Contributors

Most of my students have no idea what the difference between capitalism and socialism is. Let me say that differently: most of my students have emotional responses to those words. Some have strong instincts about which is good and which is ugly. But in terms of an ability to define and give distinguishing examples, maybe a few here and there walk in with this ability. (And given the conflation of terms in U.S. American public discourse, it seems hard to blame them). Some have taken introduction economics courses. If I were in charge of general education requirements, I’d make sure that student learn not (only) about mathematical principles, but about the logics of different economics systems. Until that point (!), I accept it means I have to do this work before I can teach about environment and society. One year, when still teaching from a textbook, I put capitalism up front. We spent a week dedicated to Marxian environmental critiques. I quickly found that does not work for my politically diverse classroom. Instead, I now break the ideas down, avoiding the most evocative terms until the building blocks are in place. We slowly talk about markets, explaining what markets do […]

What does it mean to teach a situated class? The easiest answer to this is to include ‘local’ examples. But for me, being deeply situated in my teaching has also meant starting from and responding to what the students know and helping them make sense of their own world. (In contrast to the typical academic textbook which is structured to present an academic field to students; it’s also in contrast to teaching what students ask for, for they often don’t know what they don’t know.) After teaching from the well-used Robbins, Hintz and Moore volume, and asking my students at the University of Oklahoma to write weekly response papers, I realized that the course I was teaching simply wasn’t setting the students up to do much with the content. I tried tweaking and supplementing, but eventually resolved to write my own quasi-textbook and work through a series of real-world explanations for environmental problems. The open, online format (ok, it’s not yet open; I want to test-run it first) is also hoped to better enable place-situated approaches by making it easy to swap out examples and case studies. I now have 10 weeks of text that presents different explanations for the […]

Building discussion around infrastructural labour and livelihoods By: Alejandro De Coss and Kathleen Stokes ** Many thanks to participants in our session. While we have endeavoured to capture key points, we also appreciate this summary should not be taken to not reflect everyone’s views. ** On April 18th, 2018, scholars from around the UK met for the symposium “Infrastructures for Troubled Times”. Hosted by the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics & Responsible Futures at the University of Brighton, the event sought to challenge and question the apparent neutrality of infrastructures, understanding them as “increasingly complex, multi-scalar and interconnected, affecting and effected by climate change, patterns of global economic debt, financial management and resource extraction/use.” As part of this symposium, we organised a session on “infrastructural labour and livelihoods” which stemmed from the perspective that human work and labour is necessary to the development, repair, and maintenance of infrastructures. Despite this, we find that labour is rarely explored in depth in contemporary debates around infrastructure’s role in shaping social and material worlds. Our session wanted to question the role of human labour in developing and maintaining infrastructures, and understand how such contributions are perceived and valued – particularly as […]

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. Below, we highlight the presentations that were given in order to highlight the work being done by researchers interested in situating urban political ecological research through sustained engagements with cities of the global south. Old engines, pipes, pumps, and cables at a SACMEX workshop. Photograph by Alejandro De Coss. In his presentation, Maintaining Mexico City’s Lerma water supply system: an ethnography of labour and infrastructure, Alejandro De Coss (Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science), looked at the ways in which the Mexico City water system is maintained and repaired. In particular, he focused on the Lerma System, an inter-basin transfer built between 1942 and 1951, which still supplies the city with approximately 14% of its daily water use. During the course of one year, Alejandro worked alongside the repair and maintenance teams of the Mexico City Water System in two different sites. One was the Lerma […]

In this commentary Kampala based photographer and film-maker Joel Ongwech reflects on his participation in a recent exhibition at The Square Gallery in the city Most of my work has started with research and then developed into film or photography through a situated approach that allows me to really get to know my subjects and the contexts in which they live in this city. For this particular project, it all started through my involvement as a researcher on a project led by Will Monteith at the School of International Development at University of East Anglia and Shuaib Lwasa at the Urban Action Lab at Makerere University in Uganda. As a researcher, collecting data in the form of multiple interviews across the cities helped develop my perspective on refugee life in the city.  I then looked into these collected stories from an artistic perspective. So when the opportunity for participating in the OPEN DOORS exhibition came along I did not hesitate to apply since I had already a good understanding about the refugee situation in the urban city of Kampala and was keen to develop an artistic response. My photographic investigation focused on Elvis, a 27 year old Congolese refugee who moved to Kampala from […]

‘Maybe, it’s okay for the big people [rich/elite] to live by the sea. But, for us [kampung residents], our rights have run out.’ –Interview with Kampung resident, 11 July 2017, Kampung Kerang Ijo. For traditional fishing kampung (urban villages) along North Jakarta’s coast, there have always been livelihood uncertainties. Residents daily manage how many fish they will catch or how much they will sell for. They monitor the sea for the ebb and flow of tides, knowing that coastal floods are both common and sudden. Yet, kampung residents face new uncertainties about how much longer their way of life may be viable, as they are squeezed out and overshadowed by mega-projects. Kampung cluster between large developments, open spaces, rivers, and formalised housing throughout Jakarta. They are usually high density, and are hubs of informal economic activity. In addition to encroachment from the increasing spread of high rise developments, residents in the north of the city are also subject to urban transformations that are intended to mitigate flood risks. One of these projects is the Great Garuda Seawall Project (GGSW; see this recent post), a partnership between Dutch firms and Indonesian ministries to construct a giant seawall that will close Jakarta […]

