What is a river? A transnational meditation on the colonial city, abolition ecologies and the future of geography

Geography’s abolitionist turn: Notes on freedom, property, and the state

“…Where “resilience” lends itself to technical fixes, they argue that an abolitionist approach to climate vulnerability helps account for the role of historical racisms and intersectional drivers of trauma, concluding that “environmental justice goals should be, more broadly, about freedom and liberation” (ibid: 133). Finally, for Wangui Kimari and Jessica Parish, abolition ecology provides a lens to understand how natural resources like urban rivers and projects to rehabilitate them are “problematically entangled with enduring colonial, racialized, and gendered epistemologies of the city” (2020: 644). Thus, while none of these projects explicitly centers the prison or police, each study considers the ways in which racial capitalism undergirds relationships between humans and their environments, adopting abolition as a flexible framework for rethinking current arrangements in ways that further liberation for various groups and their ecologies.…”

Blended finance, transparent data, and the complications of waters' multiple ontologies

“…This means that more modest and not so colonizing devices such as roof catchments need more nurturing. And, while we should carefully avoid the trap of the "rehabilitation" of rivers (Kimari and Parish, 2020) rivers and surface waters in terms of "remedying an ahistoricized pollution" (Kimari and Parish, 2020:5), perhaps we should treat them better. Taking seriously the relationality of water means that solutions to problems of water supply need to be context-specific and multiple rather than abstract and universal.…”

Placing the more‐than‐human in environmental gentrification

“…As Porter, Hurst and Grandinetti note in the context of Australia, thinking around urban greening often ‘ignores Indigenous people, lands and knowledges, and is silent of the violent processes of colonization that have rendered cities so apparently divorced from nature that we now need to “bring nature back”’ (2020, p. 228). Over the past decades, research on urban environmental processes has begun to address the connection of urban greening and environmental gentrification to settler colonial racial capitalism (Cooke, 2020; Heynen, 2016a, 2016b; Heynen & Ybarra, 2021; Kimari & Parish, 2020; McClintock, 2018; Parish, 2020; Safransky, 2014). Environmental gentrification in settler colonial contexts produces a continuation of settler violence that disrupts Indigenous more‐than‐human relational worlds.…”