© 2003 Editorial Board of Antipode. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,Malden, MA 02148, USA

SPECIAL ISSUE

Urban Political Ecology, Justice andthe Politics of Scale

Guest Editors: Erik Swyngedouw and Nikolas C Heynen

Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale

Erik SwyngedouwSchool of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University, Oxford, UK;

erik.swyngedouw@geog.ox.ac.uk

Nikolas C Heynen Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,

Milwaukee, WI, USA; nheynen@uwm.edu

This and the subsequent papers in this special issue set out the contours of Marxian urban politicalecology and call for greater research attention to a neglected field of critical research that, givenits political importance, requires urgent attention. Notwithstanding the important contributions ofother critical perspectives on urban ecology, Marxist urban political ecology provides an integratedand relational approach that helps untangle the interconnected economic, political, social andecological processes that together go to form highly uneven and deeply unjust urban landscapes.Because the power-laden socioecological relations that shape the formation of urban environ-ments constantly shift between groups of actors and scales, historical-geographical insights intothese ever-changing urban configurations are necessary for the sake of considering the future ofradical political-ecological urban strategies. The social production of urban environments is gainingrecognition within radical and historical-materialist geography. The political programme, then, ofurban political ecology is to enhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental constructionby identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and amore inclusive mode of environmental production can be achieved.

Introduction In the summer of 1998, the Southeast Asian financial bubble imploded.Global capital moved spasmodically from place to place, leaving citieslike Jakarta with a social and physical wasteland where dozens ofunfinished skyscrapers are dotted over the landscape while thousandsof unemployed children, women and men roam the streets in searchof survival. In the meantime, El Niño’s global dynamics were wreakinghavoc in the region with its climatic disturbances. Puddles of stagnant

water in the defunct concrete buildings that had once promised con-tinuing capital accumulation for Indonesia became breeding groundsand great ecological niches for mosquitoes. Malaria and dengue feversuddenly joined with unemployment and social and political mayhemin shaping Jakarta’s cityscape. Global capital fused with global climate,with local power struggles and with socioecological conditions to reshapeJakarta’s urban socioecological conditions in profound, radical anddeeply troubling ways.

This example suggests how cities are dense networks of interwovensociospatial processes that are simultaneously local and global, humanand physical, cultural and organic. The myriad transformations and metab-olisms that support and maintain urban life—such as, for example,water, food, computers, or movies—always combine physical and socialprocesses as infinitely interconnected (Latour 1993; Latour and Hermant1998; Swyngedouw 1999). Imagine, for example, standing on the cornerof London’s Piccadilly Circus, and consider the socioenvironmentalmetabolic relations that come together in this global-local place. Smells,tastes, and bodies from all nooks and crannies of the world are float-ing by, consumed, displayed, narrated, visualised and transformed.The “Rainforest” shop and restaurant play to the tune of ecosensitiveshopping and the multibillion-pound ecoindustry while competing withMcDonalds’ burgers and Dunkin’ Donuts; the sounds of world musicvibrate from Tower Records; and people, spices, clothes, foodstuffsand materials from all over the world whirl by. The neon lights are fedby energy coming from nuclear power plants and from coal- or gas-fired electricity generators. The cars burning fuels from distant oil-deposits and pumping CO2 into the air, affecting people, forests, climates,and geopolitical conditions around the globe, further complete theglobal geographic mappings and traces that flow through the urbanand “produce” London as a palimpsest of densely layered bodily,local, national and global—but depressingly uneven geographically—socioecological processes. This intermingling of things material, socialand symbolic combines to produce a particular socioenvironmentalmilieu that welds nature, society and the city together in a deeplyheterogeneous, conflicting and often disturbing whole (Davis 1998;Swyngedouw 1996). The socioecological footprint of the city hasbecome global. There is no longer an outside or limit to the city, andthe urban process harbours social and ecological processes that areembedded in dense and multilayered networks of local, regional,national and global connections.

In the emerging literature on political ecology, little attention hasbeen paid so far to the urban as a process of socioecological change,while discussions about global environmental problems and the possi-bilities for a “sustainable” future customarily ignore the urban originof many of the problems. Similarly, the expansive literature on the

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technical aspects of urban environments fails to acknowledge the in-timate relationship between the antinomies of capitalist urbanisationprocesses and environmental injustices (see Swyngedouw forthcominga). Nevertheless, “environmental” issues have been central to urbanchange and urban politics for at least a century, if not longer.

