I’ve just got word that my first (of three) reviews on the state of urban political ecology (UPE) titled “Urban political ecology I: The urban century” has been published on the Progress in Human Geography Online First web site.
Abstract
It has been over 15 years since the term ‘urban political ecology’ (UPE) was coined. While still often not
incorporated into larger discussion of political ecology, its growing visibility in the published literature
suggests that it has gone beyond an emerging theoretical lens to one that has fully emerged. This report
characterizes the current literature that explicitly utilizes the language of UPE, discusses its theoretical
evolution that is now seeing a second wave, as well as catalogs some of the new arenas through which the
sub-field has offered novel insights into the socionatural unevenness of cities. A central contribution of this
survey is to illustrate the myriad articulations of how urban environmental and social change co-determine
each other and how these metabolic processes offer insights into creative pathways toward more democratic
urban environmental politics.
Keywords
cities, political ecology, urban geography, urban metabolism, urban political ecology (UPE)
Nik Heynen 