This paper provides a theoretical and political critique of how the concept of resilience has been applied to places. It is based upon three main points. First, the ecological concept of resilience...

From resilience to resourcefulness: A critique of resilience policy and activism

In recent years, urban research has become increasingly concerned with the social, political and economic implications of the techno-political and socio-scientific consensus that the present unsustainable and unjust environmental conditions require a transformation of the way urban life is organized. In the article, I shall argue that the present consensual vision of the urban environment presenting a clear and present danger annuls the properly political moment and contributes to what a number of authors have defined as the emergence and consolidation of a postpolitical and postdemocratic condition. This will be the key theme developed in this contribution. First, I shall attempt to theorize and re-centre the political as a pivotal moment in urban political-ecological processes. Second, I shall argue that the particular staging of the environmental problem and its modes of management signals and helps to consolidate a postpolitical condition, one that evacuates the properly political from the plane of immanence that underpins any political intervention. The consolidation of an urban postpolitical condition runs, so I argue, parallel to the formation of a postdemocratic arrangement that has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic environmental management. In the third part, I maintain that this postpolitical consensual police order revolves decidedly around embracing a populist gesture. However, the disappearance of the political in a postpolitical arrangement leaves all manner of traces that allow for the resurfacing of the properly political. This will be the theme of the final section. I shall conclude that re-centring the political is a necessary condition for tackling questions of urban environmental justice and for creating egalibertarian socio-ecological urban assemblages.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00859.x

The Antinomies of the Postpolitical City: In Search of a Democratic Politics of Environmental Production

‘Water is a brutal delineator of social power which has at various times worked to either foster greater urban cohesion or generate new forms of political conflict’. In the paper which follows, Matthew Gandy explores this statement by looking at the expansion of urban water systems since the chaos of the nineteenth‐century industrial city. In this early period, the relationship between water and urban space can be understood by the emergence of what he calls the ‘bacteriological city’, defined by features such as new moral geographies and modes of social discipline based upon ideologies of cleanliness, a move away from laissez‐faire policies towards a technocratic and rational model of municipal managerialism, and a connection between urban infrastructures and citizenship rights. Gandy goes on to discuss that while many cities never ultimately conformed to this model, the last thirty years has seen a fundamental move away from the bacteriological city to a more diffuse, fragmentary and polarized urban tec...

Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city

Sustainability is increasingly becoming a core focus of geography, linking subfields such as urban, economic, and political ecology, yet strategies for achieving this goal remain illusive. Socio-technical transition theorists have made important contributions to our knowledge of the challenges and possibilities for achieving more sustainable societies, but this body of work generally lacks consideration of the influences of geography and power relations as forces shaping sustainability initiatives in practice. This paper assesses the significance for geographers interested in understanding the space, time, and scalar characteristics of sustainable development of one major strand of socio-technical transition theory, the multi-level perspective on socio-technical regime transitions. We describe the socio-technical transition approach, identify four major limitations facing it, show how insights from geographers – particularly political ecologists – can help address these challenges, and briefly examine a c...

Socio-technical regimes and sustainability transitions: Insights from political ecology

Many ecosystem services are in decline. Local ecological knowledge and associated practice are essential to sustain and enhance ecosystem services on the ground. Here, we focus on social or collect ...

Social-ecological memory in urban gardens-Retaining the capacity for management of ecosystem services

Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City

Nostalgia for home is quite natural among expatriates. The English country life recreated in the hill stations of India, however, was elaborated on by the greater prestige of an imperial people. This paper examines the hill station as a landscape type tied to nineteenth-century discourses of imperialism and climate. Both discourses serve as evidence of a belief in racial difference and, thereby, the imperial hill station reflected and reinforced a framework of meaning that influenced European views of the non-western world in general. Because the hill station was seen as a resource to be protected for use by the British ruler, the standards used in colonial settlement planning are framed in these discourses of privilege and difference. Primary attention is given to the high imperial age from 1870 to 1914 when construction activity was greatest. Ootacamund, the summer capital of the Madras presidency in southern India, serves as the case study for evaluating this landscape type.

Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India

In this paper, we explore a “grassroots” neighborhood revitalization effort engendered at the national scale without regard to local geographies of race and class. Specifically, we examine the Harambee Great Neighborhood Initiative, convened by the well-known nonprofit Habitat for Humanity together with Milwaukee’s Local Initiatives Support Corporation, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Drawing from participant observation, analysis of print and digital media, volunteer surveys, and interviews with area residents and local nonprofit representatives, we demonstrate the ways in which the six-year program of planning and neighborhood development was conceived and driven by an extra-local nonprofit with significant blind spots to local and organizational politics of race and without sufficient collaboration with the Harambee community. Our analysis points to the importance of race in nonprofit governance and community revitalization efforts. Moreover, we contribute to urban geographic scholarship on nonprofit governan...

Neighborhood revitalization without the local: race, nonprofit governance, and community development

Culture has come to perform a pivotal role in the selling of places, as competition among cities resulting from economic restructuring has heightened the significance of a city's image. Using the case of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this paper explores the relationship between a city's image and a complex reality by examining the manipulation of local cultural resources to promote dominant interests. This city's experience also demonstrates the extent to which a politics of resistance can be espoused on the basis of contested local representations of different class and racial experiences.

Making milwaukee famous: cultural capital, urban image, and the politics of place

As a PhD student of cultural anthropology with a burgeoning interest in urban geography, I found this edited collection of articles useful, particularly as an overview of trends in urban geography since the middle of the twentieth century Perhaps seasoned urban geographers who are intimately familiar with the developments and debates within their sub-discipline might think they have little to learn from this disciplinary overview, but I would argue otherwise Since academics of all stripes have a tendency to be myopic, both new and advanced scholars have much to gain from this collection, which ranges from classic articles in the political economy of urban geography to studies influenced by the cultural turn of the 1980s and 1990s Despite the disparate sources of material composing this volume’s seven sections, several themes emerge: the importance of knowing the history and context of theories and methodologies of urban geography; the changing conceptualisations of ‘the city’; the dual influences of political economy and post-modern/interpretive analyses; and the significance of globalization as a phenomenon, its local impacts and the technologies that often shape and propel it

Judith T. Kenny

Papers

Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City

Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India

Neighborhood revitalization without the local: race, nonprofit governance, and community development

Making milwaukee famous: cultural capital, urban image, and the politics of place

The urban geography reader