Reading History and Power in Urban Landscapes: The Lens of Urban Political Ecology

Abstract

This essay sketches some of these features and their implications, employing five intersecting rubrics—hybrids, boundaries, histories, values, and peripheries. Together, these frames build an account of how the urban engine (or metabolism, in the language of urban political ecology), with its distinctive pace and drivers, assembles dynamic entities that defy easy categorization and carry powerful political stakes. The essay draws on a selection of empirical work across Indian cities (including my own writings on Chennai) and on the theoretical contributions of urban political ecology, to argue for a more complex understanding of urban nature as constituted through historical projects of urbanization, and of environmental sustainability as inseparable from questions of social justice.