Periodic Reporting for period 3 - uEcologies (Urban Ecologies: governing nonhuman life in global cities)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-08-01 bis 2023-01-31
A fundamental dimension of contemporary, global urbanization is its radical transformation of nature. Domestic animals now make up more than twice the biomass of humans on the planet. They are vital to livelihoods of the urban poor in the Global South, providing economic opportunities, yet posing zoonotic risks. In contrast, cities of the North are marked by the relative absence of animals in urban spheres and a strict control of their bodies and presence. Despite the critical role of animals and nonhuman life in forging urban living, forms of governance and the politics of inhabiting cities, they have received scant systematic attention in the social sciences.
The aim of the Urban Ecologies project is to examine how human-animal dynamics and their relation to the built environment configures the scope and ambit of urban governance. It marks a major theoretical departure from ongoing attempts to specify how cities are organized, regulated and ordered. Interdisciplinary in nature, the project develops new methods by bringing ecological methods into conversation with ethnographic work. It forges new concepts for understanding contemporary urbanization that aim to reverse the anthropocentric bias of urban theory.
To this end, Urban Ecologies is focused on four key arenas of inquiry: (1) examining how human-animal dynamics are differentially composed in cities of the global South and global North; (2) appraising the social, economic and spatial forces that structure these dynamics; (3) generating new perspectives in urban studies through an ecological understanding of urban governance; and (4) exploring how such understandings might contribute to agendas of promoting resilient and sustainable cities.
These objectives translate into a specific set of themes, explored comparatively through cities of the Global South and North, to forge new ways of understanding contemporary urbanization. The first pertains to materiality or the ecology of cities, differentially understood as cultivated, feral and wild. The second theme entails infrastructures, including how the built environment structures animal lives and the ways in which infrastructure is repurposed by nonhumans. The third attends to urban metabolism or the social, spatial and material transformations of nature that unfold in urban landscapes with uneven and often coercive effects. The fourth major theme pertains to biopolitics or the ways in which life is administered in urban arenas by the state and capital. These themes are tied together to develop new visions of how urban governance unfold.
The project investigates these themes in a comparative manner, attentive to both difference as well variations. Urban Ecologies starts from the premise that cities and their constituent ecologies are not the same everywhere. Rather what needs to be accounted for is historical difference and the ways in which these have bearings upon urban formations in their specificity. The comparative endeavour unfolds along two axes: the first is between cities of the Global North (London), and those of the South (New Delhi, Guwahati); the second pertaining to difference within the South, including postcolonial metropolises (Delhi) and ‘ordinary’ cities but with populations of over one million people and indicative of where much of contemporary global urbanization is happening (Guwahati).
The wider import of this project stems from its endeavour of addressing an uncharted but critical field of human action which sheds new light on urban governance. By integrating adjacent disciplines, including ecology and the interpretative social sciences, this project seeks to push the frontiers of urban studies. This is pushed through by means of methodological innovation combining ecological and ethnographic perspectives. The social relevance of the project beyond pushing academic thinking pertains to how cities might be made more just and resilient for the urban poor. To this end, it speaks to the United Nations Habitat Agenda’s call for promoting good governance, an endeavour it seeks to address through situated inquiry and by taking seriously the lives of those enmeshed with nonhuman life. Urban Ecologies seeks to resituate urban governance and contribute to new ways of re-envisioning more equitable urban lives.
The aim of the Urban Ecologies project is to examine how human-animal dynamics and their relation to the built environment configures the scope and ambit of urban governance. It marks a major theoretical departure from ongoing attempts to specify how cities are organized, regulated and ordered. Interdisciplinary in nature, the project develops new methods by bringing ecological methods into conversation with ethnographic work. It forges new concepts for understanding contemporary urbanization that aim to reverse the anthropocentric bias of urban theory.
To this end, Urban Ecologies is focused on four key arenas of inquiry: (1) examining how human-animal dynamics are differentially composed in cities of the global South and global North; (2) appraising the social, economic and spatial forces that structure these dynamics; (3) generating new perspectives in urban studies through an ecological understanding of urban governance; and (4) exploring how such understandings might contribute to agendas of promoting resilient and sustainable cities.
