Search

This article is about green capitalism, demolition, and the production of housing scarcity in Kigali, Rwanda. It follows Kiyovu cy'abakene—a real place that was near zero‐carbon, built with renewable resources, owned and operated by Kigali residents—as it was first reimagined as a rhetorical "slum" and then converted into an actual one by force. And it follows the design and construction of Batsinda Housing estate, a sustainable solution to a fictional "crisis" of inadequate housing in Kigali. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research, I argue that in Kigali, and many cities like it, the destruction of built environments is not only about local elites who wish to demolish "slums" or "informal settlements" to build "world‐class" luxury cities. The demolition of neighborhoods and the displacement of people who live there is also done in the service of making new markets for green commodities through the production of scarcity. To manufacture effective demand for green commodities while maintaining their monopoly over what constitutes "sustainable," Kigali's international teams of managers and consultants must render alternative, ecologically sound, African‐owned neighborhoods and building technologies "unsustainable." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic implications of biopolitics – or the administration, regulation, and control of life – have received significant attention in recent geographical and cognate scholarship. An emerging theme of inquiry, largely focused on the Global North, makes contributions to specifying 'lively capital', defined here as bodily value in motion – predicated on accumulation from other‐than‐human life. In this paper, we argue that the biopolitical process of bringing life into the ambit of capital works in cultural, political, and economic registers and not just through singular logics of the economic, as extant accounts have implied. The rendition of life into capital through modes of biopower is not a universal process. It has diverging trajectories that, in postcolonial contexts, involve hybrids between biopolitical and vernacular practices. This argument is made through an account of bovine biopolitics in urban Delhi with specific reference to the city's 'cattle problem' involving 'surplus' animals. It unfolds in four distinct parts. First, drawing on archival work, we trace colonial histories of cattle improvement to reveal how the category of 'surplus' was invented. Second, we deploy more‐than‐human ethnographies of free‐ranging animals in Delhi to foreground how 'surplus' cattle – which we conceptualise as 'living waste' – are driven to feed on waste as a result of gentrification and the enclosure of erstwhile grazing grounds. Third, we turn to gaushalas (cow shelters) in Delhi to show how 'surplus' cattle from the city's streets are rehomed and managed. Fourth, we examine the uneven practices of care afforded to different bovines based on logics associated with right‐wing Hindutva nationalism. Our account provincialises lively capital by opening up more nuanced and situated understandings of the relations between biopolitics and capitalism, attentive to divergences from models situated in Western modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global ecological crises place significant strain on cities at a time of accelerating urbanization. 55% of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. These areas continue to experience rapid development and confront ecological challenges including climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation. As a result, an increasing number of urban policymakers have turned to sustainability initiatives, and environmental movements have called for greater involvement in decision-making processes at the local and political levels. However, strategies to reduce the ecological footprint of cities and establish ‘green’ development practices remain vigorously debated among policymakers, city dwellers, and researchers. Given the need to implement socially inclusive and environmentally just frameworks of collective action in the built environment, strategies centered on citizen engagement are essential. However, understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘sustainability’ can vary significantly across social and cultural boundaries, so citizen engagement cannot be viewed monolithically. How can effective communication around urgent socio-ecological issues occur within the domain of urban policy making? Here we examine how intercultural communication impacts the perception of socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable urban environments. We offer two distinct disciplinary approaches to examine the complexity of urban environmental identity and point to the dynamic interaction between personal and collective relationships to urban ecologies. The dialogue outlines how socio-cultural perspectives can improve our understanding of the connections between city dwellers and urban nature(s). It emphasizes the need for further research on intercultural engagement in urban policymaking and argues that the complexity of urban environmental identity must be taken into consideration to promote effective, cross-cultural communication. Focusing on the cross-cultural dialogue of the 2022 Autumn School for the Young VDW, the paper provides two perspectives on the issues of interdisciplinarity and interculturality in urban policy making and planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Yamuna khadar or the floodplains of the river Yamuna in Delhi is a deeply contested agrarian space. While thousands have been involved in farming these floodplains for decades, contestations over their legality, compensation, land use, displacement, and impact on the river, soil, and city have been significant public concerns over the last few decades. In this paper, I focus on one aspect of this agrarian landscape--the toxicity associated with river water due to the pesticides and fertilizers used in agriculture. I examine how toxicity is perceived, discursively constructed, and dealt with by differently located stakeholders in this landscape. The differently located stakeholders associated with the toxic agrarian landscape of Yamuna khadar are not experiencing pollution as a homogenous community, i.e., neither all of them see themselves as suffering from pollution nor do they see themselves as contributing to the toxicity of the landscape in a similar way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores practices of citizen bat conservation in the city through the lens of becoming-with animal. It draws on insights gained