TAILIEUCHUNG - In the Nature of Cities Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism

When we eventually look back at the intellectual shibboleths of the high capitalist period—say the last three centuries—few ingrained assumptions will look so wrongheaded or so globally destructive as the common-sense separation of society and nature. Historically and geographically, most societies have avoided such a stark presumption as hubristic folly, but from physicists to sociologists, physicians to poets, the brains of the ascendant capitalist “west” not only embraced but made a virtue of society’s separation from nature (and vice versa). Scientists studied a natural world, conceptually ripped from any social context except that human bodies, like “natural” ones, were just as subject to the laws of gravity or. | In the Nature of Cities Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism Edited by Nik Heynen Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw Questioning Cities Series Also available as a printed book see title verso for ISBN details In the Nature of Cities In the Nature of Cities engages with the long overdue task of re-inserting questions of nature and ecology into the urban debate. This path-breaking collection charts the terrain of urban political ecology and untangles the economic political social and ecological processes that form contemporary urban landscapes. Written by key political ecology scholars the essays in this book attest that the reentry of the ecological agenda into urban theory is vital both in terms of understanding contemporary urbanization processes and of engaging in a meaningful environmental politics. The question of whose nature is or becomes urbanized and the uneven power relations through which this socio-metabolic transformation takes place are the central themes debated in this book. Foregrounding the socio-ecological activism that contests the dominant forms of urbanizing nature the contributors endeavour to open up a research agenda and a political platform that sets pointers for democratizing the politics through which nature becomes urbanized and contemporary cities are produced as both enabling and disempowering dwelling spaces for humans and non-humans alike. Nik Heynen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Maria Kaika is Lecturer in Urban Geography at the University of Oxford School of Geography and the Environment and Fellow of St. Edmund Hall Oxford. Erik Swyngedouw is Professor at the University of Oxford School of Geography and the Environment and Fellow of St. Peter s College Oxford. Questioning Cities Edited by Gary Bridge University of Bristol UK and Sophie Watson The Open University UK The Questioning Cities series brings together an unusual mix of urban scholars .

• Môi trường
• ecological imaginary
• Metabolic urbanization
• political economy
• urban monoculture
• environmental control
• entrepreneurial Philadelphia