Abstract:

The resurgent interest in environmental questions in political geography has brought into focus its existing and potential intersections with related fields, including political ecology. Both fields share the core concerns of investigating state, territory, power, and political action around environmental resources; and both draw from a diversity of approaches and methods. In this chapter, I explore the convergences between political geography and political ecology through the vantage point of the urban, surveying two approaches to urban environmental change in urban political ecology and affiliated fields. The first tracks metabolic circulation, extended urbanization, and the state-resource-territory nexus through broadly neo-Marxian framings of the uneven production of urban spaces and environments. The second reviews a range of embodied and situated approaches from feminist, postcolonial, and Southern urbanist scholarship to demonstrate how diverse everyday practices reshape the politics of urban environments. I provide selected empirical examples for both approaches, including my own research on the urbanizing environments of Manila.

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