from practices related to bat conservation efforts through interviews and participant observation with bat advocates in the city of Groningen, Netherlands. We show how becoming-with happens and why it is significant to humans and bats. We argue that becoming-with is dynamic and contingent on the elements present in different human–bat networks, which comprise bodies, technologies, practices, forms of knowledge, and urban spaces and places and result in varied relations that bats and bat conservationists enter into. Also, we observed the various outcomes of local bat conservation efforts. We argue that each of these ways of becoming-with must be considered valid, and is needed, in the big picture of bat conservation efforts in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans, non‐human animals, and technologies are increasingly entangled. Using the peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) as an illustrative example, we propose 'technonatural history' as a theoretical and methodological approach for observing, describing, and examining the role technologies play in shaping human relations with other species. After nearing extinction in the 20th century, peregrines have become woven into the fabric of everyday urban life and are a frequently sighted urban raptor in the UK, nesting on high‐rise buildings and church spires since the late 1990s. Their unexpected presence in cities symbolises hope for multispecies conviviality amid the contemporary ecological crisis. As their populations resurged, crucially, webcam and livestreaming technologies developed rapidly. Peregrines were one of the first animals to be broadcast over the internet via 'nestcams', granting broad publics access to their intimate lives. We examine the related technological histories of livestreaming technologies and natural histories of peregrine falcons in the UK, tracing the emergence of 'the digital peregrine' and its manifold implications for more‐than‐human and digital geographies. To do so, we build on oral history interviews with people associated with digital peregrines throughout the UK: nestcam technicians, peregrine conservationists, professional ecologists, activists, and citizen scientists. While digitisation brings broad publics closer to these cosmopolitan raptors, they can only ever grasp at the wildness of peregrine falcons and their wider milieus as the digital peregrine is a distinct entity, encountered via its own set of affects and affordances. In the peregrine's case, digital technologies create unexpected and radical opportunities for urban conviviality, signalling the positive potentials technologies host for forging meaningful more‐than‐human connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Birmingham, a badger visits me each evening outside my front door. Five years later, a fox meets me on a city street at 5 am. Two years after that, walking along the city's canals, my eyes lock with a heron's. A year later, a eucalyptus tree becomes my shade and respite in a disturbed city. Months later, as I get ready to leave the city, I encounter a group of parakeets. In this paper, I ask how these seemingly disparate encounters and relationships are intimately connected as part of Birmingham's urban ecologies and larger stories of urban regeneration – and its consequences for thriving and precarious life in the city. I argue that the tension between thriving and precarity in Birmingham (and cities like it) results from new exertions of control whilst urban dwellers establish new forms of more-than-human urban cohabitation. The stories in this paper, relating to different non-human lives caught up in Birmingham's transformation into a neoliberal city, demonstrate that serious consideration of more-than-human theory and experience is essential to the future of urban studies scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the age of mass migration (1850-1940) more than 4 million Italians reached the United States. The experience of Italians in United States cities has been largely explored during the twentieth century and produced a vast amount of academic literature. However, the study of migrants’ adjustment practices connected to nature is a quite recent concern, also for Environmental History. Migrants' visions of nature influenced their practices and attitudes toward the environment, helping them to be resilient and adjust to different urban contexts and manage the sense of displacement provoked by their encounter with a U.S. metropolis at the turn of the twentieth century. Italians of Chicago, for instance, in their quest for a partial self-sufficiency brought into the urban space non-urban practices—like the raising of animals, the farming of many vacant lots in the city, and the collection of different kinds of materials from the urban landscape—which challenged the modernity project that was deeply embedded in the functionalist city enterprise. Their way of inhabiting the city was a performative activity, which generated hybrid spaces. In many cases though, these practices were perceived by U.S. authorities and public opinion as a sign of backwardness and an obstacle to modernity: this complicated immigrants' aim for self-sufficiency and generated conflicts over the uses of urban space. One of the challenges that emerge from the study of migration phenomena through the lens of environmental history is the lack of sources: where can scholars find the environment in migration studies’ sources? With this article we address such an apparent epistemological blank spot by analyzing one specific kind of written source: we aim to explore the Italian experience in Chicago through the articles of the newspaper The Chicago Tribune, which we analyze following the socio-ecological dichotomy of proper urban space vs. unruly migrant practices. Known for its nativist, isolationist, and anti-Catholic positions—which targeted the Irish before shifting to Italians—The Tribune played the role of an anti-Italian-immigrant press organ from the 1870s until the first decade of the twentieth century. In an era when white Anglo-Saxon primacy within society, racism, and discriminatory discourses on immigrants’ ethnic qualities were commonly accepted as scientific, The Tribune reportage of Italians’ poor conditions and livelihoods concurred in re-enforcing such a narrative. With this article, we want to show that through the often biased and deformed lens of the WASP middle-class press, it is possible to reconstruct Italians’ and other immigrant’s urban practices, as well as to show how so-called modernization processes were contested and resisted by various marginal urbanites.

