Presentation short abstract

Ethnographic research with river users in Pittsburgh, PA, USA explores how people live with persistent pollution in post-industrial waterways. It examines how memories and sensory encounters with toxicity shape imaginaries of care, risk, and just environmental futures.

Presentation long abstract

In 2023, American Rivers named the Ohio River the second most endangered river in the United States, citing its long history and ongoing realities of industrial pollution. This history runs deep into the watersheds of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, whose confluence in Pittsburgh forms the Ohio. Between 1987 and 2021, Allegheny County recorded over 15,000 toxic chemical releases into its waterways, 32% of them in Pittsburgh and 26% involving carcinogenic substances (WPRDC 2023). Yet these same rivers have become increasingly central to post-industrial urban revitalization efforts that transform formerly industrial waterfronts into sites of recreation and economic renewal. This presentation draws on ethnographic research with Pittsburgh river users to examine how people understand the past, present, and future of river life amid overlapping legacies of pollution and redevelopment. I focus on the ways that memories of contamination and sensory encounters with pollution shape residents’ imaginaries of care, risk, and belonging along the rivers. By tracing these situated ways of knowing and engaging with polluted waters, the research shows how everyday river practices can articulate broader struggles over just urban environmental futures and social reproduction in post-industrial landscapes.

Presentation short abstract

The Geosmin Crisis in Rio de Janeiro’s water supply shows how precarious infrastructure and practices of evidencing and experiencing environmental crises shape urban ecologies of pollution, revealing how multispecies and planetary health politics take shape in practice and embedded in urban space.

Presentation long abstract

Cities vividly expose the political entanglements of pollution, environmental degradation, and public health in the Anthropocene. This article examines the health-threatening ecologies that emerge at the intersection of polluted rivers and precarious water and sanitation infrastructures in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, focusing on the so-called Geosmin Crisis in the city’s water supply system. Geosmin (earth smell in Greek) is an organic compound produced by cyanobacteria that is not toxic itself but signals poor water quality. In the southern hemisphere summers of 2020 and 2021, elevated geosmin levels contaminated Rio de Janeiro´s drinking water, leading to a massive interruption of supply and triggering widespread diarrhea and nausea. The article traces how diverse actors´ practices of evidencing and experiencing the Geosmin Crisis turned Geosmin into a cultural object around which particular politics of human and environmental health crystallized. While communities along the polluted Guandu River—the city’s main water source—have long endured chronic water insecurity alongside declining aquatic ecologies, residents of Rio’s wealthier South Zone encountered the Geosmin Crisis as an acute disruption marked by brown, foul-smelling tap water and contentious scientific debates over water quality monitoring and health risks. By following these uneven encounters, the article argues that urban ecologies of pollution—“the diverse, partial, and improvisational ways in which pollution is known, lived with, and contested”—offer a critical lens for understanding how multispecies and planetary health politics take shape in practice and become embedded in urban space.

Presentation short abstract

Pollution and its effects in Berlin’s ponds varies widely across space, time, species, and institutional responsibilities. Combining chemistry, ecology, and stakeholder interviews, we map social-ecological linkages to guide improved governance and future planning.

Presentation long abstract

We investigate urban pollution in and around small urban waterbodies using an inter- and transdisciplinary approach in Berlin, Germany. We combine water chemistry, urban ecology, and data on public perception and human–wildlife interactions to understand how water, noise, and light pollution vary across the city and how they affect its multispecies inhabitants. We complement these datasets with interviews with district administrations and other stakeholders, together with publicly available information on wastewater, stormwater, and pond management and history. To integrate these heterogeneous materials, we apply a social-ecological network approach linking pollutants, species groups, infrastructures, and administrative actors. This method helps identify direct and indirect linkages across ecological and institutional domains. Our chemical analyses reveal distinct spatial and temporal differences in pollutants across ponds and small lakes, though it remains challenging to directly link pollution patterns to land use, human activities, or water sources. Ecological surveys show that bacteria, aquatic vegetation, birds, and bats respond differently to pollutants, highlighting how unevenly pollution affects various organisms. Interviews further reveal tensions in governance: as one stakeholder stated, “some ponds are there to be polluted” and function as buffers against urban contamination, while others act as essential stepping stones for biodiversity with exuberant life even in highly urbanized contexts. By linking these social-ecological patterns with institutional structures, our study lays the groundwork for evidence-based improvements in pond governance and supports a participatory scenario process to envision desirable futures for the more than 600 small waterbodies of the German capital.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines artificial light as urban pollution by analysing the nocturnal ecologies shaped by light infrastructure in Zurich. Drawing on walking interviews, it shows how light infrastructures disrupt habitats while generating contested spaces of governance and multispecies coexistence.

