Maria Kaika, Roger Keil, Tait Mandler, Yannis Tzaninis, Presentation of the book “Turning up the heat: Urban political ecology for a climate emergency”, 14.09.2023, 5:30pm-7:00pm CEST

Sciences Po, Online via Zoom*

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Presentation of the book Turning up the heat: Urban political ecology for a climate emergency. Manchester University Press, 2023.

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) has focused on unsettling traditional understandings of the ‘city’ as entirely distinct from nature, showing instead how cities are metabolically linked with ecological processes and the flow of resources. More recently, a new generation of scholars has turned the focus towards the climate emergency. Turning up the heat seeks to turn UPE’s critical energies towards a politically engaged debate over the role of extensive urbanisation in addressing socio-environmental equality in the context of climate change.

The collection brings together theoretical discussions and rigorous empirical analysis by key scholars spanning three generations, engaging UPE in current debates about urbanisation and climate change. Engaging with cutting edge approaches including feminist political ecology, circular economies, and the Anthropocene, case studies in the book range from Singapore and Amsterdam to Nairobi and Vancouver. Contributors make the case for a UPE better informed by situated knowledges: an embodied UPE that pays equal attention to the role of postcolonial processes and more-than-human ontologies of capital accumulation within the context of the climate emergency. Acknowledging UPE’s rich intellectual history and aiming to enrich rather than split the field, Turning up the heat reveals how UPE is ideally positioned to address contemporary environmental issues in theory and practice.

Speakers

Maria Kaika is Director of the Centre for Urban studies and Chair in Urban Regional and Environmental Planning at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on urban political ecology, the embodied politics of urban infrastructures, and the relation between environmental and housing precarities. She is also the author/editor of: The Political Ecology of Austerity (2021, Routledge, New York; with R Calvario and G Velegrakis); Urbanizing degrowth: Five steps towards a Radical Spatial Degrowth Agenda for planning in the face of climate emergency (2023 Urban Studies Special Issue with Varvarousis, A, Demaria, F and March, H); In the Nature of Cities: urban political ecology and the metabolism of urban environments (2006 with N Heynen and E Swyngedouw; Routledge, London); City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City (2005; Routledge, New York).

Roger Keil is Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University. He researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease, infrastructure, and regional governance. Among his recent publications are Suburban Planet (Polity, 2018) and After Suburbia (UTP, ed. with Fulong Wu, 2022) as well as Pandemic Urbanism (Polity, 2023, with S.Harris Ali and Creighton Connolly) and Turning Up the Heat: Urban political ecology for a climate emergency (MUP, ed. with Maria Kaika, Tait Mandler and Yannis Tzaninis, 2023). Keil is a Fellow of CIFAR’s Humanity’s Urban Future program.

Tait Mandler is a postdoctoral researcher in the Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation group at Wageningen University. Their research interests include urban political ecology, agrifood economies, everyday life of chemical exposure, and anthropology of the senses.

Yannis Tzaninis is urban and social geographer, and his research focuses on urban political ecology, European suburbanisation and discourses of space. He has published on cosmopolitanism, post-suburbia, utopias, place-making, and educational inequalities.







Discussion

Joost de Moor, Assistant Professor in Political Science, CEE, Sciences Po.

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