In the introductory essay to Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media, editors Pepita Hesselberth and Maria Poulaki set the stage for their volume on compact cinematics, a term which encompasses a wide array of moving image works and their role in society—a role that is often minimised due to their length and “small screen” methods of display. Rather than agree with dominant understandings that compact cinematics are new, and exist on the border of film and television, the authors argue that such visual displays, now in digital form through platforms, such as Vine and YouTube, predate feature-length films, and can open new avenues of understanding in the realm of spectacle and leisure studies more broadly.

Recently, there has been a surge of African screen media representations of environmental awareness and solutions for sustainable communities as the Global South experiences increasing urban migration and climate change. Much of the focus in this work is on the precarity of daily life for those on the margins of large urban agglomerations. This article brings together theories and practices from the disciplines of urbanism, architecture and documentary cinema studies to examine some examples of how African artists are bringing attention to issues of urban precarity, climate change, survival and growth on the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several key questions about evaluating the University of Nevada, Reno's Campus Master Plan from a "deep roots" perspective are worth considering, both in relation to the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Project in Power, Place, and Publics at the University of Nevada, Reno (RSA Project) and in relation to others that gather rhetorical scholars and community leaders for the purpose of developing productive outcomes: What methodologies are needed for rhetorical scholars to explore and assess the collective and historic identity of groups situated in urban place and space? How can we interrogate the practices associated with an immersive cultural experience in a scholarly working group? How can a deliberative framework inform similar future projects? In this article, we advance three essential tasks for rhetorical scholars to engage in when undertaking such projects: (1) use more of rhetoric's generative power and less of its critical/analytical power in order to articulate multiple possible avenues for developing places and spaces; (2) conduct extensive on-the-ground research to uncover the "collective identity" of various stakeholders and to show how those identities can productively inform planning; and (3) identify common ground as well as intractable differences among stakeholder positions and provide inventive ideas for managing both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impressions from an imaginary walk across the streets of Alphabet City, resonant with the architectural echoes of an optimistic modernism, its socio-technological design rooted in a widely shared belief in the governability of urban ecologies.

Drawing on ideas of a "clean and green city", recent municipal development policies in Hanoi have resulted in the demolition of a number of traditional marketplaces in favour of high-rise buildings. In its efforts to implement environmentalist policies, the city government and investors find themselves confronted with agentive forces of spirits and other non-humans, which play a significant role in negotiating and protecting urban space in a society increasingly characterized by the manifold dynamics of market socialism. An approach referring to the ecologies of urbanism permits examination of encounters between urban renewal and the spirit world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architects working with city planners and developers in the shaping of urban environments typically consider multiple factors in isolation, from urban design and socio-economic relationships to data analyses. Analyses regarding urban life cycle scenarios are exemplar of this trend, with considerations made in isolation at the later stages of the design-development process when the scope for decisions which could ultimately affect the sustainability of an urban environment is much more limited. This paper defines our effort to introduce a new tool, named “Clark’s Crow”, which aims to address this shortcoming by promoting awareness of the impact of different design options through a biophysically based ecological accounting method in the early stages of urban design-development. The tool is used within existing architectural design environments with an aim to offer a socio-ecological analysis during the design decision-making process. Clark’s Crow is underpinned by the emergy analysis method, which aims to consider both the energy, material, and information flows of a system, such as an urban ecology, and to understand both the work of the techno-sphere in constructing our urban environments and that of the geo-biosphere in sustaining such development. Clark’s Crow facilitates emergy analysis in the early stages of urban design, thereby allowing queries regarding material and energy flows to be addressed in conjunction with design choices at this initial stage. In this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness and features of Clark’s Crow through a case study of development using next generation systems in Manhattan, New York, depicting how an emergy analysis approach can lead to an understanding of the value and impact of speculative buildings towards sustainable design-development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper examines the project, Urban Animals and Us, as a journey - or foray - into the ‘terrain vague’ between people and (other) animals with whom we share urban space. Through three design experiments developed around speculative prototypes and co-design tools, we attempt to bring ’wild’ urban animals - like magpies and gulls into contact with the residents of a senior retirement home, to explore what new practices can arise between, otherwise, unconnected life-worlds. We expand the notion of companion species from philosopher of science Donna Haraway and begin to position the current project within a growing interest in animals in contemporary design research. Through analysis of the design experiments and the subsequent discussion, we argue, that a foray into interspecies relations, can inform the practical research agenda, and, help to re-articulate the dominant anthropocentricity of design research.