Presentation long abstract

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is increasingly recognised as a form of urban pollution, an ecological and endocrine disruptor that reshapes habitats, species behaviour, and the politics of urban environments. Cities around the world are attempting to address astronomical and ecological light pollution through techno-managerial measures such as smart lighting, spectral regulations, and environmental standards. Yet, while seeking to mitigate light as a pollutant, these approaches often obscure the more-than-human socio-ecological relations that light infrastructures mediate. This paper brings a political ecology of pollution perspective to the nighttime city, showing how ALAN simultaneously produces ecological harm and generates contested spaces of multispecies coexistence and justice. Drawing on more than thirty walking interviews with lighting planners, ecologists, researchers, public authorities, darkness and light-pollution advocates, and marginalised social groups, conducted primarily in Zurich, the paper examines how light infrastructures become sites where pollution, urban planning, governance, and multispecies coexistence intersect. Focusing on various situated nocturnal ecologies across the city, such as water bats along Zurich’s watercourses such as the Schanzengraben and the Limmat, fireflies (in particular Italian fireflies) on highland meadows in Zurich such as around the Kreuzkirche, and urban spiders inhabiting illuminated façades and bridges, we explore how the intersections among the socioecological effects of light pollution on humans and other-than-human actors shape the emergence of democratic and insurgent planning solutions that recognise these intersections in their response to light pollution and multispecies coexsistence in the city.

Presentation short abstract

This paper traces the relationship between the spatiality of environmental pollution and the encoding of ‘proper residence’ in the south eastern Indian city of Chennai. It calls for attending to the politics of inhabitation in contesting and remaking this polluted world.

Presentation long abstract

In Dec 2023, when residents of Ennore mobilised against the poisoning of their air and water by hazardous industries, they were met with a bewildering response. Ennore was not a residential area, how could factories be held responsible poisoning where people were expected not to reside?

A predominantly fishing town woven into a rich estuarine ecosystem, Ennore is now heavily polluted by industries, power plants and ports. Now, Chennai is no stranger to watery environs, as much of the city has been unabashedly built over marshlands, canals & former irrigation tanks.

Yet, it is the north Chennai wetlands, inhabited by working classes and oppressed castes; coastal sands that are home to fishing communities; canal and river banks historically settled by workers without access to land that are marked as sites of improper inhabitation. The logics of extractive pollution and a caste-inflected social geography construct these as spaces of ‘non-residence’ and environmental vulnerability available for development and displacement.

This paper traces the particular encoding of ‘residence’ to the social difference produced along the axes of land and water. What then does it mean to dwell in this ‘already polluted’ world? The paper posits that transgressions of the code through fishing, foraging, drying, cooking from the sea and its many estuarine inlets - in Ennore and all along Chennai’s seashore – constitute acts of asserting coastal residence, including for more than human inhabitants. They present an eminent practice of not only making home but also building worlds in an ‘already climate-changed landscape’.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how the extension of logistics into urban spaces transforms local ecologies and sparks social contestation. It shows how contamination operates as a top-down justification for new polluting projects, as a language of protest, and as an alternative socio-ecological imaginary.

Presentation long abstract

The ongoing expansion of logistics infrastructures and port facilities is reshaping urban environments, generating new disconnections between city dwellers and water landscapes, encouraging the spread of non-native species, and producing diverse forms of pollution. This paper traces the web of ecological transformations and contestations emerging from the gradual extension of the port of Montreal into neighborhoods in the city’s Southeast – areas often referred to as the “black lung of the city”. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine the ways in which urban residents and grassroots organizations work to render visible the largely undetected and indeterminate effects of global commodity flows on their everyday lives. In urban spaces marked by long histories of toxic exposure, I show how contamination operates simultaneously as a top-down justification for new polluting projects, as a language of protest, and as an alternative socio-ecological imaginary. As official decontamination efforts enable further cycles of destruction and exploitation, polluted urban natures increasingly become catalysts for collective attachments and emerging practices of care and conservation.

