The spatialized political ecology of the city: Situated peripheries and the capitalocenic limits of urban affairs

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to make a modest contribution to the debate on how the ecologies of urbanization help us understand the socio-spatial changes we confront in the climate emergency. The intervention is constructed in four steps. First, it speaks to what kind of Urban Political Ecology (UPE)—or generally what I call a “spatialized political ecology”—may be appropriate for urban society. In a second step, it historicizes and spatializes the narrative by introducing an urban political ecology of landscapes. For that, the paper mobilizes the concepts of boundaries, belts, and in-betweens. The third part illustrates the transformation of postsuburban political ecologies in three rather different world regions. The last part of this paper examines what the potential is and what need for action exists in an urban society threatened and conditioned by the climate emergency and the Capitalocene. Ultimately, the paper aspires to move the debate on UPE more into the direction of making it relevant for the urban affairs of a suburban planet.

Disclosure statement

No financial interest of benefit has arisen from the direct applications of my research.

Notes

1. I thank the editor and four reviewers for comments on this essay. They made my argument more complete and sharper. All remaining errors are mine.

2. This development has recently been of much quantitative (Angel et al., 2017) and qualitative debate in urban studies (Berger et al., 2017; Keil, 2018a, 2018c). I use the term “suburbanization” here as the generic term, discussed at length in these literatures, which sometimes bleeds into terminologies such as peri-urban, exurban or post-suburban.

3. A spatialized political ecology means two things: (1) the word is meant to encompass differently scaled political ecologies—those of the city, of the region (and landscape), of the nation, and of the planet—or of urban society generally and (2) it is a tip of the hat to the great tradition of spatial thinking in urban studies and geography that has changed the social sciences fundamentally. One of the key drivers of the “spatial turn” was Edward W. Soja who laid the foundation for the proliferation of the notion of spatialization as a form of socio-spatial structuring. Influenced by Lefebvre, Foucault and Derrida, Soja made the term a keystone of his thinking, alongside the notion of “spatiality.” In a critical appreciation of his life’s work, Duncan Thomas wrote “The deeper sources of this structuring process are usually glossed over and its problematic historical geography is almost universally simplified, but the resultant surfaces of social geometry continue to be visible as geographical expressions of the crude orderliness induced by the effects of nodality. They too are part of the spatialization of social life, the extended specificity of the urban.” (Thomas, 2015). The dialectics of nodality and extension, this “extended specificity of the urban” captures the power of the term “spatialization” well.

4. The Marxian concept of the metabolic rift was popularized by John Bellamy Foster (2000). For a world historical use of the concept in line with my argument here see Moore (2000).

5. I am very grateful to Mikołaj Lewicki, whom I first met on a tour he guided expertly to Białołęka in the summer of 2018 during the annual meeting of the International Network of Urban Research and Action (INURA) and who provided me access to Joanna Kusiak’s work on the subject, and Kacper Pobłocki whose insights on the Polish urban periphery greatly helped me to understand its significance and peculiarity.

6. Small wonder that the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020 has given rise to all manner of speculation on whether new spatial patterns such as the ones described in this paragraph may be a consequence of quarantine and isolation requirements and social distancing desires more generally. See, for example, Ben Flatman’s ruminations, following a prescient lecture by Peter Hall on deurbanization: Learning from lockdown: Is 30 years of urban renaissance about to go into reverse? Available at https://www.bdonline.co.uk/opinion/learning-from-lockdown-is-30-years-of-urban-renaissance-about-to-go-into-reverse/5106149.article?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter.

7. This would also miss the many contradictory dimensions of present urban development such as eco-gentrification, much of which is based on an urbanism that is stuck in very simplistic categories of centrality, compactness, density, etc. See Rice et al. (2020).

8. The IBA Emscher has had many critical reactions and assessments over the years. In this short section, I can hardly make reference to the various aspects of the debate. A good case study analysis can be found in Wachsmuth and Angelo who note: “IBA Emscher Park gave the Ruhr a new green identity through gray technology, arguing that a green urban-industrial region was neither impossible nor an oxymoron” (Wachsmuth & Angelo, 2018, p. 9).

9. For an excellent analysis of the current debate on the Anthropocene, see Swyngedouw and Ernstson (2018a, 2018b).

10. The study by Nagendra et al. (2018) looked at hundreds of international articles on the subject of urban sustainability and found that: “The vast majority (78%) of the papers have a first or lead author from the global north, predominantly from the United States and Europe (with Australia, Japan and Singapore playing smaller roles). Just 5% have a first author with joint affiliation from the United States and China, and one paper has a sole author with joint affiliation in Europe (London) and Jamaica. Only 16% of the papers have a first author only from the global south—without exception, all are from China. In both groups, a typical (median) paper would have 100% authorship from either the global north or global south” (Nagendra et al., 2018, p. 344).

11. The introduction of “blue and green” eco-system services, for example, which I discussed in the context of the restoration of mining landscapes in Minas Gerais and in the Ruhr above may not be of primary urgency until other problems are first addressed (Simone & Pieterse, 2017, pp. 143–144).

Additional information

Funding

Funding information was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, File number 412-2010-1003.

Notes on contributors

Roger Keil

Roger Keil is a Professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University in Toronto. He researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease, and regional governance. Keil is the author of Suburban Planet (Polity 2018); he is the co-editor, with Judy Branfman, of Public Los Angeles: A Private City’s Activist Futures (UGAPress 2020) and, with Xuefei Ren, of The Globalizing Cities Reader (Routledge 2017). The editor of the Global Suburbanisms book series with University of Toronto Press, he has also co-edited Suburban Governance: A Global View (with Pierre Hamel) as well as Massive Suburbanization (with K. Murat Güney and Murat Üçoğlu) in that series.