Format/Structure

Traditional paper presentations.

Long Abstract

Urban Political Ecology (UPE) provides a vital lens for understanding cities as spaces of socio-ecological politics, foregrounding the contested and interest-driven organisation of urban metabolic processes. In a context of overlapping crises – from climate change to deepening social inequalities – this offers a tool for understanding urban fragmentation and exploring radical alternatives that address the democratic appropriation and transformation of urban life.

This panel focuses on how urban metabolisms are shaped by infrastructure that mediates socio-ecological relations. Infrastructure plays a key role in both reproducing structures of inequality and exploitation and enabling incremental or transformative change. While global environmental change and rising inequalities highlight the urgent need for sustainable and equitable services, many states still rely on modernist approaches based on the ideal of rationally planned networked cities, which have proven insufficient in the Global South. This session challenges this ideal by exploring how diverse patchworks of technologies, practices, and relations – heterogeneous infrastructure configurations – coexist to deliver essential services across the world and how inherent contradictions, fractures, and disruptions bear the potential for politicising responses to the polycrisis.

We invite contributions within the broad field of UPE, and particularly those that mobilise UPE to explore the intersection of urban metabolism and infrastructure. How can a dialectical approach to urban metabolism help us conceptualise and investigate efforts to democratise urban services? What critical insights can we develop by studying diverse infrastructure patchworks? What kinds of politics are enabled by different infrastructure configurations? What is and could be just and sustainable infrastructure beyond the traditional modern/arcadian binary? We are particularly interested in contributions that address the role of human labour as a mediator of metabolic relations and those that link these infrastructure questions to broader political ecology debates, including future imaginaries, political economy, and questions of ownership and property.

This Panel has 12 pending paper proposals.
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