Visionaries of all sorts lamented the “unsustainable” character ofearly modern cities and proposed solutions and plans that wouldremedy the socioenvironmental dystopias that characterised much ofurban life and produce a healthy “wholesome” urban living. FriedrichEngels ([1845] 1987) had, of course, already noted in the mid-19thcentury how the depressing sanitary and ecological conditions ofEngland’s great cities were related to the class character of industrialurbanisation. Much later, Raymond Williams pointed out in TheCountry and the City ([1973] 1985) that the transformation of natureand the social relations inscribed therein are inextricably connected tothe process of urbanisation. Indeed, the dialectic of the environmentand urbanisation consolidates a particular set of social relations through“an ecological transformation, which requires the reproduction ofthose relations in order to sustain it” (Harvey 1996:94). These socio-environmental changes result in the continuous production of new“natures”, of new urban social and physical environmental conditions.All of these processes occur in the realms of power in which socialactors strive to defend and create their own environments in a contextof class, ethnic, racialised and/or gender conflicts and power struggles.Of course, under capitalism, the commodity relation veils and hidesthe multiple socioecological processes of domination/subordinationand exploitation/repression that feed the capitalist urbanisation processand turn the city into a kaleidoscopic, metabolic socioenvironmentalprocess that stretches from the immediate environment to the remotestcorners of the globe. Indeed, the apparently self-evident commodificationof nature that fundamentally underpins a market-based society notonly obscures the social relations of power inscribed therein, but alsopermits the disconnection of the perpetual flows of metabolised, trans-formed and commodified nature from its inevitable foundation—thatis, the transformation of nature (Katz 1998). In sum, the environmentof the city—both social and physical—is the result of a historical-geographical process of the urbanisation of nature (Swyngedouw andKaika 2000).

Although Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991) does not address the environ-ment of the city directly, he does remind us of what the urban reallyis—that is, something akin to a vast and variegated whirlpool, repletewith all the ambivalence of a space full of opportunity, playfulness andliberating potential, while being entwined with spaces of oppression,exclusion and marginalisation. Cities seem to hold the promise of eman-cipation and freedom whilst skilfully mastering the whip of repression

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and domination (Merrifield and Swyngedouw 1997). Perpetual changeand an ever-shifting mosaic of environmentally and socioculturallydistinct urban ecologies—varying from the manufactured and mani-cured landscaped gardens of gated communities and high-technologycampuses to the ecological war zones of depressed neighbourhoods,with lead-painted walls and asbestos-covered ceilings, waste dumps andpollutant-infested areas—still shape the choreography of a capitalisturbanisation process. The environment of the city is deeply caught upin this dialectical process, and environmental ideologies, practices andprojects are part and parcel of this urbanisation of nature process. Need-less to say, the above constructionist perspective considers the processof urbanisation to be an integral part of the production of new en-vironments and new natures. Such a view sees both nature and societyas fundamentally combined in historical-geographical productionprocesses (see, among others, Castree 1995; Smith 1984, 1996, 1998a).

The papers in this special issue each address, in their own way, howthe production of urban “nature” is highly contested terrain. The fusionbetween the interests of the chemical industry and the constructedaesthetics of lawn-based suburbia, explored in the paper by Paul Robbinsand Julie Sharp, testifies to the intricate power relations, both symbolicand material, that operate at a variety of geographical scales but becomematerialised in the particular geographies of high-input lawns. Similarly,Nikolas Heynen argues how questions of environmental social justicebecome etched into programmes of reforestation, which produce,depending on their “scalar” configuration, distinct outcomes with respectto issues of socioenvironmental justice. The paper by Maria Kaika sug-gests how the political economy of urbanisation in Athens operates,among others, in and through the interweaving of discursive andmaterial practices with respect to the urbanisation of nature and, inparticular, of water. The contested politics of urban water circulationare simultaneously the arena in which and means through which par-ticular political-economic programmes are pursued and implemented.All of these contributions suggest how the urban process fundamentallyconstitutes a political-ecological process, one that shapes the processof production of urban natures.

From these perspectives, there is no such thing as an unsustainablecity in general. Rather, there are a series of urban and environmentalprocesses that negatively affect some social groups while benefitingothers. A just urban socioenvironmental perspective, therefore, alwaysneeds to consider the question of who gains and who pays and to askserious questions about the multiple power relations—and the scalargeometry of these relations—through which deeply unjust socio-environmental conditions are produced and maintained. This requiressensitivity to the political ecology of urbanisation, rather than the in-voking of particular ideologies and views about the assumed qualities

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that inhere in nature itself. Before we can embark on outlining thedimensions of such an urban political-ecological enquiry, we need toconsider the matter of nature in greater detail, in particular in light ofthe accelerating processes by which nature becomes urbanised throughthe deepening metabolic interactions between social and ecologicalprocesses.