These objectives translate into a specific set of themes, explored comparatively through cities of the Global South and North, to forge new ways of understanding contemporary urbanization. The first pertains to materiality or the ecology of cities, differentially understood as cultivated, feral and wild. The second theme entails infrastructures, including how the built environment structures animal lives and the ways in which infrastructure is repurposed by nonhumans. The third attends to urban metabolism or the social, spatial and material transformations of nature that unfold in urban landscapes with uneven and often coercive effects. The fourth major theme pertains to biopolitics or the ways in which life is administered in urban arenas by the state and capital. These themes are tied together to develop new visions of how urban governance unfold.
The project investigates these themes in a comparative manner, attentive to both difference as well variations. Urban Ecologies starts from the premise that cities and their constituent ecologies are not the same everywhere. Rather what needs to be accounted for is historical difference and the ways in which these have bearings upon urban formations in their specificity. The comparative endeavour unfolds along two axes: the first is between cities of the Global North (London), and those of the South (New Delhi, Guwahati); the second pertaining to difference within the South, including postcolonial metropolises (Delhi) and ‘ordinary’ cities but with populations of over one million people and indicative of where much of contemporary global urbanization is happening (Guwahati).
The wider import of this project stems from its endeavour of addressing an uncharted but critical field of human action which sheds new light on urban governance. By integrating adjacent disciplines, including ecology and the interpretative social sciences, this project seeks to push the frontiers of urban studies. This is pushed through by means of methodological innovation combining ecological and ethnographic perspectives. The social relevance of the project beyond pushing academic thinking pertains to how cities might be made more just and resilient for the urban poor. To this end, it speaks to the United Nations Habitat Agenda’s call for promoting good governance, an endeavour it seeks to address through situated inquiry and by taking seriously the lives of those enmeshed with nonhuman life. Urban Ecologies seeks to resituate urban governance and contribute to new ways of re-envisioning more equitable urban lives.
Overview of Work Performed
The Urban Ecologies project has unfolded through two main stages so far. The first stage (August 2018 – July 2019) involved the foundation stage and included reviews of the literature, setting up members of the team, as well as scoping studies in the three cities. Setting up of team members involved interviewing and hiring four PhD scholars based at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bengaluru, India, which is a project-partner. Foundational work extended to teaching and mentoring PhD scholars by the PI (based at the University of Cambridge) and key project partner (based at NIAS, Bengaluru), including their development of a research programme under the aegis of the project. Scoping studies in the three cities involved prospecting field sites, setting up contacts with local bodies and institutions, as well as scoping out methodologies for fieldwork.
The second stage (August 2019 until present) has focused on conducting fieldwork. The first major body of fieldwork included sustained research in Delhi (Work Package 1) and London (Work Package 3) by the PI and, in Delhi, by the four PhD scholars. The PI’s work has focused on feral ecologies in London (looking at human-avian relations), and commensal and cultivated ecologies in Delhi (including archival and field-based work on urban macaques and cattle). The key project partner has worked very closely with the four PhD scholars to develop new methodologies that lie at the heart of the project. This has now translated into looking at (i) the history and contemporary ecology of urban milch cattle; (ii) ethnographic and ethological perspectives on urban ‘street dogs’; (iii) the ecologies of urban macaques; and (iv) nonhuman life in urban informal settlements or slums. The second bout of fieldwork involves doing a comparative study of the cultivated (cattle), feral (street dogs) and the wild (macaques) in Guwahati (Work Package 2) by the four PhD scholars, which began in February 2021, and is expected to continue until around August 2021. There was a lapse in fieldwork due to the Covid-19 lockdown in India and the UK, but field and archival work have now resumed.
In July 2020, two Postdoctoral Scholars were recruited to conduct research on the cultivated (urban poultry) and the wild (urban foxes) in London (Work Package 1). This work complements the research done by the PI on feral ecologies of the city. Fieldwork for this part is yet to commence due to lockdown restrictions and, in the meantime, the focus has been on finalizing methodologies and conducting supplementary archival work and secondary research. The PI has also begun his own fieldwork on urban metabolism – a key theme in the project – focusing on Guwahati (Work Package 2); this research is envisaged to be conducted over the next one year to further develop comparative understandings of urban life and its governance.
The project has also participated in a number of collective and collaborative endeavours. This includes the setting up of a University of Cambridge CRASSH research network on ‘Rescaling the Metabolic’ (co-led by the PI), and is a forum for discussing questions around metabolism which is a key theme of the project. It also involves taking part in the Urban Environments Initiative in at the LMU-Munich by the PI and key project partner to build further synergies and avenues of dissemination for our work.
