Urban Political Ecology

As urban environments transform across the globe, debates over urban nature and its future forms have introduced important critical questions. How, for instance, do we study emergent, dynamic configurations of nature and culture in cities? How do we conceptualize the city as a field site when urbanization encompasses the full spatial continuum from city to countryside? How do we understand the place of history in an environmental era often categorized as unprecedented? This article traces political ecology from its noncity origins to its present engagements with urban life and forms. It argues that ethnographic work both enriches and complicates recent debates about the urban past, present, and future, and it calls for more vigorous and refined anthropological engagement with the biophysical sciences, the theoretical and methodological challenges of scale, and the work of historical contextualization in the history-evasive era now widely known as the Anthropocene.