The Urbanisation of Nature The importance of the social and material production of urban naturehas recently emerged as an area of importance within historical-geographical materialist, radical geography (Benton 1996; Castree1995; Gandy 2002; Grundman 1991; Harvey 1996; Hughes 2000; Keiland Graham 1998; Smith 1984; Swyngedouw 1996, 1997). Thispresents an important departure from the agrarian or “rural” focus ofmuch environmental history (see Worster 1993). While there is animportant body of literature that focuses on urban environmental his-tory (see Hurley 1997; Melosi 2000; Tarr 1996), Marxist urban politicalecology more explicitly recognises that the material conditions thatcomprise urban environments are controlled and manipulated andserve the interests of the elite at the expense of marginalised popu-lations. These conditions, in turn, are not independent of social, politicaland economic processes and from cultural constructions of what con-stitutes the “urban” or the “natural” (Kaika and Swyngedouw 1999). Theinterrelated web of socioecological relations that bring about highlyuneven urban environments, as well as shaping processes of unevengeographical development at other geographical scales, has become apivotal terrain around which political action crystallises and socialmobilisations take place. The excavation of these processes requiresurgent theoretical attention. Such a project, of course, requires great sensi-tivity to and understanding of physical and biochemical processes. In fact,it is exactly those “natural” metabolisms and transformations thatbecome discursively, politically and economically mobilised and sociallyappropriated to produce environments that embody and reflect positionsof social power. Put simply, gravity and photosynthesis are not sociallyproduced, of course. However, their powers are socially mobilised toserve particular purposes, and the latter are invariably associated withstrategies of achieving or maintaining particular positionalities ofsocial power and express shifting geometries of social power.

It is exactly this mobilisation and transformation of nature and theallied process of producing new socioenvironmental conditions thatare at the heart of Marxist political ecology and that are addressed inthis and the subsequent papers. Such perspective, in turn, recognisesthe acting of nonhuman actors, as suggested by Actor NetworkTheory, but insists on the social positioning and political articulationof such “acting” (see Latour 1999a). Moreover, historical-geographical

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materialist perspectives are rather concerned with the contested makingof socionatural networked arrangements, rather than with a meredense description of such networks. Finally, it insists that urban socio-ecological metabolisms are inherently social and material, yet embeddedin discursively scripted and culturally imagined understandings (seeCastree 2002; Swyngedouw 1999).

In the opening passage of Social Justice and the City, Harvey (1973:22)suggests that “The city is manifestly a complicated thing”. And whileHarvey (1973:22) suggests our understanding of this thing is a directresult of the complications inherent in it, he also suggests our prob-lems can “be attributed to our failure to conceptualise the situationcorrectly”. For these reasons, the expansion of urban political ecologynot only will be a useful project, but is becoming increasingly centralto emancipatory urban politics and to the resurgent quest for morejust socioecological conditions.

Historical-geographical materialism is, of course, based on the prin-ciple that all living organisms need to transform “nature” and that, asa result of this transformation, both humans and “nature” are changed.Much of this goes back to Marx’s (1975:328) notion that

Nature is man’s [sic] inorganic body, that is to say nature in so far asit is not the human body. Man [sic] lives from nature, i.e. nature is hisbody, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is notto die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to naturesimply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature.(emphasis added)

Nature and humans, materially and culturally, are social and historicalfrom the very beginning (Castree 1995; Haraway 1997; Smith 1996,1998a). While an understanding of the changes that have occurredwithin urban environments lies at the heart of political ecology research,they must inherently be understood within the context of the economic,political and social relations that have led to urban environmentalchange. As a result of the inherently uneven processes that produceurban environments, Swyngedouw and Kaika (2000:574) suggest “thatbecause of the capitalist, thus by extension social, processes thatcreate and recreate uneven socioecological urban landscapes … it isnecessary to focus on the political economic processes that bringabout injustice … not the natural artefacts that are produced throughthese uneven social processes”. Obviously, the material production of environments is necessarily impregnated by the mobilisation ofparticular discourses and understandings (if not ideologies) of andabout nature and the environment.

The social appropriation and transformation of nature produceshistorically specific social and physical natures that are infused bynumerous social power relationships (Swyngedouw 1996). Social beings

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necessarily produce nature; nature becomes a sociophysical processinfused with political power and cultural meaning (Haraway 1991,1997). In addition, the transformation of nature is embedded in aseries of social, political, cultural and economic social relations thatare tied together in a nested articulation of significant but intrinsicallyunstable geographical scales. Indeed, urban socioecological conditionsare intimately related to the socioecological processes that operateover a much larger, often global, space. For example, the politics ofrecycling of e-waste in Seattle simultaneously produces the sociallyexploitative and environmentally apocalyptic spaces of e-waste dump-ing in China and other parts of the developing world. The politics ofurbanisation of Athens and the engineering of its waters is not onlyembedded in local and national political-ecological processes andrelations, but also inserted in capital flows negotiated at the level ofthe European Union. In sum, the scalar geometry of urban politicalecology welds together processes operating at a variety of nested andarticulated geographical scales.

