Suchergebnisse

Analysis of politics in urban West Bengal has focussed on the near hegemonic control of political parties and the state on daily life – overlooking or under-accounting for the complex institutional assemblages that shape spaces of the political in daily life. Addressing this empirical gap, this paper examines the role of social clubs, who discursively imagine themselves to be not political in governing the city. I demonstrate the ways that clubs, as a particular socio-cultural institution, territorialise power in order to produce governable space and in turn act as both alternative to the state and party and intermediaries with them. Mobilising evidence from extensive qualitative research on governance in two small cities I seek to complicate and nuance existing narratives on everyday politics, the party and the role of clubs in West Bengal. And in doing so offer theoretical contributions to the ways we understand political subjects and the social production of the heterogeneous overlapping territories of governance that characterise postcolonial cities.

In the global South, urban infrastructures and environments are marked by significant heterogeneity and the presence of multiple overlapping systems, configurations and actor networks that keep the city working – water flows, electricity is available, and waste is collected. This occurs in the face of what has been traditionally characterized as failed or incomplete infrastructures and the presence of governance practices that often deviate from formalized norms and policies. However, increasingly academics are arguing that such heterogeneity represents not failure but spaces of possibility and transition. This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings and conceptual ideas that frame urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday. We then outline how the contributions of this Special Issue (SI) reveal the contested, negotiated, and situated nature of everyday urban governance and the multiple ways that politics become spatialized and power shapes contemporary cities, urban environments, and infrastructures. The SI brings together an interdisciplinary and diverse range of contributions focusing on case studies in secondary and metropolitan cities in India, Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya and Guinea-Bissau, and Brazil. Read together, the papers in this issue contribute to four primary debates and discussions in urban studies and social science studies of the urban environment. These include responding to noted absences in studies of urban political ecologies, contributing to new understandings of the urban political, focusing on the practices that produce political subjectivity and render groups governable, and highlighting everyday spaces of possibility for a more equitable urban future.

Urban ponds in India have for a long time been used for multiple purposes and have been accessible to a wide range of social groups; they thus often represent an urban commons. However, recent transformations of urban ponds into infrastructure that serves more limited uses have been accompanied by enclosure and social exclusion. Using an urban political ecology approach that is enriched with the concepts of environmental imaginaries and (un)commoning, this paper examines the ideational foundations and societal mechanisms underpinning the transformation of the pondscape of Navsari, a small city in the state of Gujarat. Based on interviews and field observations, the study found that the small-town elite's imaginary of the 'modern city' underpinned the shift to the ponds becoming part of Navsari's drinking water infrastructure; this led to the enclosure of the ponds and thus the ideational and physical separation of residents from these waterbodies and the exclusion of traditional user groups. This socio-ecological transformation of the pondscape, however, was not characterised by simple, linear processes of uncommoning driven by local elites: the dismantling of the urban commons (in the form of waste dumping by multiple actors) largely preceded the creation of infrastructure; enclosures and exclusions remained imperfect and spatially variable; and in some places informal resource-use rules continued or were recreated by local communities. This research points to how important it is for urban political ecology to consider the imaginaries and practices of multiple actors – including those beyond the metropolitan areas – in the construction of a nuanced narrative of dispossession in the neoliberal city.

In this article, we identify different types of urban nature, more or less « wild » or « artificialized », that are produced through the interaction of different actors and the natural environment. Taking cues from Urban Political Ecology, we analyze power relations and environmental imaginaries that result in the production of different urban ecologies and access rights in the case of ponds and lakes in medium-sized Indian cities. Dans cet article, nous identifions différents types de natures urbaines, plus ou moins « sauvages » ou « artificialisées », produites par l'interaction entre différents acteurs et le milieu naturel. Inspiré par l'Urban Political Ecology, nous analysons les relations de pouvoir et les représentations issues de la production de différentes écologies et des droits d'accès dans le cas des étangs et des lacs des villes moyennes en Inde.

