In scholarly and popular texts, Mumbai is invoked as an iconic example of the problem of urban informal settlements in the twenty‐first century. While such representations oscillate between tropes of accommodation and marginalization, they often obfuscate the compromised and historical successes of settler politics in the city. In this paper, the authors use an international urbanization conference as a starting point for exploring Mumbai settlers’ housing practices. They examine the processes through which emergent forms of inclusion have been conceptually unhinged from longstanding struggles against inequality. By examining the complex interplay of housing politics, social mobilization, and municipal policy in Mumbai, the paper argues for more careful attention to new regimes of governing that accompany aspirations for “inclusion” in the cities of the urban age.
As urban environments transform across the globe, debates over urban nature and its future forms have introduced important critical questions. How, for instance, do we study emergent, dynamic configurations of nature and culture in cities? How do we conceptualize the city as a field site when urbanization encompasses the full spatial continuum from city to countryside? How do we understand the place of history in an environmental era often categorized as unprecedented? This article traces political ecology from its noncity origins to its present engagements with urban life and forms. It argues that ethnographic work both enriches and complicates recent debates about the urban past, present, and future, and it calls for more vigorous and refined anthropological engagement with the biophysical sciences, the theoretical and methodological challenges of scale, and the work of historical contextualization in the history-evasive era now widely known as the Anthropocene.
Ecology with the city is a transdisciplinary pursuit, combining the work of researchers, policy makers, managers, and residents to advance equity and sustainability. This undertaking may be facilitated by understanding the parallels in two kinds of coproduction. First, is how urban systems themselves are places that are jointly constituted or coproduced by biophysical and social processes. Second, is how sustainable planning and policies also join human concerns with biophysical structures and processes. Seeking connections between coproduction of place and the coproduction of knowledge may help improve how urban ecology engages with diverse communities and urban interests in service of sustainability.
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