Engels (1940:45) spoke to the complexities inherent to these socio-ecological relations when he suggested that “When we consider andreflect upon nature at large … at first we see the picture of an endlessentanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and com-binations, in which nothing remains what, where, and as it was, buteverything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away”. Thenotion of “metabolism” is the central metaphor for Marx’s (1976:283,290) approach to analysing the dynamic internal relationships betweenhuman and nature:

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a processby which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, andcontrols the metabolism between himself and nature. He confrontsthe materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion thenatural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head, andhands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a formadapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts uponexternal nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneouslychanges his own nature.… [Labouring] is the purposeful activityaimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation ofwhat exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universalcondition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature,the ever-lasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, andit is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or ratherit is common to all forms of society in which human beings live.

This socionatural metabolism is, for Marx, the foundation of andpossibility for history, a socioenvironmental history through which thenature of both humans and nonhumans is transformed. To the extent

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that labour constitutes the universal premise for human metabolicinteraction with nature, the particular social relations through whichthis metabolism of nature is enacted shape the form this metabolicrelation takes. Clearly, any materialist approach insists that “nature”is an integral part of the metabolism of social life. Social relationsoperate in and through metabolising the “natural” environment andtransform both society and nature.

Marx undoubtedly borrowed the notion of “metabolic interaction”from von Liebig, the founding theoretician of modern agriculturalchemistry (Foster 2002). In fact, the original German word is Stoffwechsel,which simultaneously means circulation, exchange and transformationof material elements (see Swyngedouw forthcoming a). As Foster(2000:157–158) argues, the notion of metabolism is central to Marx’spolitical economy and is directly implicated in and possibility for thecirculation of commodities and, consequently, of money as capital:“The economic circular flow then was closely bound up, in Marx’sanalysis, with the material exchange (ecological circular flow) asso-ciated with the metabolic interaction between human beings andnature.”

Under capitalist social relations, then, the metabolic production ofuse-values operates in and through specific social relations of control,ownership and appropriation and in the context of the mobilisation ofboth (sometimes already metabolised) nature and labour to producecommodities (as forms of metabolised socionatures) with an eyetowards the realisation of the embodied exchange value. The circu-lation of capital as value in motion, then, is the combined metabolictransformations of socionatures in and through the circulation ofmoney as capital under social relations that combine the mobilisationof capital and labour power. New socionatural forms are continuouslyproduced as moments and things in this molecular metabolic processof accumulation (see Benton 1996; Burkett 1999; Foster 2000;Grundman 1991). While nature provides the foundation, the dynamicsof social relations produce nature’s and society’s history. Whether we consider the production of dams, the making of an urban park, the re-engineering of rivers, the transfiguration of DNA codes, themaking of transgenic cyborg species such as Dolly the cloned sheep,or the construction of a skyscraper, they all testify to the particularsocial relations through which socionatural metabolisms are organisedand express the molecular dynamics of a continuously expanding andaccelerating capital circulation process.

Political ecology, then, “combines the concerns of ecology and abroadly defined political economy. Together this encompasses theconstantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources,and also within classes and groups within society itself” (Blaikie andBrookfield 1987:17). Furthermore, Schmink and Wood (1987:39)

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propose that political ecology should be used to explain “how economicand political processes determine the way natural resources have beenexploited”. While these broad definitions lay a sound foundation fromwhich to begin to understand urban political ecology, they are in needof further elaboration and expansion (see Forsyth 2003).

The processes of urbanisation, while implicit in much geographicalresearch, often tend to simply play the role of backdrop for other spatialand social processes. While there has been work done that helps usconsider the spatial distribution of limited urban environmental resources(Swyngedouw 1996), there does not exist a framework through whichto systematically approach issues of uneven urban socioecologicalchange, related explicitly to the inherent spatial patterns the distribu-tion of environmental amenities takes under urban capitalism. Such aframework is an important step towards beginning to disentangle theinterwoven knots of social process, material metabolism and spatialform that go into the formation of contemporary urban socionaturallandscapes.

This special issue of Antipode seeks to present urban political ecologyas a theoretical platform for interrogating the complex, interrelatedsocioecological processes that occur within cities. Peet (1977:6) suggeststhat “Radical science strips away diversions, exposes existing explana-tions to criticism, provides alternative explanations which trace therelationship between ‘social problems’ at the surface and deep societalcauses, and encourages people to engage in their own theory construction”.As a project following suit in the historical-geographical materialist/radical tradition, the aim of urban political ecology is to expose theprocesses that bring about highly uneven urban environments.

The Production of Urban NatureThe relationship between cities and nature has long been a point ofcontention for both environmentally minded social theorists andsocially minded environmental theorists. Urbanisation has long beendiscussed as a process whereby one kind of environment—namely, the “natural” environment—is traded in for, or rather taken over by,a much more crude and unsavoury “built” environment. Bookchin(1979:26) makes this point by suggesting that “[T]he modern cityrepresents a regressive encroachment of the synthetic on the natural,of the inorganic (concrete, metals, and glass) on the organic, or crude,elemental stimuli on variegated wide-ranging ones”. The city is hereposited as the antithesis of nature, the organic is pitted against the artificial and, in the process, a normative ideal is inscribed in themoral order of nature.

