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Sumit Vij
Sumit Vij

Modern flood infrastructure has failed in its promises. Is it time for a modest approach?

Modern flood infrastructure has failed in its promises. Is it time for a modest approach? Authors Sumit Vij, Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands Timos Karpouzoglou, Royal Institute of Technology KTH, Sweden Mary Lawhon, University of Edinburgh, the UK This commentary works through how urban flood infrastructure operates and evolves in Guwahati, India. The piece marks the limitations of modern infrastructure, making a case for heterogeneity – combining technologies, actors and power relations that shape the unpredictable nature-society relationships. We draw upon the conceptualisations of heterogenous infrastructure configurations and modest imaginary to explain the alternative approach of how the world works and, therefore, what modern infrastructure can(not) do. A modest imaginary is not an antithesis of modernity but a different way of understanding the world rooted in uncertainty and an inability to predict and control nature. Adopting this imaginary has implications of the kinds of technologies one believes might be useful— and here we tease out how regime actors shown their interest in small, cheaper, locally emerged technologies. Suraj (pseudo name) was born and still resides in Guwahati at Tarun Nagar, a low-lying area prone to urban floods. He and his ancestors have witnessed a profound urban change in Guwahati, […]
Henrik Ernstson
Henrik Ernstson

Archives of the Planetary Mine: Meeting and (online) keynotes at Stockholm University (re-blogged)

The Archives of the Planetary Mine at Stockholm University, 14-15 November 2022 gathers over 30 scholars and students at Stockholm University. Three public keynotes, which will also be available online, by Paula Serafini (Queen Mary, University of London), Martín Arboleda (Diego Portales University), and Jeff Diamanti (University of Amsterdam). Read more about the event here. Press the image to be taken to our sister page Situated Ecologies who is organizing this event.
Henrik Ernstson
Henrik Ernstson

Panel Discussion in Stockholm: Mineral Extraction in the Age of Green Transformation (re-blogged)

Press the image to be taken to our sister page Situated Ecologies who is organizing this event. Join us for a panel discussion on how the decarbonization of the economy also intensifies the extraction of minerals in the global South and global North with speakers Martín Arboleda (Diego Portales University), Berta Flaquer (Luleå University of Technology), and Arne Müller, Swedish journalist from northern Sweden. Read more here. The event extends the event Archives of the Planetary Mine at Stockholm University, 14-15 November 2022 that gathers over 30 scholars and students at Stockholm University. Three public keynotes, which will also be available online, by Paula Serafini (Queen Mary, University of London), Martín Arboleda (Diego Portales University), and Jeff Diamanti (University of Amsterdam).
Mwangi Mwaura
Mwangi Mwaura

Designing infrastructure incrementalism through incompleteness

Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi has become a focal point of large-scale and ambitious transport projects set to resolve the mess that is road traffic in the city. Such projects include the construction of the Thika superhighway, several by-passes and the controversial expressway, an elevated toll road connecting the affluent sides of Westlands, a business and residential area, with the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Recently inaugurated, the expressway has been termed a road for the rich. In these developments, evictions and demolitions of houses and sometimes entire villages with no compensation are a norm that continues to highlight that Bulldozers are a de facto planning tool of the city. Of surprise, however, is that the mess seems to never be resolved and what follows are often incremental fixes on the newly constructed infrastructures. This has been the case for the Thika Superhighway, where some modifications made in its short life of 10 years include the removal of speed bumps and a plan to have a BRT system. The BRT case is particularly telling for its incrementalism. In 2019, for example, the innermost lanes were marked as preferential lanes for the expected BRT buses, and in 2021 there […]
Wangui Kimari
Wangui Kimari

Maji ni Haki! Water is our right!

From the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi: Where is the water for our people? And what challenges do they face trying to make sure they can get enough for their families everyday? Our Art for Social Change campaign made a song about water struggles, and it features powerful commentary and activists from across Nairobi. Big up to the artists and to Hood Creation for the images and sound. We are also grateful to Mary Lawhon and the Examining nature-society relations through urban infrastructure project (project number: P19-0286:1)  for the support! See the video above!  
Medhanit Ayele
Medhanit Ayele

