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. 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).
Urban Ecologies seeks to resituate urban governance and contribute to new ways of re-envisioning more equitable urban lives.
