Urban Political Ecology and Planetary Urbanization

Urban political ecology investigates the power relations and resource flows that produce and sustain urban environments, emphasising how socio-economic structures, infrastructure and ecological processes are mutually constitutive. It foregrounds struggles over access to water, energy, land and waste management, revealing the spatialised impacts of neoliberal policies, accumulation by dispossession and environmental injustice. Planetary urbanization extends this perspective by recognising that urbanising forces now permeate global hinterlands, oceans and the atmosphere, transcending the traditional city boundary. This approach situates urbanisation as a planetary condition characterised by the intensification of material and energy cycles, the proliferation of infrastructures and the reconfiguration of social-ecological relations at multiple scales. By integrating political economy with ecological dynamics, the field offers critical insights into the uneven vulnerabilities and resistances emerging from rapid urban transformation and points to pathways for more just and sustainable futures.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have shown the planetary scope of urbanisation by quantifying global land take and resource fluxes, illustrating how peri-urban expansion drives transgression of ecological boundaries and intensifies water and carbon imbalances. Another analysis explores the uneven exposure of marginalised urban populations to heat extremes and air pollution, linking infrastructural inequality to health disparities in low-income neighbourhoods. These contributions employ high-resolution satellite data and socio-economic metrics to map socio-environmental vulnerabilities, advancing methods for cross-scale integration of ecological and political variables.

Urban Political Ecology and Planetary Urbanization publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in urban political ecology and planetary urbanization across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Urban political ecology: The study of power, resource flows and socio-environmental relations shaping urban spaces.

Planetary urbanization: A framework recognising that urbanising processes extend globally, beyond city boundaries.

Metabolic fluxes: Flows of energy, materials and waste that underpin production and consumption in urban systems.

Assemblage: A conceptualisation of heterogeneous social, material and ecological elements that constitute urban phenomena.

Rurban assemblages: Hybrid rural-urban configurations where agrarian and metropolitan dynamics intersect.

References

1. Reclaiming the city from an urban vitalism perspective: critically reflecting smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just city labels. Cities (2023).
2. Spaces of melancholia, melancholias of space: Shifting structures of feeling in post-independence Karachi. Political Geography (2024).
3. Negotiating Land in Rurban Bengaluru, South India. Sustainability (2023).