The Place and Time of the Political in Urban Political Ecology: Contested Imaginations of a River's Future

Abstract

Urban political ecology (UPE) has become an important and influential paradigm for the geographic analysis of socioecological transformation. Despite considerable progress in its empirical and theoretical sophistication, however, what it means to analyze the specifically political dimensions of change in UPE accounts remains largely unspecified and underdeveloped. One option receiving attention is to confine analysis of the “properly political” to the disruption of prevailing orders by egalitarian challenges. As an alternative, we propose and elaborate a pragmatist approach to political analysis that has emerged in science and technology studies. Through accounts of two efforts to imagine the socioecological future of an urban river, we aim to demonstrate the potential of such an approach. We argue that in addition to local variation and the deployment of knowledge, analyses of the political trajectories of issues should address historical variation and the mobilization of desire. We contend that such an approach provides a methodology for tracing connections between conventional political processes and extraordinary moments of disruption and that it is also compatible with multiple perspectives on the “political” within UPE.