Urban political ecology (UPE) has established a firm foothold as urban environments have become increasingly relevant for both academics and for the broader environmental movement. Over the last decade, UPE has established a position that took as its starting point the tightly interwoven status of “socionature”, coupling a critical stance on urban environments through a theorization of society in which the “urban” is a distinct historical expression of capitalism. More recently, some in UPE have voiced the concern that this approach places too heavy an emphasis on structural capitalist forces and have begun to reexamine and push further UPE's engagement with post‐structuralism and post‐humanism. This paper explores three such moves: the first is a resurgence in interest in environmental imaginaries; the second is a closer engagement with the extensive literature on urban governance; the last is a new form of engagement with post‐humanism, specifically the theoretical implications of including non‐human agency into accounts of urban political ecologies.

Cities today are typically framed as sites of capitalist development, while the urban park is theorized as an indirect response to the emerging hegemony of industrial production in the nineteenth century. Yet, this historical framing tells us little about the process through which our notions of 'the city' and of 'nature' are produced, or how this knowledge affects the formation of urban people's identities. The discursive formation of the capitalist city can be traced to specific historical moments, one of which is the construction of urban parks during the mid-to late-nineteenth century, which I argue was instrumental in producing a new knowledge of the capitalist city by creating a boundary between the social space of the city and the natural space of the park. Using Philadelphia's Fairmount Park as a case study, I draw on archival photographs and annual park commission reports to explore the formation of park subjects during this period and shed light on diverse economic practices that were once widespread in and around the city but whose erasure was ultimately a prerequisite for the successful formation of an urban discourse organized around the construction of the city/nature boundary.

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