies to politicize and decentralize heat politics, challenging the dominance of large-scale gas and waste-powered systems, and triggering a public-led response that favors public ownership and stronger regulatory oversight.
This essay draws on the dialectical philosophy of science developed by ecologist Richard Levins and evolutionary geneticist Richard C. Lewontin—perhaps best known outside their fields of specialization for the essays collected in The Dialectical Biologist (1986)—to provide methodological orientation for research on planetary urbanization. Levins and Lewontin's approach to dialectics emphasizes reciprocal co-determination and co-evolution: parts exist only through their relations to wholes; wholes are continually reshaped by the activity of their parts; and every process must be analyzed historically and across scales rather than reduced to a single, privileged unit of analysis or level of explanation. Building upon these methodological principles, we theorize planetary urbanization as an emergent, uneven, multidimensional, and contradictory process through which cities and the non-city environments that sustain them recursively transform one another and co-evolve, generating wide-ranging and often destructive biospheric reverberations. This anti-essentialist conceptualization requires the analytical decomposition and relational investigation of five key terrains of research on planetary urbanization: cities and agglomeration economies; hinterlands and operational landscapes; the human/non-human divide; periodization and geohistorical development; and the category of the planetary itself. This mode of analysis delineates a rigorously dialectical, non-reductionist research program for investigating the environments of planetary urbanization, elucidating how socio-ecological crises are generated through the very processes that produce and sustain urban life. It also opens a horizon through which to imagine, plan, and build alternative societal metabolisms—and the far-reaching political-economic, institutional, infrastructural, and sociospatial transformations they would require.
A crusader for the margins, Roger Keil went as far as calling planet Earth ‘suburban’ in his book Suburban planet: Making the world urban from the outside in. This iconoclastic and heretical take on the ‘urban’ is not just an attempt to be intellectually provocative; it is a call to look at the world from a different angle, from the ‘outside in’, starting from those places that have been dismissed as secondary, peripheral, and parochial. It is also a call to see suburban and extended urbanization as an ongoing planetary process that we cannot ignore. In this article, we examine how the ideas developed through the frameworks of extended urbanization and urban political ecology help develop new insights for understanding global health (antimicrobial resistance) and critical logistics (the port–city interface).
How do critical urban researchers understand the possibility of social change when confronted with a situation that is as numbing as it is enraging? From the planetary climate crisis to the perniciousness of markets and technology to the dismantling of a (never just) global order, just change has rarely looked quite so foreclosed. Underpinning the hopelessness and anxiety of the current age is an apparent crisis of knowledge: how can we know the world in such turbulent times? How can we know how and what to commit to politically? How do we continue to believe in the potential of social movements to realize change? This article looks to the work of Roger Keil to take on a peripheral view—to focus on the edges of the urban, whether as physical territory, political economic process, or socionatural system. Giving in to the unsettlement and finding the possibility, it shows how an approach based on attending to the unsettled allows us to see and work through such disruptive conditions, and offers a renewed attention to the political in these times.
The relationships between ‘filth’, microbial ecologies, and the urban environment are complex and dynamic. In Global North contexts, nineteenth century epidemics caused by pathogenic microorganisms forced major political and infrastructural urban reorganisation. More recent scientific and sociocultural imaginaries of microbial exposure and curated forms of ‘filth’ as positive for human health, i.e., probiotic (govern)mentalities, are finding their way into the conceptualisation and governance of urban environments. This groundwork paves the way for expanded accounts of urban human-microbial relationality and co-evolution, including the consideration of extracorporeal and distributed urban microbiomes and their interactions with both ‘bacteriological’ and ‘probiotic’ renderings of urbanity. Firstly, the technological success of the bacteriological city was underpinned by the generation of a set of highly productive microbial ecologies that protected public health, namely those involved in the treatment of drinking water and wastewater. These early efforts at putting bacteria to work suggest the co-existence of various imaginaries of microbes - as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ - at the turn of the twentieth century. Secondly, these foundations open the door for the excavation of alternative genealogies of human-microbial-urban dynamics, including those from the Global South, the Global East, and the role of interactions in deep time. Finally, the lessons of antimicrobial resistance further complicate contemporary celebrations of ‘good bacteria.’ The analytical framework of probiotic blowback may be useful for charting the material trajectories and possible futures of socio-microbial relationality across space and time.
