Slide Situated Urban Political Ecology Collective

Reading List

African Urbanism

Overviews:
  • Mabogunje, A. L. (1990). Urban planning and the post-colonial state in Africa: a research overview. African Studies Review, 33(02), 121-203.
  • Myers G (2011) African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice. London and New York: Zed Books
  • Parnell, S., & Pieterse, E. A. (2014). Africa’s urban revolution. Zed Books.
Seminal texts:
  • Simon, D. (1992). Cities, capital and development: African cities in the world economy. * Belhaven Press.
  • Rakodi, C. (1997). The urban challenge in Africa: Growth and management of its large cities. United Nations Univ.
  • Davidson, B. (1959). The lost cities of Africa. J. Currey.
  • The works of Akin Mabogunje; for an overview, click here.
Other texts we found particularly useful:

See more here on the African Centre for Cities website

Urban Political Ecology

Overviews:
  • Heynen, N. (2013). Urban political ecology I: The urban century. Progress in Human Geography, 0309132513500443.
  • Keil R (2003) Urban political ecology: A progress report.Urban Geography 24:723–738
  • Keil R (2005) Progress report: Urban political ecology.Urban Geography 26:640–651
  • Zimmer A (2010) Urban political ecology: theoretical concepts, challenges, and suggested future directions.Erkunde4:343–35
Seminal texts:
  • Heynen, N, Kaika, M and Swyngedouw, E (2006)In the Nature of Cities. London: Routledge
  • Swyngedouw E (2004) Social Power and the Urbanisation of Water. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  • Myers, G. A. (1999). Political ecology and urbanisation: Zanzibar’s construction materials industry. The Journal of modern African studies, 37(01), 83-108.
Empirical cases (African)
  • Gandy M (2006) Planning, anti-planning and the infrastructure crisis facing metropolitan Lagos.Urban Studies 43(2):371–396
  • Lawhon M (2013) Flows, friction and the sociomaterial metabolization of alcohol.Antipode 45(3): 681-701
  • Myers G (2005) Disposable Cities: Garbage, Governance And Sustainable Development in Urban Africa. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing
  • Njeru J (2006). The urban political ecology of plastic bag waste problem in Nairobi, Kenya.Geoforum, 37(6): 1046-58.
  • Njeru, J. (2013). “Donor-driven” neoliberal reform processes and urban environmental change in Kenya: The case of Karura Forest in Nairobi.Progress in Development Studies 13(1): 63–78
  • Silver, J. (2014). Incremental infrastructures: material improvisation and social collaboration across post-colonial Accra. Urban Geography, 35(6), 788-804.
Conceptual arguments
  • Lawhon, Mary, Ernstson, Henrik and Jonathan Silver. (2014). Provincialising urban political ecology: towards a situated UPE through African urbanism. Antipode. 46(2): 497-516
  • Loftus A (2012) Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
  • Myers G (2008) Sustainable development and environmental justice in African cities.Geography Compass 2(3):695–708
  • Gabriel N (2014) Urban Political Ecology: Environmental Imaginary, Governance, and the Non-HumanGeography Compass8(1):38-48
  • Monstadt J (2009) Conceptualizing the political ecology of urban infrastructures: Insights from technology and urban studies. Environment and Planning A41(8): 1924-1942
  • Swyngedouw E (1996) The city as a hybrid: On nature, society and cyborg urbanization.Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 7(2): 65–80
  • Swyngedouw E (2006) Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities.Science and Culture15:105–121
Empirical cases (non-African)
  • Kaika M (2005) City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City.London and New York: Routledge
  • Ranganathan M (In press) Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban PeripheryInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research
  • Rademacher, A,. and Sivaramakrishnan, K. (eds) (2013)Ecologies of Urbanism in India:Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability. New York: Columbia University Press
  • Truelove Y (2011) (Re-)Conceptualizing water inequality in Delhi, India through a feminist political ecology framework.Geoforum42(2):143–152
  • Gandy M (2004) Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city.City 8(3):363–379.
  • Gandy M (2005) Cyborg urbanization: complexity and monstrosity in the contemporary city.International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(1):26–49
  • Heynen N (2003) The scalar production of injustice within the urban forest.Antipode 35(5):980–998 Swyngedouw E and Heynen N (eds) (2003) Urban political ecology in advanced capitalist countries. Antipode35(5)
  • Swyngedouw E (1997) Power, nature, and the city. The conquest of water and the political ecology of urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador: 1880-1990.Environment and Planning A 29(2):311–332

Southern Theory

Overviews/seminal works:
Other works we found particularly useful:
  • Ernstson, H., Lawhon, M., & Duminy, J. (2014). Conceptual vectors of African urbanism:‘engaged theory-making’and ‘platforms of engagement’. Regional Studies, 48(9), 1563-1577.
  • Robinson J (2006)Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. Routledge, London
  • Bayat A (2000) From ‘Dangerous Classes’ to ‘Quiet Rebels’:  politics of the urban subaltern in the Global South.  International Sociology15:533-557
  • Lawhon M (2013) Situated, networked environmentalisms: a case for environmental theory from the South.Geography Compass 7(2): 128–138
  • Parnell, S., & Oldfield, S. (2014). The Routledge handbook on cities of the global south. Routledge.
  • Simone A (2004) People as infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg.Public Culture 16(3):407-429

Political Ecology

A good overview:
Seminal texts:
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