With plans underway for large‐scale urban agriculture and a proliferation of representations made of the city's vacant lots, Detroit, Michigan is increasingly understood as a particularly hybrid metropolis that complicates conceptual divisions between city and nature. This article looks at representations of urban nature found in Detroit, focusing primarily on the work by photographers and journalists over the past 5 years as part of a broader discourse on Detroit's decline. By drawing from urban political ecology and critical work on nature, this article argues that representations of the city suggest an ambivalence, both popular and scholarly, about the emergent ecologies found in cities like Detroit. But, ultimately, journalists and commentators see nature in the city as a reflection of the city's absence, rather than its materiality, and so representations of Detroit reflect dominant conceptual divisions between the city and the non‐human world. This article builds on work in urban political ecology and environmental history to argue that representations and discourses about nature are important in the production of just urban environments.

This paper considers New York City's High Line Park, a linear stretch of green space situated on a discontinued railroad track in Manhattan. Unveiled in 2009, the High Line has become one of the most visited tourist sites in the city, but critics have called attention to its role in the gentrification of its surrounding neighborhoods and ties to extensive real estate development in the region. More specifically, many critics have focused on the project's dramatic redesign of the site's accidental landscape, which was a product of decades of abandonment and spontaneous plant growth. Drawing from contemporary literature that sees urban wastelands as sites of creative possibility, these critics have mourned the contemporary High Line's redesign for its rejection of a space that offered more creative possibility. At the same time, the park's designers themselves have argued that the redesigned park preserves the site's transgressive spirit through purposeful design elements. In this paper, I analyze these conversations and consider how differing ideas about design and accidental urban nature are being engaged with by critics of the park. I celebrate criticisms of the park's role in gentrification, but caution against the idea that abandoned urban spaces offer an implicit critique to neoliberal urban governance.

As the effects of austerity continue to ravage cities and the impacts of climate change become more pronounced, municipal officials around the world are struggling to pay for climate adaptation. Some cities have already begun to anticipate the new infrastructures that climate change will require, while others have been forced to adapt in real time as climate crises have arrived in spectacular ways. Two of the most emblematic events are Superstorm Sandy, which drenched New York City in October 2012, and the drought-induced crisis of water scarcity in Cape Town, South Africa, which was most visible between 2016 and 2018. In both cases, the cities turned to green bonds, a form of municipal finance that foregrounds environmental ambitions. In this paper, we track the forms of adaptation projects that green borrowing are earmarked to fund. Drawing from scholarship on the financialization of nature alongside recent work on racial capitalism and austerity, we find that rather than transformative municipal change each city is largely carrying on with projects that reinscribe existing inequalities in the city. In addition to reflecting inequalities already present in the two cities, however, the use of municipal debt for adaptation intensifies risks, both financial and environmental, borne primary by the poor or working class people of color. Building on qualitative fieldwork in Cape Town, New York, and across the green bond investment chain, we argue that the risks posed by climate change in the city cannot be financialized away. Ultimately, we call for the end of municipal austerity driven by national and supranational budgeting choices in favor of increasing national funding of municipal adaptation by rescaling borrowing to higher political scales that can more progressively distribute risks.

Geographies of waste, which include examination of its flows and politics, have demonstrated empirical differences and contrasting approaches to researching waste in the Global North and South. Southern waste geographies have largely focused on case studies of informality and (neoliberal) governance. We draw on Southern theory to argue that this focus can be productively extended through greater consideration of the production of value and the role of materiality and technology in the wastescape. We argue that a relational understanding of multiscalar wastescapes contributes insights into the distribution of costs and benefits as well as what enables and constrains the extraction of value for different actors.