Roger Keil is widely recognized as a leading scholar of global suburbanism, infectious disease, and (sub-)urbanization. Over the last two decades, his work has generated a substantial body of scholarship and helped build an international research community around these themes. This article traces the intellectual continuities that animate Keil's evolving research and publishing practice. While his wide-ranging contributions have been central to shaping the field of Urban Political Ecology, a single conceptual claim runs through his work since the late 1980s: the idea that globalizing capitalism is best understood through the networked materialities of urbanization, which mediate social relations with nature in the modern world. We follow the development of this claim from his early work on urban politics in Frankfurt, Los Angeles, and Toronto in the 1990s to his more recent engagements with suburbanization and infectious disease. Structured around the themes of politics, regions, and networks, this article foregrounds Keil's critical and enduring project: to bring our understanding of capitalist globalization down to earth to the level of urbanization rather than treating it as a reified force acting from above.
This article outlines the major aspects of Roger Keil's contributions to the study of the relationship between cities and infectious disease to date. We suggest how urban scholars have already and could in the future build on his corpus of work, not just for urban health specifically, but for our grasp of extended urbanization more generally. We do so by recounting Keil's contribution to the urban studies scholarship on various dimensions, including those pertaining to: the networking of urban health, managing urban health within the context of extended urbanization, and finally theoretically grounding urban health into a finer-grained critical grasp of urban questions in our post-anthropocentric era. In our conclusion, we highlight the urgent and continuing need to embrace Roger Keil's steadfast optimism even when facing deeply troubling urban crises—a lesson all too critical today as global affairs veer toward more turbulent and calamitous times, such as those faced in the current geopolitical situation.
This paper evaluates Roger Keil's influence on the fields of urban and regional governance and suburban studies, underscoring his foundational contributions and identifying pathways for future sub/urban research. We trace Keil's intellectual trajectory from his early work on metropolitan politics and new regionalism in Los Angeles to his later engagement with the evolving landscapes of twenty-first-century global suburbanization. Through this progression, we demonstrate how his scholarship illuminates the intricate co-constitutive relationship between sub/urban governance and extended urbanization. Cutting through rote critique and caricature, we argue that Keil's research, theoretical interventions, and activism on the urban periphery have consistently opened new lines of inquiry while offering generous analytical tools and provocations to probe our possible urban futures. Essential to his approach is a distinctive interdisciplinary sociospatial perspective that critically interrogates the dialectics of suburbanization–suburbanism, decenters the city within critical urban studies, and situates urban knowledge production at the intersection of global urban processes and politics on the street. In an ‘urban age’ that is increasingly characterized by the suburban, Keil's work offers a vital foundation for researchers, scholar-activists, and practitioners seeking to develop deeper insights into post-city urban worlds where diverse, transformative sub/urban politics and polities continue to emerge.
Urban political ecology (UPE) has over the past few decades matured into a thriving and sophisticated critical perspective in speaking to power and allying with a wide range of eco-social resistance movement, there is a shared assumption that substantive critical analysis in its revelatory mode articulates with or nurtures the making of progressive, radical, and effective political movements that aim at making a socially more equitable, politically more inclusive, and ecologically sensible urbanity. Nonetheless, this hypothesis requires careful critical scrutiny as exposing the mechanisms of power does not seem to translate in effective political action in the absence of a clear political desire to transform the present. In this commentary, we explore the new contours of capitalism and the pivotal importance to engage with communist urban political ecologies in order to cut through the deadlock of the present.
