Rethinking the nature of urban environmental politics: Security, subjectivity, and the non-human |
| |
Authors: | Kevin Grove |
| |
Institution: | Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43230, United States |
| |
Abstract: | The growing field of urban political ecology (UPE) has greatly advanced understandings of the socio-ecological transformations through which urban economies and environments are produced. However, this field has thus far failed to fully consider subjective (and subject-forming) dimensions of urban environmental struggle. I argue that this can be overcome through bringing urban political ecology into conversation with both post-structural political ecology and critical geopolitics. Bridging these literatures focuses attention on practices of socio-ecological exclusion and attachment through which environmental subjectivities are formed. This argument is drawn out through a case study of the politics of local economic development and conservation within the watershed of the Big Darby Creek near Columbus, Ohio. This struggle was driven by a preservationist movement that coalesced around a shared understanding of socio-ecological hybridity as a source of metaphysical insecurity. Hybridity appears here as a site of political and ethical struggle over social and ecological exclusions produced in the pursuit of security. This case study demonstrates a paradox of environmental politics: the non-human is at once a site of constituent possibilities for identity and subjectivity as well as forces which seek to foreclose this radical openness. Recognizing the paradoxical nature of environmental struggle allows for a more complex and nuanced account of the multifarious forces that shape the formation of environmental subjectivities. |
| |
Keywords: | Urban political ecology Post-structuralism Critical geopolitics Urban governance Environmental politics Environmentalism Subjectivity Identity Nature-society theory Hybridity |
本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录! |
|