Embodied urban political ecology: five propositions

Doshi, Sapana

doi:10.1111/area.12293

Cited by 152 publications

(105 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…The field necessarily must respond to the demands emerging from geographical scholarship concerned with racial capitalism (Robinson, 1983;Pulido, 2017), particularly in the A of F (Derickson, 2017) and Flint (Ranganathan, 2016;Pulido, 2016). Calls to examine racialised, capitalist urbanisation echo growing articulations within UPE to decolonise (Simpson and Bagelman, 2018), provincialise (Lawhon et al, 2014) and think intersectionally (Doshi, 2017;Heynen, 2018) within and beyond a Marxist, political economy tradition.…”

Section: Racialised Infrastructuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Repairs can be understood as the dialectical infrastructure-social relations through which people and technologies interact (Ramakrishnan et al, this issue) for systems that require constant support and maintenance Graham (2010, p. 10). This is an infrastructure experience that is lived with and embodied in many poor communities (Doshi, 2017). Accounts of repairs in global North contexts focus on utility companies and the state (Graham and Thrift, 2007), and these practices remain black-to users.…”

Section: Where Is the Infrastructural South?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Decaying infrastructures in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis

Silver

2019

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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Infrastructure is critical to the ways in which urban inequality is produced and experienced. Across US post-industrial contexts urban infrastructures are decaying, causing problems to the capacity of various systems to deliver essential resource flows for social reproduction. This paper examines the US pipeline crisis to understand why, how and with what effects infrastructure has undergone a process of physical decay, concentrated across inner-city areas. It uses a case study of Camden, New Jersey, a poor city in which infrastructure has undergone decades of neglect, privatisation and under-maintenance. This decay has created difficulties in sustaining a safe, universal and fully functioning infrastructure. To understand these dynamics, the paper advances an urban political ecology approach to examining these infrastructural geographies. It makes three key contributions. First, it considers how to conceptualise decay and its effect on the urban circulations that have been enabled/disabled by infrastructure through the notion of unbounding. Second, given the highly segregated infrastructural experiences between a black city and white suburbs, the paper draws on recent geographic scholarship on racial capitalism, emphasising the role of race in the governing of infrastructure and in accounting for Camden’s conditions of decay. Third, the paper advances a relational theorisation that draws on concepts emanating from urban political ecology and associated research on infrastructure in cities of the global South. With the reported, widespread decay of infrastructures in global North, post-industrial contexts, a relational theorisation can draw on long-established vocabularies that challenge where we locate the ‘infrastructural South’ and prompt new political urban questions.

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Section: Racialised Infrastructuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Where Is the Infrastructural South?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Decaying infrastructures in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis

Silver

2019

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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“…Instead of questions of electrons, carbon emissions or economics, APE recognize Matt Huber's (: 7) provocation that ‘energy is life itself’. The result is a de‐fetishized understanding of ‘energy’, exploding the idea of a singular ‘magical substance’ (Lohmann and Hildyard, ) and casting our attention instead on the multiple power‐laden processes through which bodies are made thirsty or hungry, or homes made cold or dark (Doshi, ).…”

Section: Irregular Connections Ii: Ape As Social Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

Irregular Connections: Everyday Energy Politics in Catalonia

Angel¹

2019

Int J Urban Regional Res

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While questions of energy and energy transition have become hotly contested, the abstract and fetishized conception of energy that dominates contemporary political debates occludes connections to everyday life. By tracing the activities of Catalan activist network Alianza contra la Pobreza Energética (Alliance against Energy Poverty or APE), this article seeks to excavate the political possibilities opened up by a more everyday energy politics. The article addresses the practice of illegal utilities connections among the urban poor of Catalonia, arguing that this constitutes a form of makeshift urbanism resonant of that conceptualized from within ‘Southern’ cities. These ‘irregular connections’ to urban infrastructure networks are then distinguished from the ‘irregular connections’ formed between people within the collectivized social infrastructure of APE. APE, I argue, translate ‘energy’ as social reproduction, framing their struggle for the right to energy around the right to sustain life with dignity. This, I suggest, is the starting point for a feminist praxis capable of creating new and unruly subjectivities, reconfiguring reproductive relations in more caring and collective directions, and ultimately challenging the violence of the commodity form.

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“…Political ecologists are increasingly pushing the field's long-standing normative commitment to social change to contend with race, gender, class, and their intersections in new ways (Doshi 2017;Heynen 2018;Middleton 2010Middleton , 2015Mollet and Faria 2013;Moore and Robbins 2015). LCPE takes up a recent call for a decolonial political ecology (Carroll 2015;Kim et al 2012;Schulz 2017;Sundberg 2014) and treats this as a methodological challenge.…”

Section: Radical Geography On the Left Coastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Left Coast Political Ecology: a manifesto

Wesner

Moore

Martin

et al. 2019

Journal of Political Ecology

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Left Coast Political Ecology (LCPE) is a network of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty engaged in a collective practice of political ecology grounded in strong connection to the "Left Coast" of North America. In this manifesto, we build on successful 2015 and 2018 workshops on the practice and value of political ecology today to communicate our origins, efforts, and ideas towards building a community of praxis amid the urgencies and uncertainties of our time. We first articulate those organizing and theoretical lineages that influence and inform our work. We trace the evolution of LCPE through diverse genealogies and cross-pollinations – from the "Berkeley School" to Black, Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial studies, through political struggles within and beyond the academy. In grappling with the challenges of our institutional histories of settler-colonial, capitalist, and racist dispossession, we then propose a "coastal epistemology", one that troubles the notion of a settler-colonial or neoliberal "frontier" while finding value in encounter, conversation, and emergence. We seek to make transparent our positions of relative privilege as well as the precarious contexts in which we work and live, while mobilizing and embodying political ecology's long-standing normative and liberatory aims. Next we share some of the diverse methodological approaches employed by our members and collective, with the aim of providing inspiration and solidarity to others contending with similar challenges. Ultimately, we suggest a vision for what a political ecology adequate to our moment might look like and require: a necessarily collective and hopeful project, amid processes of colonial violence, capitalist inequity, and climate catastrophe. The Left Coast Political Ecology network invites you to dream and organize with us, to share resources, experiences, and community, and to help push our field and our institutions toward more socially just and ecologically sustainable futures.Keywords: Coastal epistemology, Left Coast, network, radical geography, praxis, West Coast

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Embodied urban political ecology: five propositions

Cited by 152 publications

References 37 publications

Decaying infrastructures in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis

Decaying infrastructures in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis

Irregular Connections: Everyday Energy Politics in Catalonia

Left Coast Political Ecology: a manifesto

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