Presentation short abstract

Paper examines sanitation infrastructure in Mumbai's self-built settlements on colonial-era landfills. Through ethnographic work with contractors, we show how safety emerges through navigating subsurface contamination rather than achieving its absence, challenging assumptions that waste can go away.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores situated practices of sanitation infrastructure-making in Mumbai's self-built settlements to examine constructions of 'safe' sanitation amidst legacies of waste contamination. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation of sanitation construction practices and extensive work-life history interviews with 22 contractors building household toilets in Mumbai's M East ward, we reveal how contemporary sanitation practices intersect with colonial-era landfill legacies. These contractors work on unstable, sinking grounds composed of municipal waste accumulated for a century, where each excavation encounters layers of historical contamination rather than stable ground. The analysis demonstrates how contractors' situated expertise emerges through navigating multiple contamination streams simultaneously - managing fresh bodily wastes alongside subsurface contamination from colonial waste disposal. Through incremental learning and adaptive construction techniques responsive to shifting ground conditions, contractors develop localised understandings of safety, where 'majbooti' becomes central to safety repertoires. Their practices reveal how sanitation infrastructure serves as a critical interface mediating between surface living spaces and subsurface contamination histories. This situated knowledge challenges conventional notions of 'safely managed' sanitation that assume waste can be made to go 'away.' Instead, contractors' experiences expose the impossibility of separation when infrastructure must be built within rather than above contamination. Their expertise, developed through intimate material engagement with subsurface contamination, demonstrates how safety emerges relationally through managing ongoing pollution rather than achieving its absence. While not romanticising unsafe conditions, we argue for more pluralistic understandings of sanitation safety that recognise the expertise of those building infrastructure within, rather than despite, contaminated urban grounds.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores how mould is mobilised to protest housing and wider injustices in the UK context. It argues that mould acts as both material and metaphor, bringing attention to forms of racialised blame generated through UK migration, housing and welfare regimes.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation explores how mould becomes lived and known as a materiality to protest urban injustice. It presents ethnographic research involving biographic interviews and creative workshops with 50 Somali mothers experiencing housing distress in temporary accommodation in Birmingham, UK. These methods explored the everyday practices through which residents (re)produced scientific and medicalised evidentiary regimes in a hostile state context. Following the mobilisation of mould in and through women’s struggles for safe homes, we argue that mould acts as both material and metaphor, bringing attention to forms of racialised blame generated through UK Hostile Environment and housing policies. We show how the subjects of such policies mobilise mould – and its perceived impact on their bodies - as sites of evidence to hail the state. Drawing on STS, anthropological and geographic literature, this paper is part of a broader move to understand how toxic evidence is mobilised within the relational politics of post-welfare states.

Presentation short abstract

Through feminist political ecology, this paper shows how groups sanitation commoning in Accra challenge and mediate waste-driven enclosure. Collective cleaning emerges as reproductive and political labour to sustain shared urban spaces amid postcolonial austerity and inequality.

Presentation long abstract

Each week in Accra, community groups haul waterlogged textile waste from beaches, desilt drainage systems, and sweep neighbourhood gutters blocked by plastics and refuse they did not produce. This paper examines how residents practice sanitation commoning: collectivised cleaning labour that challenges the enclosure of shared urban spaces, particularly on customary and public lands. Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork (2024–2025) with a coastal youth cleanup initiative, a dues-paying mothers’ organisation, and citywide environmental volunteers, I show how waste forecloses access to land where communities have maintained collective tenure or use despite intensifying pressure to privatise.

Structural adjustment’s austerity policies, expanding public–private partnerships, and accelerating transnational waste flows converge in postcolonial cities to overwhelm municipal systems and deposit trash burdens in the urban commons of neighbourhoods made marginal. Waste, products of distant commodification, materially withdraws these lands from collective use. Clean-up groups made up of those positioned precariously take on gendered, racialised, classed, and spatially uneven cleaning work in under-serviced neighbourhoods, storm drains, coastal ecosystems, and roadsides. While their commoning capacities are differentiated, each group creates routines, rules, rhythms, and asserts legitimacy. They do so as political actors navigating impossible scalar mismatches between local capacity and upstream drivers’ overproduction.

Using feminist political ecology and postcolonial intersectionality (Mollett and Faria 2013), I conceptualise sanitation commoning as grassroots governance in which residents collectivise reproductive labour to contest and mediate enclosure. This makes visible how urban commons persist through maintenance: essential, exhausting, risk-filled, and irreducible political work, and not only through definitive reclamation.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how and why lay peoples’ experience has been incommensurate with U.S. air pollution governance. I detail how grassroots activists resist and challenge the state, showcasing how dominant, technical solutions channel attention and resources into efforts that do not alleviate harm.