Within the last couple of decades, theorisation about human/environment relations has made substantial progress. In particular, aperspective that attempts to transcend this binary logic and the moral

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codes inscribed therein has replaced the crude binary ruling of cityversus the environment. Critical to this progress has been the realisationthat the split between humanity and environment that first becameprominent during the 17th century (Gold 1984) has long impededunderstanding of environmental issues. Along these lines, Swyngedouw(1999:445) suggests that “[C]ontemporary scholars increasinglyrecognise that natural or ecological conditions and processes do notoperate separately from social processes, and that the actually existingsocionatural conditions are always the result of intricate transforma-tions of pre-existing configurations that are themselves inherentlynatural and social”. This was, of course, recognised by Marx morethan 150 years ago, but only recently regained the attention it deservesfrom both Marxists and non-Marxists (Pulido 1996; Whatmore 2002)alike:

It is not the unity of living and active humanity, the natural, inorganicconditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence theirappropriation of nature, which requires explanation, or is the resultof a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganicconditions of human existence and this active existence, a separationwhich is completed posited only in the relation of wage labour andcapital. (Marx [1867] 1973:489).

While the notion that all kinds of environments are socially pro-duced is not new, the idea still has much room for expansion, discussionand illustration. In his landmark book, Uneven Development, Smith(1984:xiv) suggests:

What jars us so much about this idea of the production of nature isthat it defies the conventional, sacrosanct separation of nature andsociety, and it does so with such abandon and without shame. We are used to conceiving of nature as external to society, pristine andpre-human, or else a grand universal in which human beings are but small and simple cogs. But … our concepts have not caught upwith our reality. It is capitalism which ardently defies the inheritedseparation of nature and society, and with pride rather than shame.

Although global/local forms of capitalism have become more en-trenched in all forms of social life, there are still powerful tendenciesto externalise nature. Yet the intricate and ultimately vulnerabledependence of capital accumulation on nature deepens and widenscontinuously. It is on the terrain of the urban that this acceleratingmetabolic transformation of nature becomes most visible, both in itsphysical form and its socioecological consequences.

Although many view the notion of urban environmental landscapesas an oxymoron, Jacobs ([1961] 1992:443) has already suggested thaturban environments “are as natural as colonies of prairie dogs or the

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beds of oysters”. Harvey (1996) has argued that there is nothing intrin-sically unnatural about New York City. He (1996:186) substantiates thisby suggesting that human activity cannot be viewed as external toecosystem function. He (1996:427) suggests that “It is inconsistent tohold that everything in the world relates to everything else, as ecologiststend to, and then decide that the built environment and the urbanstructures that go into it are somehow outside of both theoretical andpractical consideration. The effect has been to evade integrating under-standings of the urbanising process into environmental-ecologicalanalysis”. The conclusion, then, that there is nothing unnatural aboutproduced environments such as cities, dammed rivers or irrigatedfields comes out of the realisation that produced environments arespecific historical results of socioenvironmental processes. Thisscenario can be summed up by simply stating that cities are built outof natural resources through socially mediated natural processes.

Lefebvre’s (1976) take on the notion of “second nature” providesan often-neglected platform from which to discuss the social produc-tion of urban environments. Regarding the social production of urbanenvironments Lefebvre (1976:15) suggests:

Nature, destroyed as such, has already had to be reconstructed atanother level, the level of “second nature” i.e. the town and the urban.The town, anti-nature or non-nature and yet second nature, heraldsthe future world, the world of the generalised urban. Nature, as thesum of particularities which are external to each other and dispersedin space, dies. It gives way to produced space, to the urban. The urban,defined as assemblies and encounters, is therefore the simultaneity(or centrality) of all that exists socially.

While perhaps relinquishing some of the inherent “natural” qualitiesof cities—water, vegetation, air and so on—Lefebvre’s explanation ofsecond nature defines urban environments as necessarily sociallyproduced and thus paves the way to understanding the complex mix ofpolitical, economic and social processes that shape, reshape and reshapeagain urban landscapes. In addition, for Lefebvre, as well as for Harveyor Merrifield (2002), the urban constitutes the pivotal embodiment of capitalist or “modern” social relations, and, by implication, of thewider (and often global) socioecological relations through whichmodern life is produced, in both a material and a cultural sense.

While landscape architects such as Frederick Law Olmsted andEbenezer Howard are often credited with “creating” urban naturallandscapes, the metabolisation of urban nature has a history as long asurbanisation itself (Olmsted 1895). From Mumford’s (1961) exegesisof the history of the city to Koolhaas’s (2002) and colleagues’ (Koolhaaset al 2001) more mesmerising collage of cities as the hyperaccumu-lation of retail-space ecologies and their surreal beauty of layered,

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chaotic compositions, various writers share the notion that urbanenvironments, in their cultural presence and physical materiality, arecreated, constructed environments. To this end, Gandy (2002:2) sug-gests that “Nature has a social and cultural history that has enrichedcountless dimensions of the urban experience. The design, use, andmeaning of urban space involves the transformation of nature into anew synthesis”. Still, understanding the politicised and uneven natureof this urban synthesis should be the main task.

