Erik Swyngedouw and Ian R. Cook University of Manchester

1. Social PolisSocial Platform on Cities and Social Cohesion: Urban environment and ecology (EF5) survey paper Cities, Social Cohesion and the Environment Erik Swyngedouw and Ian R. Cook University of Manchester

2. Cities, Social Cohesion and the Environment Structure of presentation: • Introduction • 19th and 20th Century Antecedents • Urban Sustainability • Urban Environmental Justice • Urban Political Ecology • New and Future Directions

3. Introduction • Cities and the environment/the environment of the city • The urbanization of nature • The production of urban environments

4. 19th and 20th Century Antecedents 1. Cities, Nature and the Environmental Question in the 19th century (Engels, (urban) sociology, Chadwick, Sanitation, Planning) • Naturing the City – 20th century urban planning and policy (Olmsted, Garden Cities, Suburbs) • De-naturing the City – Nature in the City (but see Mumford, Bookchin, Williams)

5. Urban Sustainability • Ecological concerns – urban ecology • Urban ecological rationality • Ecological systems relations and technocratic management • Globalising urban socio-natures • The fantasy of cohesion: searching for cohesion in a conflicting world

6. Environmental Justice Beginning as a social movement in the US in 1970s/1980s Shared belief in the unequal distribution of environmental goods and bads “Living in a clean and healthy environment is everybody’s right” (www.capacity.gov.uk)

7. United Church of Christ and Robert Bullard – catalysts for academic interest in EJ Work “connected what had previously been largely isolated stories of risk into a racially identifiable pattern of injustice” (Bryneet al. 2002: 5) Large number of studies into citing patterns of toxic industries, social implications and community resistance

8. What do ‘environment’ and ‘justice’ mean for EJ? • “The environment, for us, is where we live, where we work, and where we play” (Dana Alson, EJ activist) • Environment as deeply and unavoidably intertwined in social life • Four necessary conceptions of justice (Schlosberg, 2003, 2007): • Distributional justice - Recognitional justice • Procedural justice - Justice of capabilities

9. Debates over the most influential axis of oppression: race or class? Scepticism towards focus on intentional, malicious acts of discrimination... “Given the insidious nature of discrimination in contemporary society, intent-based theories of environmental inequality are over-simplified by limiting inquiry to the most proximate causes while overlooking the institutional mechanisms and historical and structural processes that determine distributions of environmental hazards.” (Morello-Frosch, 2002: 491)

10. Urban Political Ecology Less concerned with the patterns of sociospatial environmental justice, more concerned with the production of urban environments and the socio-environmental inequalities within this A school of critical urban political environmental research A belief in the intertwining and hybridisation of nature and society “The crucial issue therefore, is not that of policing boundaries between “nature” and “culture” but rather, of taking responsibility for how our inevitable interventions in nature proceed – along what lines, with what consequences and to whose benefit” (Castree and Braun, 1998: 34)

11. Capitalism’s endless search for surplus value is responsible for environmental degradation, resource depletion and labour exploitation Class is the primary axis of oppression Urbanisation is produced through particular forms of socio-ecological metabolism Exploitation and injustice are wrapped up in the making and remaking of the urban under capitalism

12. Importance of spatial scale in producing and contesting EJ Potential for drawing together EJ and UPE studies However, gaps remain in our understanding of the nexus...

13. New and Future Directions • The Socio-Ecological Circulation of Urban Metabolism • Energies • Foods and water • Wastes, ‘recycling’, materials • Urban Socio-Natural Technologies (desalination, transport, flow management …) • CO2 – Heat/Cold • And their exclusions/inclusions

14. 2. Post Neo-Liberalising Urban Environments • Urban environmental governance and its contradictions • Urban socio-ecological management versus urban socio-ecological politics • The Selective Policies of ecocities, sustainability and re-development

15. 3. Urban Socio-Ecological Movements and the Struggles for Justice • Unequal urban socio-natural ecologies • Urban socio-ecological movements and justice • Scaling urban socio-ecological struggles

16. 4. Urban Socio-Ecological Imaginaries • Discourses of nature, environmental practices and social inclusion/exclusion. • Climate Change and Urban Practice • Urban socio-ecological utopias: real and imaginary alternatives

17. Conclusions • Research into the metabolism of past, present and future cyborg cities, focusing on the shifting power relations and inequalities within these transformations and the ‘extra-local’ networks and processes that constitute urban metabolism • Research into the linkages between urban neo-liberalisation and environmental injustice, and the dynamics and ramifications of neo-liberal urban environmental projects such as ecological gentrification, sustainability, ecocities

18. Research into the geographies of environmental justice movements and the contradictions of operationalising and networking such movements Research into the relationships between discourse, post-political management arrangements and environmental (in)justice, together with critical research into the visions of, and marginalisation of, alternative discourses Paper available to download at www.socialpolis.eu