One dimension of the project is to engage policy-makers. Due to delays with Covid-19 and a slightly later start of the London fieldwork, we envisage this dimension to only take place in early or mid-2022, when we have more data and can work ground up. This will take place predominantly in London and in Guwahati.
In summary, most of the fieldwork in New Delhi (Work Package 1) has been completed; research on urban ecologies in Guwahati (Work Package 2) is underway, and will continue until the end of the year for the PhD scholars, and for a further year in terms of the PI’s work. Part of the fieldwork in London (Work Package 3) has been completed, i.e. a focus on feral ecologies. Research on the wild and the cultivated in London are to begin.
Main Results
The main results are presented in terms of the four key themes that the project investigates, namely: materiality, infrastructure, metabolism and biopolitics, as they cut through the three different cities.
(1) Materiality: our work has revealed how cities have very specific configurations in terms of their ecology and this is constituted by difference. The ways in which the material life of cities is configured – whether these are cultivated, feral, or wild – has bearings upon and are shaped by relations with people, the wider built environment and regimes of urban governance. Furthermore, our research in Delhi indicates that there are a range of other terms that might be more apt for specifying the ecologies of cities, including the commensal (in lieu of the wild), the agrarian (complementary to the cultivated), and street denizens (contra the feral), each of which reveal very particular sets of relations. Work in London shows how categories such as the feral hold – and in fact such categories, derived from a Western epistemology are suited to cities there but not necessarily elsewhere. Preliminary fieldwork in Guwahati is beginning to indicate that there are differences within Indian cities, both in terms of how the cultivated, feral and wild ecologies inhere, as well as the various practices that give rise to these ecologies.
(2) Infrastructure: emerged as a key theme during the lifecourse of the project. It has entailed examining the enmeshment of animal life with the built environment and the ways in which the latter structures how nonhumans dwell in the city. The project’s work in Delhi has led to a critical re-evaluation of contemporary accounts on infrastructure. We show how, in urban settlements, infrastructure is not only repurposed for fostering nonhuman life, but animals too can become infrastructure, subtending economic activity. Preliminary work in Guwahati is beginning to investigate how ecology-infrastructure relations inhere in the city and whether they vary from Delhi. Our research posits a wider infrastructural ontology that accounts for nonhuman lives and forces, furthering debates on what is a vibrant arena of social science scholarship.
(3) Metabolism: ongoing work has looked at different metabolic regimes in Delhi, including the relations between animal life and waste in urban slums, and the contestation of urban cattle over what might be called the ‘metabolic commons’, or the commons of basic staples. Our research reveals how the metabolic labour of animals such as pigs reared in Delhi’s informal settlements becomes a vital means through which the poor cope with urban precarity. Similarly, waste and the commodity detritus of capital becomes a source of food for cattle in urban dairies. This research is poised to make new contributions to rethinking the metabolic at a number of scales from the animal body to the flows of cities, and is currently being expanded through more concerted work on urban metabolism in Guwahati and industrial animal rearing settings in London. The comparative endeavour is likely to yield rich dividends for reworking what is a central concept in the interpretative social sciences, particularly urban theory.
(4) Biopolitics: refers to the administration of life at various levels, from bodies to populations, and is a key element of urban governance. To this end, biopolitics is a theme that draws different aspects of urban life together to get at the main question of governing cities by regulating nonhuman life. We map different ecologies – the cultivated, feral and the wild – to show how biopolitical regimes work differently and in conjunction with the forms of life concerned. This brings in variation within cities. For instance, our work in Delhi shows how the governance of urban macaques has to do with a politics of aesthetics, an endeavour of redistributing life as the animals unsettle aspirations to become a ‘world-class city’. In contrast, the imperative to regulate cattle stem from a much longer history of improving cattle for draught power and milk yield, and is closely entwined in economic arguments. When we turn to street dogs, it is health and the risk of zoonosis that becomes a concern for the state and NGOs. Work in Delhi reveals how governance is often a hybrid of biopolitical and vernacular practices, and cannot be reduced to the same genealogies of biopower located in Western modernity. Ongoing work in Guwahati aims to ‘provincialize’ urban governance in Delhi, to see how concerns unfold in ‘ordinary’ cities that do not necessarily have the same ‘world-class’ tag and therefore do not reveal the same set of dynamics. In a similar vein, our work in London has shown how attempts to quell feral parakeets are based on a much more stringent biopolitical logic including the mapping and monitoring of populations and the imperative to cull birds, not witnessed in the case of feral animals in Delhi. Ongoing work in Guwahati is beginning to show that the regulation of nonhuman life is very different and follows patterns different from that of Delhi. There is much less intensive management, particularly in terms of wild and feral ecologies, and other concerns (such as disease) are at the centre of interventions on the cultivated. Difference and variation are key here, and our ongoing comparative endeavour has enabled us to foster new insights into urban governance. We aim to build on these for a much more synthetic analysis in the second half of the project.