The last couple of decades have witnessed a series of regional events that have threatened to shift the tides of global politics. For instance, it was not long ago that the notion of ‘Africa rising’ became such a hot story amidst optimistic accounts of a growing middle class, inclusive technologies, sprawling cities, and budding economies. It was also not that long ago that China’s growing clout in Africa and its connections with Europe began to attract extensive attention. This attention has become even more amplified at the global stage with China’s increased economic and strategic positioning through vast infrastructure development projects such as the ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative. However, it is the apparent shift toward “‘de-globalization’ and the return of the nation-state” in the West as witnessed by the events leading up to – and beyond – ‘Brexit’ and ‘Trump’ that has received the most critical attention. Critics have cited a broader shift in global flows and loops, and a purported shift toward decentring and multicentring alongside an increased redistribution of power and influence. They argue that this could potentially lead to a more fragmented reality synonymous with increased multi-polarity in which global institutions and establishments hold lesser legitimacy […]

Our academic culture continues to reward intellectuals who cite big-name, usually white, male, and European theories and theorists. French theorists, in particular, are given special attention. While sympathetic to the compulsion to harness the ideas of great men, one can no longer claim that this is the only way to succeed in the academic publishing world. Though the alternative might garner less attention, Southern theorists (such as Jean and John Comaroff or Raewynn Connell) have opened the way for an alternative way of doing academically accepted, publishable research. It is this framing that I kept returning to as I read Julian Brown’s South Africa’s Insurgent Citizens: On Dissent and the Possibility of Politics. It is at one level unfair to focus on this text when making an argument about over-use of French political theory, but let me focus on it as a specific instance of what I suggest is a wider concern (and note other reviews here and here).  Academic work generally takes two different tacks: using a case to contribute to theory, or using theory to explain a set of empirics. Brown’s book falls into the latter as he attempts to use Rancière, whom he defines as the most influential theorist […]

I couldn’t quite figure it out. The entire project of housing provision in South African cities seemed to be marked by an almost obsessive sense of calculation, of rational town planning. Most notoriously there is the waiting list. After apartheid, the South African government embarked on a mass formal housing delivery program. In order to qualify for a home, residents in need must register at a local office and enter the demand database. Then there is the process of enumeration. Local governments don’t like shacklands to be unintelligible, and so they render them legible by assigning de facto addresses to every structure. In both of these processes, we can see at work what the German sociologist Max Weber famously called formal rationality. Yet exceptions abounded. Enumeration rarely kept pace with in-migration from elsewhere in the city, and small land occupations seemed to become large informal settlements in a matter of weeks. And everyone seemed to be on the waiting list for decades, whereas I’d also encounter people who received a house after a matter of years. Residents who slipped through the cracks of formal rationality began to challenge the state, ultimately in the courtroom, pointing to the post-apartheid constitutional guarantee […]

I’m walking through Guet Ndar, a neighbourhood in Saint-Louis, Senegal. We can hear the waves of the nearby Atlantic Ocean. During my last visit, a number of years ago, they seemed perhaps more distant, whereas now they seem almost upon us. We turn a corner near a mosque and look out. What were once streets are now the ocean, the elementary school has become a ruin of collapsed concrete and a new line of buildings stand facing the fierce Atlantic. The fishing settlement of Guet Ndar lays across from the historical centre of Saint-Louis. It operates as a crucial space for the fishing trade across the region, with distribution stretching into the Sahel and as far as Mali. With over 30,000 residents housed in this dense, popular neighbourhood, a strip of sand no more than one kilometre long, and nowadays 200 meters wide, a precarious future has become a lived present. The effects of rising sea-levels from climate change are being experienced in Saint-Louis in ways that foretell urban futures for millions of people living in coastal settlements across the continent. Here, the Atlantic Ocean in Guet Ndar is a paradox. It gives life through the incomes of the fishermen […]

Following Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States will withdraw from the Paris Accord, a number of US cities signaled their intention to symbolically join the agreement and demonstrate their commitment to avoiding more than 1.5 C warming. Cities have a unique relationship to global climate change as the historical locus of greenhouse gas emissions due to their central role in the global economy. The relationship between cities and greenhouse gases is a result of both industrial production as well as contemporary post-industrial economies driven by consumption. The relationship is scalar too: many cities are representative of both low carbon infrastructure as well as the displacement of GHG emissions ‘elsewhere.’ Cities are linked through chains of finance, the movement of goods, and the circulation of discourses. All these relationships matter for thinking about climate change through the city. Amidst these overlapping networks, the unifying factor is the sheer densities and connections present in cities: of people, of money, and of the infrastructures that, in part, form the city as a functioning assemblage. We are already locked into a significantly warmer future, and the physical impacts of that warming consistently outpace even the most severe projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on […]

The Ways of Knowing Urban Ecologies (WOK-UE) project started in 2011 and finished in December 2016. Amongst other activities, the project proved instrumental in helping to build the Situated UPE Collective from its early days in 2013. Here PI Henrik Ernstson reflects on this now finished research project to exemplify how projects can act as crucial venues for critical social scientists in building collaborations, projects and constellations beyond the peer-reviewed publication. Looking beyond peer-reviewed publications The Ways of Knowing Urban Ecologies Project has been incredibly productive as can be witnessed by its publication list. This includes one PhD thesis, an upcoming edited volume with MIT Press, and a row of high-calibre theoretical and empirical contributions in top-journals based on extensive empirical work in Cape Town and Stockholm, including New Orleans (the latter mainly through the associated MOVE project). To this, the core WOK-UE team—Jane Battersby, Marnie Graham, Anna Storm, Joshua Lewis, Mary Lawhon, Jessica Rattle, Sue Parnell and Sverker Sörlin—also made regular contributions to wider popular science and media platforms.  The WOK-UE project also created a lot of activities that were not mentioned in the short final report that I submitted to the Swedish funder Formas. In this post I would like to take the opportunity to list some of those activities since it shows how research projects can be viewed as […]