The Urbanisation of Nature and Uneven GeographicalDevelopmentIn line with seeking out a synthetic understanding of urban environ-ments, we must point out that the social forms of urban changes havebeen of primary interest within past urban geographic research(Gober, McHugh, and Reid 1991). This neglects the fact that theprocesses of uneven deterioration that accompanied urban socioeco-nomic restructuring contribute to changes in the ecological forms of urban areas more broadly. While environmental (both social andphysical) qualities may be enhanced in some places and for some people,they often lead to a deterioration of social and physical conditions andqualities elsewhere (Keil and Graham 1998; Laituri and Kirby 1994;Peet and Watts 1993), both within cities and between cities and other,often very distant places. A focus on uneven processes inherent to the production of urban environments serves as a catalyst for betterunderstanding socioecological urbanisation.

While most urban, spatially uneven social processes can be attributedto income disparity (Titmuss 1962) and uneven resource mobilisation,other complex processes, while rooted in income disparity, none-theless have manifest substantial problems of their own making. Forinstance, the structural relations that have contributed to—if notoutright created—an uneven distribution of both active and passiveforms of environmental degradation have their own host of complexsocionatural considerations that would be neglected if issues of wealthand income were the only ones to be brought to the fore. Indeed asLow and Gleeson (1998:1) suggest, “The question of justice is todaybeing reshaped by the politics of the environment. For the first timesince the beginning of modern science we are having to think morallyabout a relationship we have assumed was purely instrumental”.Issues of social justice have explicitly entered ecological studies, mostvisibly through the rubric of the environmental-justice movement(Bullard 1990; Dobson 1998; Szaz 1994; Wenz 1988). As opposed tothe broad theoretical perspective employed by political-ecologists,most studies done within the context of environmental justice/equityare more narrowly focused. Justice/equity approaches tend to dealwith specific geographic locales, which limits their generalisability.

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Furthermore, advocates—as opposed to academicians—generatemuch of the environmental-justice literature (see Bullard and Chavis1993; Di Chiro 1996).

As a result of the political mobilisation that has occurred aroundmany environmental issues, the environmental-justice literature hasevolved through political praxis and focuses on the uneven distributionof both environmental benefits and damages to economically/politicallymarginalised people. Because it comes from praxis, as opposed totheoretically driven research, it provides a distinctly different contextthrough which to understand human/environment interactions. Becauseit is a movement, versus a research project per se, it must explicitlyappeal to a broad coalition of either environmentally minded or social-justice-minded groups, thus promoting the widespread disseminationof the struggles endured. This process, in turn, provides a rich, empiric-ally based history on which to build urban environmental theory.

However, although much of the environmental-justice literature is sensitive to the centrality of social, political and economic powerrelations in shaping processes of uneven socioecological conditions, itoften fails to grasp how these relationships are integral to the functioningof a capitalist political-economic system. More problematically, theenvironmental justice movement speaks fundamentally to a liberaland, hence, distributional perspective on justice, in which justice isseen as Rawlsian fairness and associated with the allocation dynamicsof environmental externalities. Marxist political ecology, in contrast,maintains that uneven socioecological conditions are produced throughthe particular capitalist forms of social organisation of nature’s metabolism.

Urban political-ecology research has begun to show that because ofthe underlying economic, political and cultural processes inherent tourban landscape production, urban change tends to be spatially differ-entiated and highly uneven. Thus, in the context of urban environ-mental change, it is likely that urban areas populated by marginalisedresidents will bear the brunt of negative environmental change,whereas other, more affluent parts of cities will enjoy growth in, orincreased quality of, environmental resources. While this is in no waynew, urban political-ecology perspectives are starting to contribute abetter understanding of the interconnected processes that lead to un-even urban environments. The subsequent papers in this issue attemptto address questions of justice and inequality from a historical-materialistperspective, rather than from the vantage point of the environmental-justice movement and its predominantly liberal conceptions of justice.

Questions of socioenvironmental sustainability, which has becomeof great interest of late, are fundamentally political questions. Urbanpolitical ecology attempts to tease out who gains from and who paysfor, who benefits from and who suffers from particular processes ofsocioenvironmental change. Additionally, urban political-ecologists

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try to devise ideas/plans that speak to what or who needs to be sustainedand how this can be done. Urban political-ecological perspectives seekto disentangle socioecological relationships that manifest betweenindividuals and social groups and how these, in turn, are mediated byand structured through processes of ecological change (Cutter 1995).In other words, environmental transformations are not independentfrom class, gender, ethnicity or other power struggles and, in fact, oftentend to be explained by these social struggles.

