Project description
How indigenous movements mobilise to defend their right to urban territory
Different practices and ecological imaginaries at play in urban contexts could signal different routes for a more sustainable development. The question is how people relate to urban nature. The EU-funded Decolonizing Ecology project will answer this question. Building on a Latin America-based scholarship, it will reframe these types of socio-environmental struggles as urban contestations. The emphasis will be on an intersectional dimension of indigeneity, race and gender, to understand these multiple-scaled processes. Specifically, the project will explore and shed light on the practices that indigenous urban movements mobilise to defend their right to territory. It will improve our understanding about how diverse urban worlds challenge and inform concepts and urban studies more widely.
Objective
Indigenous movements in Latin America exemplify alternatives ways of relating to urban nature. These different practices and ecological imaginaries at play in urban contexts could signal different routes for a more sustainable development. Yet, they remain under-investigated, this proposal argues, due to a lack of an adequate conceptual repertoire and methodological tools to analyse these practices. This is despite new starting points for a more global urban theory: while post- and decolonial scholars have argued to further diversify socio-spatial theory, scholars engaging with an ontological turn are rethinking dualisms separating nature and culture or urban and rural to open up new grounds to study urban political ecology.
This project addresses this gap by building on Latin America-based scholarship to reframe these types of socio-environmental struggles as urban contestations, emphasising intersectional dimension of indigeneity, race and gender, to understand these multiply scaled processes. The main questions are: What practices do indigenous urban movements mobilize to defend their right to territory? How do the urban worlds enacted through these practices challenge and inform concepts and methods in urban studies more widely? Empirically, the research builds on a systematic comparative study of Mexico City (Mexico) and La Paz-El Alto (Bolivia) – cities marked with indigenous urban movements and rapid urbanization.
This research will demonstrate novel strategies to compare different ecological and urban understandings. By advancing an interdisciplinary approach to analyse environmental conflicts in cities, the project will contribute to knowledge on urban development and provide a sound base to put forward suitable policy instruments to work towards sustainable cities and communities.
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Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
WC2A 2AE London
United Kingdom