Connolly uses ongoing urban redevelopment in Penang in Malaysia to provide stimulating new perspectives on urbanisation, governance and political ecology.
The book deploys the concept of landscape political ecology to show how Penang residents, activists, planners and other stakeholders mobilize new relationships with the urban environment, to contest controversial development projects and challenge hegemonic visions for the city’s future.
Based on six years of local research, this book provides both a dynamic account of region’s rapid reshaping and a fresh theoretical framework in which to consider issues of sustainable development, heritage and governance in urban areas worldwide.
ecological repair and provide an alternative to the extractive and exploitative relations of the capitalist economy. Learning how to govern our planet as a commons is part of the imperative of becoming more resilient, but also more democratic. As such, the ecological question should not only be tackled in relation to the environmental crisis, but also, as suggested by Guattari (2000) , in relation to the social and politico-economic crisis and the prevailing mental ecology. It also needs to be addressed in post-anthropocentric terms, going beyond the human world towards
231 9 Ecologies of indebtedness Mark Featherstone Imagining catastrophe In the late 1990s the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, wrote a short essay, ‘In the Shadow of the Millennium’ (1998), concerned with the historical significance of the approaching year 2000. Given what has happened since what was called Y2K, it is hard to properly convey the low level panic that accompanied the impending arrival of the new millennium, but Baudrillard captured this through reference to the Beaubourg Clock, housed at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In his piece, he
in which these impacts will be locally and unevenly experienced. Moving from this point and away from conventional, or status quo, responses for building resource and asset bases, I argue for a shift in understanding the practices which make up adaptation and wellbeing more generally. This is a shift that sees human lives as always invested in ecologies of care. A note on international work, travel and climate impact Recently, I read an article critical of Rishi Sunak’s (British prime minister in 2023) travel practices ( Stacey, 2023 ). The prime minister had
the social, cultural and political processes that shape it (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988; Mitchell, 1996 ). Controversies over the form and function of the urban landscape are important to study from a political ecology perspective because they reflect uncertainties regarding the costs of particular instances of socio-natural transformation on the built environment and are frequent symptoms of rapidly developing urban regions ( Walker and Fortmann, 2003 : 469). Indeed, Mitchell (2007 : 316) has suggested that the central motivation in conflicts over the form of
RESEARCH ARTICLE Only connect: ecology between ‘late’ Latour and Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams Catherine Lord* Media Studies and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen, Capaciteitsgroep Media & Cultuur, University of Amsterdam, Kamernummer: 21, Turfdraagsterpad 9, 1012 XT Amsterdam, the Netherlands In recent articles and lectures, Latour’s ecological thinking has given a central role to the Gaia theory, in which he develops his own model, often shortened to ‘Gaia’. This recent work on ecology is dependent on An
designing and playing games to enact learning in experiential ways. They are a good example of critical-creative pedagogy that can help students better understand and address complex ecological challenges. I use the term ecologies in a dual sense, encompassing both its narrower environmental meaning and its broader reference to interconnections, especially in relation to the embeddedness of humans in the ‘web of life’ ( Capra, 1996 ). The chapter also takes a reparative stance that is ‘receptive and hospitable, animated by care for the world and its inhabitants’ ( Gibson
this push, there is currently a growing plethora of work that draws on conceptual frames open to multiple logics of power, namely racial capitalism and a reinvigorated adoption of intersectionality. While the latter has long been operationalized by a small group of feminist geographers largely since the 1990s, intersectionality’s almost ubiquitous invocation in critical literature appears to have found firm footing in the subfield of feminist geography more broadly and feminist political ecology in particular. Racial capitalism too is intersectional. Racial
the thoughts, feelings and beliefs that may be required to cultivate speculative methodologies of life and death – unruly ways of inhabiting the earth. Immanent values and the ecology of the virtual At the heart of the possibility of reclaiming ‘aesthetics’ while allowing the swan song to ring in our ears lies, it seems to me, the question of the nature of value. First, of course, because the rise of modern aesthetics in the 18th century was itself premised upon the very modern bifurcation between facts and values, objectivity and subjectivity: ‘the nature
eventual sale as beef; they were all feeding their animals exclusively on grass pastures; and they were all following, more or less strictly, the guidelines of an organization that supports this practice – the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association (PFLA). It doesn’t seem a very remarkable practice – to feed your cattle on pastures! But in this chapter, I narrate the actions of these farmers in a particular way (and perhaps, problematically, in a way that they may not recognize). I narrate their practices as ‘mending ecologies’. Mending ecologies is my preferred term