These metabolisms produce a series of both enabling (for powerfulindividuals and groups) and disabling (for marginalised individualsand groups) social and environmental conditions. Because these relationsform under, and can be traced directly back to, the crisis tendenciesinherent to neoliberal forms of capitalist development, the struggleagainst exploitative socioeconomic relations necessarily fuses with thestruggles to bring about more just urban environments. Processes ofsocioenvironmental change are, therefore, never socially or ecologicallyneutral. This results in conditions under which particular trajectoriesof socioenvironmental change undermine the stability of some socialgroups or places, while the sustainability of social groups and placeselsewhere might be enhanced. In sum, the political-ecological examina-tion of the urbanisation process reveals the inherently contradictorynature of the process of socioenvironmental change and teases out theinevitable conflicts (or the displacements thereof) that infuse socio-environmental change (see Swyngedouw, Kaika, and Castro 2002).

Particular attention, therefore, is paid to social power relations—whether material or discursive, economic, political and/or cultural—through which socioenvironmental processes take place and thenetworked connection that links change in one place to socioeco-logical transformations in, often, many other places. It is this nexus ofpower and the social actors carrying it that ultimately decide who willhave access to or control over and who will be excluded from access toor control over resources or other components of the environment. Inturn, these power geometries shape the social and political configura-tions and the urban environments in which we live.

Given the detrimental effects on the urban underclass of inequitableresource allocation, policy avenues for redistributing urban servicesare of importance to planners and other like-minded people (Harvey1973). The equal allocation of urban resources among the urbanpopulation is made problematic by the uneven nature of the capitalistsystem. Given the power structure for making allocation decisions,those suffering from unjust distributions of resources are less likely to expect redistribution in their favour. Harvey (1973:51) expands onthis by suggesting that “If it becomes explicit as to who will lose andwho will benefit, and by how much, from a given allocation decision,then we must anticipate far greater difficulty in implementing the

Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale 911

decision”. However, he (1973:52) goes on to say, “[A] working philosophybased on the notion that ‘what the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’tpine for’ can scarcely be acceptable to any planner of integrity”.Hence, policy innovations that plan for an equitable allocation ofurban resources should continually be sought. While “planning” doesnot necessarily imply a more equitable outcome, it does increase thelikelihood that attention will be focused on the issue.

Urban Political Ecology and ScaleA necessary precursor to understanding urban socioecological changeis that environmental and social changes codetermine each other inspace and time (Norgaard 1994). Processes of socioecological changego to re-create both social and physical environments and to generatenew socioecological settings with spatially and temporally distinctcharacteristics. This metabolic process, while rooted in specificmoments of time and space, is ongoing and continuous. The formsand circumstances that physical and environmental changes take aretied to the specific historical/geographical social, cultural, political oreconomic conditions and formal or informal institutions of govern-ance that accompany them (Swyngedouw 1997, 1999; Swyngedouw,Kaika, and Castro 2002). Within this process of socioecological change,it is also important to remember that all sociospatial processes areinvariably also predicated upon the transformation or metabolism ofphysical, chemical or biological components. This is important because,as Spirn (1996:112) suggests, “[T]o deny the dynamic reality of thenonhuman world is also misleading and potentially destructive”. Thus,we must conclude that environments are combined socioecologicalassemblages that are dynamically produced, spatially and temporally,socially and materially (Escobar 2001; Latour 1993, 1999b).

The ongoing and continual processes of urban societal and materialarrangements recreating themselves, spatially and temporally, arealways already a result, an outcome of the perpetual movement of theflux of sociospatial and environmental dynamics. These dynamics are embedded within networked or territorial scalar configurationsthat extend from the local milieu to global relations. The priority, boththeoretically and politically, therefore, never resides in a particularsocial or ecological geographical scale; instead, it resides in the socio-ecological process through which particular social and environmentalscales become constituted and subsequently reconstituted. In otherwords, socioecological processes give rise to scalar forms of organisation—such as states, local governments, interstate arrangements and thelike—and to a nested set of related and interacting socioecologicalspatial scales. In addition, these territorial scalar arrangements intersect—often in contradictory and conflicting ways—with the scalar net-works of, for example, socioecological production and consumption

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systems (Brenner 2001). In other words, a complex scalar articulationarises from the molecular processes and dynamics associated with thecirculation of capital and its associated socioecological, metabolictransformation processes, on the one hand, and the levels of scales of regulation and governance in which these are embedded, on theother. These territorial and networked spatial scales are never set, butare perpetually disputed, redefined, reconstituted and restructured interms of their extent, content, relative importance and interrelations.The continuous reorganisation of spatial scales is an integral part ofsocial strategies to combat and defend control over limited resourcesand/or a struggle for empowerment. There is constant societal strugglefor the command over particular scales in a given sociospatial con-juncture, and while some of these struggles are of minor consequence,many can be of eminent importance (Swyngedouw forthcoming b).Consider, for example, how conflicts over the appropriate scale fororganising water systems (local, river-basin, national, transnational)each evoke different power geometries and may lead to radically differ-ent socioecological conditions (see also Kaika this issue). In addition,extending scales of networked relations—through ecological conquestand expansion of the networks of capital circulation, for example—generalises and deepens uneven socioecological conditions.