Publications and Dissemination
Publications and dissemination have progressed as the fieldwork, conducted by the PI and the four PhD students. This has included a major paper on infrastructures by the PI (published in Progress in Human Geography), another paper on urban wellbeing by the PI and team member (published in Health & Place), as well as interventions by three PhD scholars on a wider forum on ecology and infrastructure led by the PI (Society & Space forum). The second set of wider interventions include the Rescaling the Metabolic network forum, where the PI and a Postdoctoral Research Associate has made contributions.
In terms of forthcoming work, the PI and key project partner are currently revising a paper for Urban Geographies, that examines the ecological life of Delhi through the feral, cultivated and the wild. This paper outlines the architecture of the project and is aimed as an agenda-setting intervention. The PI is also currently revising a manuscript on London’s feral ecologies for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. A number of other manuscripts by the PI, key project partner, Postdoctoral Researchers and PhD scholars are at draft stages or in preparation. These primarily deal with fieldwork in Delhi (Work Package 1).
In terms further substantial contributions, the PI is currently drafting a monograph on ‘Living Cities’ (to be published by Minnesota University Press) that draws on a comparative account of commensal, feral and cultivated ecologies in Delhi and London, touching on a number of themes including materiality, infrastructure, and biopolitics. This will be a major output of the project. We are also currently conceptualizing an edited collection on animal life in New Delhi, drawing upon project research and wider networks developed by the project. An innovative and exciting aspect to the project is a short 15-minute film on urban verticality, that will look at questions about Delhi through the lens of the vertical, bringing nonhuman life into the fray. This will be an additional output, complementing some of the textual outputs of the project.
The project has worked on dissemination throughout. Highlights include a keynote given at the University of Sydney by the PI (2019) and a plenary at a conference on infrastructure in Kings College, London (2019). We have presented our work at a number of international conferences (RGS-IBG, Association of American Geographers Conference, New Cultural Geographies), as well as international workshops (Prague, Munich, Berlin), and individual seminars (Delhi, Cambridge, Guwahati). The Urban Ecologies project organized a major workshop on urban ecologies at the University of Cambridge in 2018, which set out the research agenda of the project, with keynotes and lectures by eminent urban scholars. Project team members, including the PI, key collaborator, and four PhD students also ran a session on urban ecologies in the RC21 Urban Studies conference, which is an international forum, and took place in Delhi in September 2019. We have also run a lecture series and invited discussions by leading urban scholars, besides running two seminar series this year. These activities are going to continue into the next two years.
The Urban Ecologies project has unfolded through two main stages so far. The first stage (August 2018 – July 2019) involved the foundation stage and included reviews of the literature, setting up members of the team, as well as scoping studies in the three cities. Setting up of team members involved interviewing and hiring four PhD scholars based at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bengaluru, India, which is a project-partner. Foundational work extended to teaching and mentoring PhD scholars by the PI (based at the University of Cambridge) and key project partner (based at NIAS, Bengaluru), including their development of a research programme under the aegis of the project. Scoping studies in the three cities involved prospecting field sites, setting up contacts with local bodies and institutions, as well as scoping out methodologies for fieldwork.
The second stage (August 2019 until present) has focused on conducting fieldwork. The first major body of fieldwork included sustained research in Delhi (Work Package 1) and London (Work Package 3) by the PI and, in Delhi, by the four PhD scholars. The PI’s work has focused on feral ecologies in London (looking at human-avian relations), and commensal and cultivated ecologies in Delhi (including archival and field-based work on urban macaques and cattle). The key project partner has worked very closely with the four PhD scholars to develop new methodologies that lie at the heart of the project. This has now translated into looking at (i) the history and contemporary ecology of urban milch cattle; (ii) ethnographic and ethological perspectives on urban ‘street dogs’; (iii) the ecologies of urban macaques; and (iv) nonhuman life in urban informal settlements or slums. The second bout of fieldwork involves doing a comparative study of the cultivated (cattle), feral (street dogs) and the wild (macaques) in Guwahati (Work Package 2) by the four PhD scholars, which began in February 2021, and is expected to continue until around August 2021. There was a lapse in fieldwork due to the Covid-19 lockdown in India and the UK, but field and archival work have now resumed.
