Introduction. Environmental Politics in Urban India

Abstract

This special issue seeks to throw light on environmental politics in contemporary urban India. Herein we adopt a deliberately broad definition of the urban environment to include urban natural resources, environmental amenities and services, and the built environment 1 (Véron 2010). Drawing on Grove (2009:209) we understand urban environmental politics as designating the "struggles over meanings and practices of nature and the city that shape identities that make some forms of urban metabolisms possible while foreclosing others." 2 The collection of papers that form this issue explore environmental politics in a broad range of cities, from the more often discussed metros including Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai, but also the politics of the smaller centres of Puri and Leh. Utilising diverse entry points and theoretical orientations these cases each contribute to an interlinked set of discussions about the politicisation of India's urban environment. Specifically, they explore the way that the environment is entwined with questions of urban citizenship; the role environmental knowledge(s) plays in urban environmental politics; and the situated character of urban political ecologies.

TOXIC FORMATIONS: Race, Place and the Politics of Pollution on the Banks of the Ganga

“…Urban scholarship interrogating the state's uneven response to environmental protection provides important insights into class‐based inequality in relation to urban environmental politics (see Zimmer and Cornea, 2016). For example, Sharan (2006) demonstrates how both nuisance and pollution were constructed as ‘out of place’ in Delhi, with urban planning operating to manage separations between residential and industrial areas in modernizing cities.…”

URBAN WATERLINES: Socio‐natural Productions of Indifference in an Indian City

“…4 4 What Heynen (2014) characterizes as ‘second‐generation UPE’ expands the Marxian framework of first‐generation UPE to address more‐than‐human, more‐than‐western problematics of southern urbanisms including speculative peripheral urbanization and pervasive informality (Ranganathan, 2015; Zimmer and Cornea, 2016). …”