Reflection on Uta-Do African Cities Workshop

Reflection on Uta-Do African Cities Workshop Medhanit Ayele Whatchu gonna do? Vs. What are you going to do about it? Or the Swahili version of dear Kenyans ‘UTA-D0?’ Or አዪ..ታዲያ ምን ታረገዋለህ? …. ወይስ …. ምን ልታደርግ ነው? በሚሉት ጥያቄዎች መሀል ያለው ልዩነት Of the Ethiopians. All refer to the power tension defining one’s response when faced with a discomforting act. The African city is a place of Conflict, Tension: whether to succumb to a system that one considers unjustified or to fight back, enraged, at times while standing Alone. Heading back home in the late evening, faced with paying twice the taxi fare? whatchu gonna do? Pay twice the taxi fare? or negotiate back.  Pulled back by traffic police: bribe off to head your day? or go through the mind-boggling bureaucracy fighting back? Criminal activities rise in your neighborhood: Do you tell your kids to come home much earlier? Do you dismiss your evening plans? or you fight back to earn the safety of the night?  Witness the government conduct unlawful practices: do you fight back?  or slide along the tide decently, calling upon the perks of getting out of the way. And many more conflicts with much more […]
Gloria Nsangi Nakyagaba
Gloria Nsangi Nakyagaba

Reflection on UTA-Do: African Cities Workshop

Uta-Do | 2022 | Nairobi Gloria Nsangi Nakyagaba (University of Oklahoma) Mary Lawhon (University of Edinburgh) In May of 2022, thirty or so scholars, artists and activists (and many self-identifying as a combination of these) joined together for a week of discussion and reflection in Nairobi at UTA-Do: African Cities Workshop. Our week began with a reflection on the phrase that brought us together, and its myriad meanings. Uta-do can be said in a tone of resignation: it might be what is said when a boda-boda driver wants to renegotiate a fee, when a cell phone disappears, when the bumpy road makes you late. But this is not the uta-do mentality that brought us together. Instead, for most of us, we came together to think through the proactive version of uta-do: what are we going to do about the cities in which we dwell, research, and learn? This question has been posed through a developmentalist lens to those in and engaging with African cities for generations, and in that sense, there is little new to the idea of needing to ‘do something’. But the workshop UTA-Do followed the question of ‘what are we going to do’ with a reflection on […]
Arianna Tozzi
Arianna Tozzi

Troubling Waterscapes: Our journey of counter-mapping the multiple waters of Pravah

Arianna Tozzi, Irene Leonardelli, Enid Still, and Sneha Malani describe their work with counter-mapping. Using rivers and the flows of water and pollution as entry points, they capture urban-rural interdependencies in their rich and multi-faceted website Troubling Waterscapes. Here they provide a background to their counter-mapping project. This project began with a friendship between three PhD researchers, and an artist/practitioner, with a common interest in water and agriculture, and a desire to explore creative methods of engaging with our research topics. ‘Troubling Waterscapes’ was developed as an online exhibition for the bi-annual POLLEN conference in September 2020: Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration. Rather than classic academic presentations and panel discussions, where words and theoretical concepts dominate, we invited participants to think with and through water in creative ways. We used ‘troubling’ as a praxis of questioning dominant narratives of resource commodification ‘from above’ and victimhood ‘from below’, inviting the audience to think through the complexities of the uneven socionatural relations that surround us.  Our story begins in Pravah, the fictional name for a rural village in Maharashtra, India, where Irene lived during her PhD research, learning from the farming practices of women growing flowers to supply to markets in the nearby city of […]
Henrik Ernstson
Henrik Ernstson

Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish? Film screening and seminar at University of Western Cape

Seminar presentation and film screening on the politics of waste management in South African cities.
Emmanuel Awohouedji
Emmanuel Awohouedji

Tying a New Rope to an Old One: Developing an Environmental Education Curriculum in Benin

Emmanuel Awohouedji, a Benin environmentalist and educator, shares his experience of building and teaching a curriculum focusing on environmental problems and issues for middle and high schools in the Republic of Benin. This type of teaching is missing in Benin and requires overcoming administrative, structural and material hurdles—but also provides rich experiences for others to learn from. My pedagogical work in the Republic of Benin refers to the planning and implementing of a comprehensive environmental education curriculum that can help young students understand and have a growing interest in—and impact on—their surrounding environments. For the last two years I have developed this curriculum and while much is left to do, it is clear that this curriculum is missing in Benin today. Despite efforts in the early 2000s to implement environmental education, today none of the seven subjects taught in secondary classes or the nine taught in high school have a serious focus on environmental issues. Considering however the changes affecting the Beninese environment, the impacts of environmental issues, climate impact on water, food, energy, health, ecosystems, various sources of pollution (Boko, Kosmowski and Vissin n.d.), and the legislation related to environmental protection, this form of environmental education is relevant. Through working with  my students I […]

Situated Urban Political Ecology Collective

The Situated Urban Political Ecology Collective is a collaborative space for researchers to develop and present work in the field of Urban Political Ecology. We are a collective of researchers interested in the politics of the urban environment, primarily in the global south. Building on insights from postcolonial studies and political ecology, we seek to develop interventions that politicize urban and environmental theory and practice through publications, workshops, chatting on public transport, and immersing ourselves in cities.