In July 2020, two Postdoctoral Scholars were recruited to conduct research on the cultivated (urban poultry) and the wild (urban foxes) in London (Work Package 1). This work complements the research done by the PI on feral ecologies of the city. Fieldwork for this part is yet to commence due to lockdown restrictions and, in the meantime, the focus has been on finalizing methodologies and conducting supplementary archival work and secondary research. The PI has also begun his own fieldwork on urban metabolism – a key theme in the project – focusing on Guwahati (Work Package 2); this research is envisaged to be conducted over the next one year to further develop comparative understandings of urban life and its governance.
The project has also participated in a number of collective and collaborative endeavours. This includes the setting up of a University of Cambridge CRASSH research network on ‘Rescaling the Metabolic’ (co-led by the PI), and is a forum for discussing questions around metabolism which is a key theme of the project. It also involves taking part in the Urban Environments Initiative in at the LMU-Munich by the PI and key project partner to build further synergies and avenues of dissemination for our work.
One dimension of the project is to engage policy-makers. Due to delays with Covid-19 and a slightly later start of the London fieldwork, we envisage this dimension to only take place in early or mid-2022, when we have more data and can work ground up. This will take place predominantly in London and in Guwahati.
In summary, most of the fieldwork in New Delhi (Work Package 1) has been completed; research on urban ecologies in Guwahati (Work Package 2) is underway, and will continue until the end of the year for the PhD scholars, and for a further year in terms of the PI’s work. Part of the fieldwork in London (Work Package 3) has been completed, i.e. a focus on feral ecologies. Research on the wild and the cultivated in London are to begin.
Main Results
The main results are presented in terms of the four key themes that the project investigates, namely: materiality, infrastructure, metabolism and biopolitics, as they cut through the three different cities.
(1) Materiality: our work has revealed how cities have very specific configurations in terms of their ecology and this is constituted by difference. The ways in which the material life of cities is configured – whether these are cultivated, feral, or wild – has bearings upon and are shaped by relations with people, the wider built environment and regimes of urban governance. Furthermore, our research in Delhi indicates that there are a range of other terms that might be more apt for specifying the ecologies of cities, including the commensal (in lieu of the wild), the agrarian (complementary to the cultivated), and street denizens (contra the feral), each of which reveal very particular sets of relations. Work in London shows how categories such as the feral hold – and in fact such categories, derived from a Western epistemology are suited to cities there but not necessarily elsewhere. Preliminary fieldwork in Guwahati is beginning to indicate that there are differences within Indian cities, both in terms of how the cultivated, feral and wild ecologies inhere, as well as the various practices that give rise to these ecologies.
(2) Infrastructure: emerged as a key theme during the lifecourse of the project. It has entailed examining the enmeshment of animal life with the built environment and the ways in which the latter structures how nonhumans dwell in the city. The project’s work in Delhi has led to a critical re-evaluation of contemporary accounts on infrastructure. We show how, in urban settlements, infrastructure is not only repurposed for fostering nonhuman life, but animals too can become infrastructure, subtending economic activity. Preliminary work in Guwahati is beginning to investigate how ecology-infrastructure relations inhere in the city and whether they vary from Delhi. Our research posits a wider infrastructural ontology that accounts for nonhuman lives and forces, furthering debates on what is a vibrant arena of social science scholarship.
(3) Metabolism: ongoing work has looked at different metabolic regimes in Delhi, including the relations between animal life and waste in urban slums, and the contestation of urban cattle over what might be called the ‘metabolic commons’, or the commons of basic staples. Our research reveals how the metabolic labour of animals such as pigs reared in Delhi’s informal settlements becomes a vital means through which the poor cope with urban precarity. Similarly, waste and the commodity detritus of capital becomes a source of food for cattle in urban dairies. This research is poised to make new contributions to rethinking the metabolic at a number of scales from the animal body to the flows of cities, and is currently being expanded through more concerted work on urban metabolism in Guwahati and industrial animal rearing settings in London. The comparative endeavour is likely to yield rich dividends for reworking what is a central concept in the interpretative social sciences, particularly urban theory.
