About Me

Presidential Fellow in Urban Studies, University of Manchester.

Nate Millington is an urban geographer, writer, and qualitative researcher, interested in the politics of urban environments, public space, and landscape design. He is currently a Presidential Fellow in Urban Studies in the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, where he is conducing research into the political ecologies of climate change adaptation in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. His work has appeared in The International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchEnvironment and Planning A, Political Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Edge Effects, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. He holds a PhD from the University of Kentucky (2016) and a MS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2010). In 2014 and 2015, Nate was a Fulbright scholar and visiting researcher at the University of São Paulo, where he conducted research into water governance and flood prevention in the urban periphery. His dissertation considers the dynamics of a multifaceted water crisis in São Paulo, where water scarcity coexists with water excess in the form of regularized flooding.

From 2017-208, Nate was a post-doctoral researcher with the ESRC-funded project, “Turning livelihoods to rubbish? Assessing the impacts of formalization and technologization of waste management on the urban poor” at the University of Cape Town's African Centre for Cities. This project, a collaboration between researchers at four universities in Europe, the United States, and Africa, focused on changes to waste governance in southern Africa and the implications for the livelihood strategies of informal workers. This project is part of efforts to develop urban theory from cities in the global south, and considers the relationship between national-level sustainability policy and the implications of those changes for workers in the informal sector.

Repairing, Repurposing, Retreating: The Materialities of Climate Response
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Repairing, Repurposing, Retreating: The Materialities of Climate Response

How do we face the challenge of existing, obdurate built environments and infrastructures (and imaginaries and imperatives built upon and around them) in responding to the threat/s of climate change? Are such materialities as obdurate as is often imagined, and if so, to what degree? With what stakes, and with and for whom, do we engage this obduracy?

Invitation to Apply: Heterogeneous Infrastructures in African Cities
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Invitation to Apply: Heterogeneous Infrastructures in African Cities

As part of broader efforts to develop regional learning across the continent, the Situated Urban Political Ecology collective and Urban Action Lab at Makerere University will be hosting a workshop on urban infrastructures in Africa from November 12-15, 2018 in Kampala, Uganda. Scholars and practitioners are increasingly grappling with alternative modes of infrastructural provision. This […]

Reflections on Situating Urban Political Ecology at the African Centre for Cities’s International Urban Conference
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Reflections on Situating Urban Political Ecology at the African Centre for Cities’s International Urban Conference

As part of the African Centre for Cities‘ International Urban Conference, Kathleen Stokes and Nate Millington organized a series of sessions dedicated to thinking about the relationships between labor, infrastructure, and politics in cities of the global south. We received numerous papers from scholars working in cities all over the world, from Accra to Delhi. […]

Provincializing Urban Appropriation
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Provincializing Urban Appropriation

In a new article, SUPE members Joseph Pierce, Mary Lawhon, and Anesu Makina reflect on theorizations of urban appropriation in South African urban contexts. Engaging with Lefebvrian theorizations of the ‘Right to the City‘ as well as Bayat’s idea of ‘quiet encroachment,’ the authors argue that actors in South Africa operate using a different model of […]

CFP AAG 2018: Urban infrastructural transitions and a progressive reworking of the contemporary city
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CFP AAG 2018: Urban infrastructural transitions and a progressive reworking of the contemporary city

Urban infrastructural transitions and a progressive reworking of the contemporary city Organizers: Valentin Meilinger (Utrecht University), Joe Williams (Durham University) Urban infrastructures are inextricably linked to social and material orders of contemporary cities and their urban geographies. They shape (and are shaped by) urban resource flows, modes of governing, lifestyles, but also urban injustices; and […]

CFP AAG 2018: Urban Political Ecology: Bodies, Social Reproduction and Everyday Life
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CFP AAG 2018: Urban Political Ecology: Bodies, Social Reproduction and Everyday Life

Call for Papers: AAG, New Orleans, 10-14 April 2018 *Urban Political Ecology: Bodies, Social Reproduction and Everyday Life* Session organisers: Archie Davies (King’s College London) and James Angel (King’s College London) Please email abstracts (no more than 250 words) to james.angel@kcl.ac.uk by Wednesday 18th October Urban political ecology provides a valuable lens through which to interrogate the […]

CFP AAG 2018:  The Political Ecology of Urban Flood Risk and Management
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CFP AAG 2018: The Political Ecology of Urban Flood Risk and Management

CALL FOR PAPERS American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting New Orleans, Louisiana, April 10-14, 2018   The Political Ecology of Urban Flood Risk and Management: Dialogues across the North-South Divide Organizers: Emma Colven (UCLA), Nate Millington (University of Cape Town), & Malini Ranganathan (American University) Discussants: Malini Ranganathan, Yaffa Truelove (University of Colorado), and Nate […]

CFP: Working infrastructures in cities of the Global South
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CFP: Working infrastructures in cities of the Global South

Call for Papers: African Centre for Cities International Urban Conference, 1-2 February 2018 Session: Working infrastructures in cities of the Global South Organisers: Kathleen Stokes (University of Manchester) and Nate Millington (University of Cape Town) Infrastructures contribute to the collective flows and metabolisms that produce urban space. From sanitation to transport, electricity to water, these […]

Deconstructing the High Line
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Deconstructing the High Line

SUPE contributor Nate Millington has a chapter in the recently released volume, Deconstructing the High Line: Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park. The book considers the High Line from multiple perspectives, critically assessing its aesthetic, economic, ecological, symbolic, and social impacts. Millington’s chapter focuses on São Paulo’s Minhocão, an elevated highway that functions […]

The aesthetic politics of graffiti removal in Contemporary São Paulo
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The aesthetic politics of graffiti removal in Contemporary São Paulo

The aesthetic politics of graffiti removal in Contemporary São Paulo In this commentary, postdoctoral researcher Nate Millington comments on the aesthetic politics of Graffiti removal in São Paulo. In his first few weeks in office, the newly elected mayor of São Paulo—Jõao Doria, a businessman and reality tv star whose election was primarily a rebuke […]