Presentation long abstract

Despite technical advances in air pollution monitors, their prevalence, and thirty-five years of U.S. environmental justice (EJ) scholarship and advocacy, communities of color continue to bear the brunt of air pollution and its consequences. In Detroit, Michigan, residents have been propelled into EJ activism, asserting that their health problems are linked to air pollution from the fifty-two industrial facilities that surround their community. Since the early 2000s, they have established working relationships with state bureaucrats and academic experts, culminating in a $2.7 million network of air quality sensors. However, they feel little long-term relief.

This paper examines how and why residents’ experiences have been incommensurate with environmental policymaking and how technical elites contribute to shaping those conditions. I illustrate how grassroots resident-activists construct and deploy embodied air pollution knowledge, utilizing sensorial experiences and networks of community trust to challenge official, technical knowledge. In doing so, I elucidate how these activists bring environmental harm “emotionally to life” to counter state data that de-humanizes the consequences of persistent air pollution. Then, I analyze disconnects between different stakeholders' perceptions of barriers to improved air pollution policy. I argue that dominant actors deploy a data deficit frame, promoting exclusively technical, data-driven solutions. Then, I detail how activists challenge these efforts; instead, situating regulatory inaction as a systemic problem embedded within neoliberal regulation and racial capitalism. Overall, I argue that air pollution governance and associated actors co-opt the language of the EJ movement, channeling attention and resources into technical solutions that do not alleviate harm.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation probes the question if pollution can be considered as heritage through the example of former military training grounds in Germany.

Presentation long abstract

Whereas heritage is commonly associated with what is deemed worthy of preservation, the material remains of pollution have long been excluded from cultural memory. In recent years, debates on toxic commons have raised the question of how to reintegrate these “unwanted” remains into collective understandings of heritage. This presentation probes the question if pollution can be considered as heritage through the example of former military training grounds in Germany. Following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in the early 1990s, militarized landscapes predominantly located in Eastern Germany were entrusted to nature conservation organizations under the Naturerbe (Natural Heritage) initiative. These sites bear a distinctive landscape profile marked by decades of tank manoeuvres, bombing, and live ammunition. Yet, some of these sites are considered highly biodiverse. Today, conservation organizations aim to preserve them in their “original” state—a concept that is inherently ambiguous and subject to interpretation. Conservation practices involve mimicking former military activities with controlled burning, conservation tanks, and the help of grazing animals, whilst navigating around explosive shells buried beneath the surface. As cleaning-up and remediating these vast polluted landscapes is often too costly, somewhat paradoxically, their toxic legacies have allowed militarized landscapes to be reframed as “natural heritage.” But which material reckonings with the past are embedded in this idea of heritage and which ones are excluded?

Presentation short abstract

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London has, since its inception, been framed as an archetypal project of urban landscape remediation. This paper explores the tricky, potentially even conceited, politics of in/visbility which underpins the parks claims towards ecological remediation.

Presentation long abstract

Urban pollution often becomes perceptible at moments when ecologies fail, break down, or die. But what happens when urban ecologies themselves become the modality by which histories of toxicity, pollution, and unequal exposure are hidden from view? By tracing the contemporary reconfiguration of urban metabolism at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, East London, this paper explores the tricky, often duplicitous, ways in which contemporary landscape infrastructure interventions are working to simultaneously remediate a historically polluted urban landscape at the same time as displacing its histories of toxic waste beneath the surface: out of sight, out of mind. During the construction of the park, 2,000,000 m³ of soil, contaminated with heavy metals and radioactive materials, was excavated, washed, 'hospitalized', bioremediated, and selectively returned alongside vast amounts of newly imported topsoil. A decade later and the landscape has undoubtedly been an ameliorative success - on the surface at least. Beneath the imported topsoils and undulating topography of bioswales, recovered riverbanks and rills, lies a geotextile membrane layer which serves as an artificial barrier to a vast amount of unremediated, toxic, and at places dangerously radioactive aggregate material. By illuminating this infrastructural 'sleight-of-hand', this paper conceptualises a new 'politics of in/visibility' (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000) which is being rearticulated by emergent design strategies that simultaneously celebrate remediation and recovery above ground, while actively sealing off the toxic legacies and chemical afterlives of unequal exposure which lie below.