(4) Biopolitics: refers to the administration of life at various levels, from bodies to populations, and is a key element of urban governance. To this end, biopolitics is a theme that draws different aspects of urban life together to get at the main question of governing cities by regulating nonhuman life. We map different ecologies – the cultivated, feral and the wild – to show how biopolitical regimes work differently and in conjunction with the forms of life concerned. This brings in variation within cities. For instance, our work in Delhi shows how the governance of urban macaques has to do with a politics of aesthetics, an endeavour of redistributing life as the animals unsettle aspirations to become a ‘world-class city’. In contrast, the imperative to regulate cattle stem from a much longer history of improving cattle for draught power and milk yield, and is closely entwined in economic arguments. When we turn to street dogs, it is health and the risk of zoonosis that becomes a concern for the state and NGOs. Work in Delhi reveals how governance is often a hybrid of biopolitical and vernacular practices, and cannot be reduced to the same genealogies of biopower located in Western modernity. Ongoing work in Guwahati aims to ‘provincialize’ urban governance in Delhi, to see how concerns unfold in ‘ordinary’ cities that do not necessarily have the same ‘world-class’ tag and therefore do not reveal the same set of dynamics. In a similar vein, our work in London has shown how attempts to quell feral parakeets are based on a much more stringent biopolitical logic including the mapping and monitoring of populations and the imperative to cull birds, not witnessed in the case of feral animals in Delhi. Ongoing work in Guwahati is beginning to show that the regulation of nonhuman life is very different and follows patterns different from that of Delhi. There is much less intensive management, particularly in terms of wild and feral ecologies, and other concerns (such as disease) are at the centre of interventions on the cultivated. Difference and variation are key here, and our ongoing comparative endeavour has enabled us to foster new insights into urban governance. We aim to build on these for a much more synthetic analysis in the second half of the project.
Publications and Dissemination
Publications and dissemination have progressed as the fieldwork, conducted by the PI and the four PhD students. This has included a major paper on infrastructures by the PI (published in Progress in Human Geography), another paper on urban wellbeing by the PI and team member (published in Health & Place), as well as interventions by three PhD scholars on a wider forum on ecology and infrastructure led by the PI (Society & Space forum). The second set of wider interventions include the Rescaling the Metabolic network forum, where the PI and a Postdoctoral Research Associate has made contributions.
In terms of forthcoming work, the PI and key project partner are currently revising a paper for Urban Geographies, that examines the ecological life of Delhi through the feral, cultivated and the wild. This paper outlines the architecture of the project and is aimed as an agenda-setting intervention. The PI is also currently revising a manuscript on London’s feral ecologies for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. A number of other manuscripts by the PI, key project partner, Postdoctoral Researchers and PhD scholars are at draft stages or in preparation. These primarily deal with fieldwork in Delhi (Work Package 1).
In terms further substantial contributions, the PI is currently drafting a monograph on ‘Living Cities’ (to be published by Minnesota University Press) that draws on a comparative account of commensal, feral and cultivated ecologies in Delhi and London, touching on a number of themes including materiality, infrastructure, and biopolitics. This will be a major output of the project. We are also currently conceptualizing an edited collection on animal life in New Delhi, drawing upon project research and wider networks developed by the project. An innovative and exciting aspect to the project is a short 15-minute film on urban verticality, that will look at questions about Delhi through the lens of the vertical, bringing nonhuman life into the fray. This will be an additional output, complementing some of the textual outputs of the project.
The project has worked on dissemination throughout. Highlights include a keynote given at the University of Sydney by the PI (2019) and a plenary at a conference on infrastructure in Kings College, London (2019). We have presented our work at a number of international conferences (RGS-IBG, Association of American Geographers Conference, New Cultural Geographies), as well as international workshops (Prague, Munich, Berlin), and individual seminars (Delhi, Cambridge, Guwahati). The Urban Ecologies project organized a major workshop on urban ecologies at the University of Cambridge in 2018, which set out the research agenda of the project, with keynotes and lectures by eminent urban scholars. Project team members, including the PI, key collaborator, and four PhD students also ran a session on urban ecologies in the RC21 Urban Studies conference, which is an international forum, and took place in Delhi in September 2019. We have also run a lecture series and invited discussions by leading urban scholars, besides running two seminar series this year. These activities are going to continue into the next two years.