This paper examines the project, Urban Animals and Us, as a journey - or foray - into the ‘terrain vague’ between people and (other) animals with whom we share urban space. Through three design experiments developed around speculative prototypes and co-design tools, we attempt to bring ’wild’ urban animals - like magpies and gulls into contact with the residents of a senior retirement home, to explore what new practices can arise between, otherwise, unconnected life-worlds. We expand the notion of companion species from philosopher of science Donna Haraway and begin to position the current project within a growing interest in animals in contemporary design research. Through analysis of the design experiments and the subsequent discussion, we argue, that a foray into interspecies relations, can inform the practical research agenda, and, help to re-articulate the dominant anthropocentricity of design research.

The durability of central city districts in large metropolitan systems of the majority world has largely been attained through intricate intersections of physical, infrastructural, human and discursive materials, as these intersections are continuously remade through shifting constellations of the incremental initiatives of residents. Residents have learned to use the city as a place to continuously explore new relationships among things and extract a wide range of unanticipated capacities from them. This is a collective resourcefulness from which there might be much to draw in terms of using the carbon-driven exigencies of infrastructural transformation as the occasion to reanimate more egalitarian political projects. Although many collective efforts are increasingly being disassembled, the reflections of a single resident of one of Jakarta's most heterogeneous residential districts points to how the revitalization of such efforts might be conceived. The efficacy of political efforts to address intensified vulnerability partly entails replenishing intense mixtures of built and physical environments as provocations and platforms for complex social maneuvers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an analytical framework to place the rise of open source urbanism in context, and develops the concept of the 'right to infrastructure' as expressive of new ecologies of urban relations that have come into being. It describes, first, a genealogy for open source technology, focusing in particular on how open source urban hardware projects may challenge urban theory. It moves then to describe in detail various dimensions and implications of an open source infrastructural project in Madrid. In all, the paper analyses three challenges that the development of open source urban infrastructures is posing to the institutions of urban governance and property: the evolving shape and composition of urban ecologies; the technical and design challenges brought about by open source urban projects; and the social organisation of the 'right to infrastructure' as a political, active voice in urban governance. In the last instance, the right to infrastructure, I shall argue, signals the rise of the 'prototype' as an emerging figure for contemporary sociotechnical designs in and for social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussing an urban walking event, "Moss-eye view", held in the City of London, this paper considers the ways in which cities may be understood from the view of morethan- human processes and incorporations. The walk explores how distinct insights emerge into ways of 'becoming urban' by attending to organisms, environments, and forms of sitework that are not typically foregrounded in the usual economies of the City of London. Moss incorporates the material effects of urban ecologies across time and space, and thus forms a process of bio-indication in the city, capturing pollutants and making resources available for other organisms. Mosses in the city might be studied as sentient, more-than-human exchangers of and participants in urban energies, and as in-between and peripheral organisms that connect up sites by working across material, affective, political, socionatural, and imaginative registers. It is argued that the "Moss-eye view" walking event is a form of research that opens up infra-urban practices for understanding cities through alternative associations and incorporations of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most academic publications refer to Parkour as a subversive and embodied tactic that challenges hegemonic discourses of discipline and control. Architecture becomes the playful ground where new ways to move take form. These approaches rarely address the material and embodied relations that occur in these practices and remain on the discursive plane of cultural signifiers. A theory of movement between bodies as the founding aspect of Parkour unfolds alternative concepts of body, space, time and movement beyond the discursive. Movement becomes the leitmotif for a re-conceptualization of the relations between subjects and objects and abandons their division. With the example of Parkour, I will challenge anthropocentric approaches toward embodiment and instead foreground open-ended shifting configurations of places and their relation to movement. Parkour re-shapes rigid concepts of places and their human encounter through movement. Through its encounter with obstacles Parkour activates the silent potential for movement located in the relation between bodies and thus reaches beyond material boundaries (e.g., a wall). As a deterritorializing practice, I will use Parkour to re-consider the relations between different bodies such as architectural configurations, subjects and their urban ecologies to develop a relational model for movement to shape our everyday encounters with matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insofar as race, class, and gender have profound effects on people's environmental experiences, and consequently their activism, the environmental field needs more work on the environmental experiences and insights of groups whose voices have been missing, including youth of color who live in urban areas in the U.S. In this paper, we focus on African American and Latinx students engaged in environmental projects in their urban communities and the impact of such projects on promoting pro-environmental leadership, agency, and behavior. We draw from written reflections and focus group interviews of several hundred 4th–12th graders (majority middle- and high-school students) who participated in place-based civic science projects. Thematic analyses of student responses found that students engaged in work on local environmental issues cultivated an appreciation for the natural world and an understanding of human-nature interdependence and the ties between the local environment and their communities' health. Through taking action with others in their communities, students viewed themselves as contributors to their communities and started to form environmental identities in ways that are not traditionally measured. Findings point to the need for forms of environmental education that are contextually grounded and centered on environmental justice in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]