AbstractWhile researchers in the growing field of urban political ecology have given significant attention to the fragmented hydroscape that characterizes access to drinking water in the global South, so far the (re)production of other urban waters and its related power relations have been underexplored. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap by exploring the everyday negotiations over access to urban water bodies, in particular ponds. These are understood as a composite resource that is simultaneously water, land and public space. This analysis draws on a case study from a small city in West Bengal, India, and is based primarily on data from open interviews with different actors with a stake in urban ponds. The article demonstrates that in a context of ambiguity of the statutory governance regime and fragmented control, the (re)production of the pondscape is embedded within complex relationships of power whereby social marginalization can be offset at least momentarily by local institutions such as neighbourhood clubs and political parties.

Solid waste management is often perceived as one of the most pressing environmental problems facing local governments in urban India and elsewhere in the global south. However, solid waste is not simply a managerial problem but is in many ways a highly political issue that involves diverse political actors at different scales. Particularly at the local level, solid waste management can also be a key part of broader political strategies, acting through its unique materiality as an environmental artefact and social relic. In this paper, we use an urban political ecology approach to examine a recent segregation-at-source project in a small town in West Bengal as a lens to understand more general multi-scalar, socio-political urban processes. Drawing primarily upon qualitative field research, the paper shows how diffuse forms of power and different governmentalities were applied between and within state-level government agents, municipal authorities, local waste workers and local communities to implement and (re)shape this project. The research points to the complexity of urban environmental governance and everyday politics in which action repertoires ranging from threats, the creation of environmental and hygienic subjects, moral appeals and economic rationality, underpinned by the harmful character of waste and by socio-cultural imaginaries thereof, (re)produced uneven political ecologies of waste between and within different neighbourhoods of the city.

Urban Political Ecology (UPE) has mainly evolved within the discipline of geography to examine the power relations that produce uneven urban spaces (infrastructures and natures) and unequal access to resources in cities. Its increasingly poststructuralist orientation demands the questioning of received categories and concepts, including those of (neoliberal) governance, government and of the state. This paper attempts to open this black box by referring to the mostly anthropological literature on everyday governance and the everyday state. We argue that UPE could benefit from ethnographic governance studies to unveil multiple state and non-state actors that influence the local environment, their diverse rationalities, normative registers and interactions across scales. This would also to enrich and nuance geographical UPE accounts of neoliberal environmental governance and potentially render the framework more policy relevant.

India's 74th Constitutional Amendment obliges state governments to devolve responsibilities related to urban environmental resources and services to the Urban Local Bodies. However, the existing literature points to deficiencies in urban decentralization, including a mismatch between resources and responsibilities, financial constraints, and a lack of capacities at the municipal level. This article, based on comparative fieldwork and analysis of environmental governance in four small cities in Gujarat and West Bengal, two states representing contrasting subnational political regimes, largely confirms the literature on urban decentralization, but it also shows important differences between the two states. Municipal governance reflects state-level regime types to some extent: While an efficient local and parastatal bureaucracy spearheads investments in environmental infrastructure in Gujarat, relatively autonomous elected municipal councillors in West Bengal guide a widely spread creation of small environmental assets. The availability of more untied funds at the local level in Gujarat than in West Bengal leads to more pronounced intra-state variation and opens possibilities for more substantial municipal agency.

AbstractCities are critical sites for understanding, and potentially ameliorating, the effects of global ecological change, the climate emergency and natural resource depletion. Contemporary cities are sociomaterially connected through global markets, trade and transportation, placing ever‐increasing demands on the natural environment and generating dangerous pollutants and emissions. Current approaches to address these environmental crises are dominated by neoliberal forms of 'green' urban development, carbon accounting and techno‐economic solutions, which extend corporate control over cities and tend to entrench inequality. A more strategic approach for enabling ecologically sustainable and equitable urban futures is urgently needed. We present five strategies for urban ecological futures in the global North, derived from qualitative and ethnographic empirical research with international eco‐communities, which open up discussions about how to tackle this challenge by acknowledging the role and potential of: (1) non‐extractive community economies; (2) democratic processes of co‐operative action; (3) social approaches to resource management; (4) participatory collaborative governance; and (5) urban heterogeneity and social justice. We explore the relational, contested and contextual processes through which these approaches could become embedded in urban policy and planning, thereby offering the strategic capacity required to move towards truly sustainable cities.