Urban Ecologies endeavours to go beyond the state-of-the-art in human geography and urban studies through two avenues: by developing novel methodologies combining ethnography and ecological science, and by generating concepts that cross disciplinary boundaries and expand the scope of the interpretative social sciences.
The project has developed and operationalized a novel set of methodologies for attending to urban life and for rethinking how cities are inhabited by nonhuman life. This draws upon ethological perspectives developed by the key project partner and, through the work of the four PhD scholars and PI, brings it into conversation with ethnography. More specifically, we have been able to elucidate the lives of street dogs, urban cattle and pigs in informal settlements, the ways in which they interrelate with the lives of people. This has also been done, to a limited extent, with urban macaques. This new etho-geographical or ethno-ethological approach foregrounds how nonhumans act and view the city, bringing in a completely new way to understand how the urban is apprehended and felt. Equally, these methods bring in a raft of new perspectives on how nonhuman life has bearings on the shape and ambit of urban governance. Whilst there have been several calls for taking nonhuman lives seriously, including ‘multi-species ethnographies’, much of it remains promissory. Ours is one of the first systematic endeavours of putting this to practice. Whilst these methods will inform individual papers, we are now in the process of planning a short set of interventions that explicate these methods and discuss what bearings they have for re-evaluating urban life.
These methods map on to a number of cross-disciplinary concepts developed by the project. This includes new interventions in urban theory, notably an expanded understanding of infrastructure. We show how taking nonhumans seriously leads to a wider infrastructural ontology, one where nonhumans themselves might become infrastructure. The other set of concepts include a rethinking of metabolism and a different account of urban biopolitics. Together, the set of concepts being developed go beyond the state of the art in contemporary urban theory. Whilst we are still in the draft stage for a number of publications explicating concepts, there has been a welcoming reception of some of these ideas in a number of forums where we have presented our work. We expect dividends in this regard over the course of the next two years.
New methods and concepts going beyond the state of the art also have wider social implications. Our work in Delhi shows how current efforts to expunge the city of its animal life meet with failure for a number of reasons, but most importantly because the lives of the urban poor are intrinsically enmeshed with these creatures. Furthermore, our archival work shows how nonhuman life has long been central to urban living. Our comparative work will shed greater light on this, and in the next phase of the project, we aim to work more closely on developing these wider implications and communicating them to different practitioner and policy audiences.
The project has developed and operationalized a novel set of methodologies for attending to urban life and for rethinking how cities are inhabited by nonhuman life. This draws upon ethological perspectives developed by the key project partner and, through the work of the four PhD scholars and PI, brings it into conversation with ethnography. More specifically, we have been able to elucidate the lives of street dogs, urban cattle and pigs in informal settlements, the ways in which they interrelate with the lives of people. This has also been done, to a limited extent, with urban macaques. This new etho-geographical or ethno-ethological approach foregrounds how nonhumans act and view the city, bringing in a completely new way to understand how the urban is apprehended and felt. Equally, these methods bring in a raft of new perspectives on how nonhuman life has bearings on the shape and ambit of urban governance. Whilst there have been several calls for taking nonhuman lives seriously, including ‘multi-species ethnographies’, much of it remains promissory. Ours is one of the first systematic endeavours of putting this to practice. Whilst these methods will inform individual papers, we are now in the process of planning a short set of interventions that explicate these methods and discuss what bearings they have for re-evaluating urban life.
These methods map on to a number of cross-disciplinary concepts developed by the project. This includes new interventions in urban theory, notably an expanded understanding of infrastructure. We show how taking nonhumans seriously leads to a wider infrastructural ontology, one where nonhumans themselves might become infrastructure. The other set of concepts include a rethinking of metabolism and a different account of urban biopolitics. Together, the set of concepts being developed go beyond the state of the art in contemporary urban theory. Whilst we are still in the draft stage for a number of publications explicating concepts, there has been a welcoming reception of some of these ideas in a number of forums where we have presented our work. We expect dividends in this regard over the course of the next two years.
New methods and concepts going beyond the state of the art also have wider social implications. Our work in Delhi shows how current efforts to expunge the city of its animal life meet with failure for a number of reasons, but most importantly because the lives of the urban poor are intrinsically enmeshed with these creatures. Furthermore, our archival work shows how nonhuman life has long been central to urban living. Our comparative work will shed greater light on this, and in the next phase of the project, we aim to work more closely on developing these wider implications and communicating them to different practitioner and policy audiences.