Please get in touch with suggestions and ideas, or to share your work through commentaries or notices.

Meet our contributors

Henrik Ernstson is developing a situated approach to urban political ecology. He is Associate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Lecturer in Human Geography at The University of Manchester, and Honorary Associate Professor at African Centre for Cities at University of Cape Town. For more information please visit my university profile page. 

Urban geographer into infrastructure | Sheffield University

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 Research, Environment 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…

Dr. Mary Lawhon is an urban political ecologist based at the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at University of Oklahoma.  Empirically, her work has focused on waste, alcohol and housing. Conceptually, her works seeks to a) politicize theory and practice, including the politicization of sociotechnical transition theory, and b) provincialize theory and practice, including urban and urban political ecological theory. Her approach is informed by nearly ten years of experiences in South Africa since 2002, including work at the Universities of KwaZulu-Natal, Cape Town, and Pretoria, as well as a lot of informal conversations, long walks, public transportation and volunteering with the NGO Earthlife Africa.

Postdoctoral researcher, Institute of Geography and Sustainability, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Keywords: urban political ecology; governmentality; everyday governance; India; water; sanitation; urban water bodies; urban parks Anna’s research interests focus on urban political ecology, which she would like to take further in the exploration of ordinary cities and the everyday practices and politics found here. In her PhD research on water and sanitation, she has investigated questions of urban governance, governmentality, the everyday state and explored questions of equity and informal housing. Her current project studies environmental governance in small cities of Gujarat, with particular attention to parks, ponds, and solid waste management. More info.

Wangui Kimari works as the participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, a community-based organisation in the poor urban settlement Mathare. The organisation strives for social justice by means of community engagement and the use of social movement platforms.

Alejandro De Coss is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Alejandro is an urban sociologist, researching the urbanisation of water in Mexico City through an ethnography of the workers and engineers that maintain, repair, and manage its water supply system. He is interested in the study of urban infrastructures, and how these intersect with questions of capital accumulation, environmental transformation, and the state. In this research, Alejandro is thinking through new materialist and critical urban political ecology approaches from the standpoint of labour as practice and process.

PhD researcher in human geography, University of Manchester. Kathleen’s research considers how initiatives promoting community responsibility for waste management affect infrastructure, labour and livelihoods in South African cities. Her research is part of the Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish? project, supported by the UK’s ESRC-­DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research.

Prince Guma is an urban imaginer, rural optimist and a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. His current research is at the intersection of Urban African Studies, and Science, Technology and Society (STS). His project focuses on the centrality of mobile technologies in Nairobi and how these shape interactions between infrastructural systems, between systems and society, and thereby, the city as a sphere, nexus and junction of and for innovation. Prior work has questioned how forces of urbanity, rurality, postcoloniality and contemporaneity elucidate, obscure, affect or are affected by everyday processes, practices and materialities. He is a research fellow of Harry Frank Guggeinhaim (HFG) Foundation's “Young African Scholars” programme; and IASSCS–Ford Foundation's Emerging Scholars International Research Fellowship Program.

PhD Candidate   Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University.   Erin’s research interests include the political economy and ecology of cities, politics of sustainability, gentrification/displacement, community organizing and social movements, and popular education. For her dissertation research, she investigates collective action processes related to land use decisions along the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon (U.S.). More info.

Emma Colven is a Geography PhD Candidate at UCLA. Her research examines contestations over flood mitigation and expert knowledge in Indonesia’s capital city.

Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands

PhD Candidate Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University. Anthony Levenda studies urban infrastructure networks, climate change, urban theory, planning theory, energy systems, and socio-environmental systems drawing on science and technology studies (STS) and urban political ecology (UPE). He is working on his dissertation that investigates urban environmental knowledge production in climate change “experiments” and low-carbon “laboratories” in the US with goals to continue this research in cities around the world.

