Urban Life

Question 1

Explain the anti-urban sentiment?

Answer 1

Cities viewed as dirty, morally corrupt.
Conservation was in part an effort to celebrate the romanticised emblems of pre-industrialised past against urban life.
Nature presented as a remedy to the city’s ills.
Ebenezer Howard put forward utopian mode of urban development around decentralised towns including rural features.

Question 2

Critiques of anti-urban sentiment?

Answer 2

“Nature” imported in “unnatural” cities is predominantly understood as quintessentially beneficial.

BUT:

Are all urban “natural spaces” beneficial?
Who are they beneficial to?
To what extent do they also reproduce/reinforce existing social inequalities?

Question 3

Explain the political-ecology city?

Answer 3

Examining the “intimate relationship between the antinomies of capitalist urbanization processes and socio-environmental injustices”
(Swyngedouw et al., 2006).

Politicising urban environments; examining the contributions of greening of urban space to (re)production of social inequalities.

Question 4

Explain the ecological city?

Answer 4

Nature in cities, although reshaped by intensive human land use, should be conceived as a set of ecosystems and biotopes with their own characteristics.

Cities as display sites: zoological and botanical gardens.

City as productive of unnatural ecologies.

Question 5

Explain the convivial city?

Answer 5

Thinking with urban ecologies: spaces of learning in the Anthropocene
Lorimer (2008)

Putting into question established binaries:
e.g. native/alien species: what does it mean for a species to be “native” to an urban environment?

Inspiring modes of learning to conserve nature in uncertain times.

Recombinant ecology produces something entirely unique and highly unpredictable. Space where species would otherwise not have come together.