There is a simultaneous “nested” yet hierarchical (in some cases)relationship between spatial scales (Jonas 1994:261; Smith 1984,1993). Power gradients within and between social groups, whethercharacterised along gender, class, ethnic or even ecological lines,reflect the scale capabilities of individuals and social groups to activelycontribute, either positively or negatively, to the metabolisation of urbanenvironments. As are all dimensions of socioecological relations, scaleconfigurations are altered as shifts in power occur. Such a process-based approach to scale focuses attention on the mechanisms of scaletransformation through social conflict and political struggle. In manyinstances, this struggle pivots around the appropriation of nature andcontrol over its metabolism. These sociospatial processes change theimportance and role of certain geographical scales, reassert the im-portance of others and, on occasion, create entirely new scales. Thesescale redefinitions, in turn, alter the geometry of social power bystrengthening the power and the control of some while disempower-ing others (see Swyngedouw 2000, forthcoming b). The geometry ofsocial power with its social conflict and political-economic struggle arebest approached through process-based approaches to scale that focusattention on the social and ecological mechanisms of scale trans-formation. This process-based approach is useful for understandingthe pivot of social and political struggles around the appropriation ofnature and the control over its metabolism (Swyngedouw forthcominga). While the politicised forces that contribute to scale transformation

Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale 913

are of primacy to urban political ecology, it is also important to pointout that ecological scales can be transformed in similar ways to socialscales, as and when the socioecological transformation of nature takesnew or different forms. For example, the socioecological scalar “nesting”into multiscalar configurations of monocultural cash-cropping agricultureis radically different from the socioecological scales of peasant sub-sistence farming (see Swyngedouw forthcoming b for an example).The papers in this special issue all pay close attention to the scalarpolitical configurations—including those of the state (local, regional,national and transnational)—as well as the spatial scalar networksthrough which particular localised events and conditions are produced.

ConclusionsUrban political ecology provides an integrated and relationalapproach that helps untangle the interconnected economic, political,social and ecological processes that together go to form highly unevenurban landscapes. Because the power-laden socioecological relationsthat go into the formation of urban environments constantly shiftbetween groups of actors and scales, historical-geographical insightsinto these ever-changing urban configurations are necessary for thesake of considering the future evolution of urban environments. Oneof the striking features of urban life is the ubiquitous necessity forsocially and materially metabolised nature to sustain urban life and itsfabric. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that in the practices ofeveryday city life, urbanised nature is a crucial material and symbolicgood that is imbedded in and engenders urban social conflicts andstruggles along class, gender and cultural cleavages over its use andcontrol. The realm of urbanised nature is, indeed, highly contestedterrain. The political programme of urban political ecology, then, is toenhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental constructionby identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribu-tion of social power and a more inclusive mode of environmentalproduction can be achieved.

Smith (1998b) suggests that while other trendy paradigms of geo-graphic thought may fall by the wayside, Marxist geography remainsone of the most vibrant and instructive approaches through which tounderstand geographical realities. This seems likely to be the caseuntil the inequalities that are created by both global and local formsof capitalism cease to exist and the quality of human life is equal.Indeed, Smith (1998b:163) concludes that “The unabashed victory ofcapitalism at the end of the twentieth century—prosperity, poverty,crisis and all—makes Marx’s analysis more, not less relevant for thetwenty-first … [even if] harnessing the trenchant economic critique toa stirring and viable political movement—precisely the point of theManifesto—remains elusive”. While traditional urban environmental

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history tends to concentrate on the configuration of things and events,historical materialism and critical political ecology prioritise theexcavation of the networked socioecological metabolisms and theirassociated power relations through which things become constitutedand organised.

An urgent task lies ahead, then, in terms of fusing critical urbantheory with critical political ecology, in both a theoretical and anempirical sense. To the extent that an emancipatory urban politicsresides in acquiring the power to produce urban environments in linewith the aspirations, needs and desires of those inhabiting these spaces—the capacity to produce socially the physical and social environmentsin which one dwells—the question of whose nature is or becomesurbanised must be at the forefront of any radical political action. Andthat is exactly what the three following papers, each in their own way,attempt to undertake. At the same time, they each open a researchagenda that may provide pointers for the further development of acritical Marxist urban political ecology.

AcknowledgmentsThe authors wish to thank Andy Jonas, Mark Purcell and MatthewGandy for their constructive and helpful comments on earlier versionsof this paper. Of course, only the authors are responsible for remainingerrors and omissions.

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