Abstract

Within the rich vein of geographical scholarship in the environmental humanities, significant attention has been paid to the relationship between cities and nature. Such scholars show how, just as humans are part and parcel of the other that we dub nature, even the greyest urban landscape is every bit as bound up with the more-than-human world as any rural landscape, in terms of how it co-evolves locally and globally with nonhuman species and materialities (Braun; Cronon; Gandy; Kaika). This scholarship also has taken up the question of how cultural and political processes intersect, substantially contributing to the interdisciplinary field of urban political ecology which attempts to untangle the economic, political, social, and ecological processes that form contemporary cities (Heynen et al.). With the majority of the world’s population now residing in urban settlements, interrogating the relation between cities and the more-than-human world has become increasingly urgent around such questions as urban sustainability, urban ecological security, and climate change (Hodson and Marvin).