Zachary Levenson is a sociologist studying the politics of housing in post-apartheid South Africa. He’s currently working on a book entitled Delivery and Dispossession: Evictions, Occupations, and Housing Provision in Post-Apartheid South Africa based on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town. His work has appeared in Contexts, International Sociology, and Catalyst, among other places, and he is a regular contributor to Africa Is a Country. More broadly, he asks how political sociology allows us to reimagine urban sociological questions. He is currently based at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a fellow at the Institution for the Study of Societal Issues.

Lyudmila (Lucy) Rodina is a PhD student, working with Leila Harris, at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and a Liu Scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues. In her research, Lucy explores the intersection of water governance and climate change in urban contexts using a social-ecological systems approach. More topically, she examines the nascent challenges to the governance of urban water under changing precipitation patterns,extreme flow events, droughts and freshwater quality concerns. She seeks a deeper understanding of the ways in which climate change affects both water resources and existing governance frameworks. What is at stake? How well suited are urban water governance frameworks to dealing with these challenges? Lucy is also interested in systematically investigating recent critical approaches resilience, and to evaluate the ways in which resilience thinking can be successfully applied to urban water governance under climate change. This will help to envision what a water resilient city would look like – a topic that remains relatively unexplored. More info

I have a double major / Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Economics; following one of my personal-life passions I received a diploma accrediting a minor in Architecture and City. I have a strong interest in how nature can contribute to more fair, sustainable and creative urban environments. Academically, I’m keen on taking further the intersection of both urban and environmental studies, as well as working for a more supportive science-policy interface. I’m from Bogotá, Colombia and currently based in Berlin, Germany.  #urbanecology #globalsouth #valorardiversidad

Beth Oppenheim-Chan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental & Geographical Sciences at the University of Cape Town. Her research in Mozambique focuses on civic engagement in city life, and the intersection of responsibility, assistance, and identity in the Global South. She is also currently also working on a British Academy Newton-funded project entitled “Food, Ethics & Identity in the Post-Apartheid City,” a multi-city study of consumption and its relation to ethics in South Africa.

Associated Researcher at Centre for Conservation Studies from Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. My key interests in urban ecology involve the study of landscapes using biophysical to cultural perspectives with reflection on landscapes from ecology, geography, history, anthropology and political ecology. I also draw upon systems and complexity thinking to understand patterns and processes in urban socio-ecological systems.

Sophie Webber is a Lecturer in Geography in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Sophie studies adaptation and urban resilience projects in South East Asia and the Pacific with a focus on their knowledge claims and financial practices. 

Joel Ongwec is a  documentary film maker and creative researcher based in Kampala.

Suraya Scheba is a lecturer in the Department of Environmental & Geographical Sciences and postdoctoral researcher at the African Centre for Cities (ACC), at the at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on socio-ecological dynamics that shape urban environments, with a concern to explore the dialectic between inequality and struggles for equitable futures. She is currently working on a project studying the Cape Town water crisis, concerned to explore the dynamic intersections between crisis and infrastructure in shaping water governance configurations.

Jacob Doherty is an anthropologist researching the politics of belonging and exclusion, infrastructural violence, and the materialities of urban environments in contemporary cities. Currently, he's working on a book entitled Waste Worlds: Kampala’s Infrastructures of Cleanliness and Disposability based on ethnographic research in and around Kampala, Uganda's diverse waste streams. 

Rossella Alba is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at the Governance and Sustainability Lab, Trier University, Germany. As part of her dissertation she is researching the politics of water infrastructure in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area through a study of the everyday practices of water vending and delivery via tanker trucks. She is interested in debates on infrastructural heterogeneity, everyday urbanism, water governance and political ecology.  Her research is part of WaterPower, a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF).

Patrick Bigger is a lecturer of critical human geography at Lancaster University, UK. His research focuses on financial practices for managing environmental change, including carbon trading, green debt, and private equity for biodiversity conservation. His research sites range from the Kenyan highlands to global financial centers to better understand how finance is (and isn’t) enrolled in new modes of environmental governance.

Lené Le Roux is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma in the United States. Trained as an urban planner, her research interests include southern urban theory, place and place-claiming, critical pedagogy and South African cities

Faculty Member, School of Environment & Development/Institute for Development Management & Policy, University of Manchester Profile and more information.

Timos Karpouzoglou is a researcher at KTH, Division of History of Science, Technology & Environment. Timos primarily focuses on the socio-technical character of water systems, actor relationships with water systems, and the urban political ecologies of water infrastructure. His research is informed by fieldwork in South Asia, East Africa and Latin America.

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