Presentation short abstract

The presentation contributes to the agenda of spatialising and urbanising degrowth in the global South by showing how more-than-human centered approaches to resisting large-scale infrastructure projects can help to situate UPE research and articulate alternative urban futures.

Presentation long abstract

Recent scholarship has suggested that there is a need for degrowth research to engage with the substantial Global North/South dialogue that has emerged in critical urban studies over the past decade. However, much of this literature to date has not engaged significantly with more-than-human approaches or insights. Nonetheless, more-than-human scholarship is well equipped to offer unique and situated approaches to addressing current interconnected planetary crises such as extreme weather (climate change) impacts, the biodiversity crisis and the politics of growth by highlighting the relational entanglements of more-than-human life. As such, both strands of research have in common the aim of exposing and confronting the metabolic demands and implications of large-scale urbanisation, which often take on different meanings and spatial forms when examined in a global South context.

In this presentation, I argue that understanding more-than-human centered approaches to degrowth in cities of the Global South requires a situated urban political ecology (UPE) approach focused on grassroots practices and environmental activism. It draws on two cases of grassroots efforts in Malaysia and Singapore which have used more-than-human discourses and approaches to resist large-scale infrastructure projects. These spatially and socially distinct efforts are framed as interconnected critiques of state-led capitalist urban development that offer alternatives to growth-centered infrastructure. The presentation thereby contributes to the agenda of urbanising degrowth by showing how grassroots practices in southern cities can help to provincialise UPE research and articulate alternative urban futures grounded in environmental justice, commons, and care.