Speaker
Description
At a time when the ecological destructiveness of urbanization and its contribution to environmental problems is widely recognized in mainstream discourse, Urban Political Ecology (UPE) offers a crucial critique of urban design and planning. UPE challenges these practices to align with agendas prioritizing social equity. Even ecological urbanists, despite focusing on sustainability, face critiques highlighting how ecological metaphors in urban design can perpetuate discriminatory urban development processes (Tzaninis et al., 2023; Gandy, 2015; Kaika, 2014). On the other side, critical spatial practices—often employing artistic metaphors, analogies, and narratives—offer tools to generate critical perspectives on the socio-ecological impacts of capitalist urbanization. These practices contribute to alternative urban imaginaries by engaging with cognitive, emotional, embodied, and aesthetic forms of knowledge and affect. UPE scholarship increasingly embraces these approaches, drawing insights from race, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as postcolonial, indigenous, feminist, and queer theories (Heynen, 2018; Loftus, 2019).
This presentation takes a collaboratively driven video-narrative project, Symbiosis, undertaken by me with two colleagues from diverse disciplinary backgrounds as a case to discuss the value of situated everyday knowledge with the understanding of contemporary patterns of urbanity. The project explores and documents Kayseri’s urban landscape through nomadic fieldwork around its volcanic, mountain-shaped terrain. While the project narrates our encounters and perceptual experiences with the mountainous landscape, this presentation examines the learnings and outcomes of the project through a UPE framework. This approach enables us to ask for an understanding of the city’s urbanization that moves beyond human-centric imaginaries, incorporating regional dynamics essential to deciphering urban patterns.
Through this lens, the presentation connects sensory and experiential knowledge to questions of metabolic relations between urban settlements and uneven flows of capital, as well as more-than-human ecological processes. By decomposing its perceptual art-based explorations through the lens of a new vocabulary of planetary urbanization, the project addresses the interplay between urban economic and political dimensions—such as unsustainable real estate development and the practices of profit-driven energy companies—and the dynamic yet increasingly vulnerable terrestrial environment of Erciyes, Kayseri's iconic volcanic mountain.
By employing perceptual and art-based explorations, the project as a case exemplifying how sensory engagement with the urban landscape can deepen our understanding of urbanization's socio-ecological implications and this presentation invites urbanists to interpret and value novel metaphors, analogies, and narratives emerging from critical spatial practices, exploring their potential to meaningfully inform urban planning and design practices.
References
Kaika M. (2014). The uncanny materialities of the everyday: Domesticated nature as the invisible ‘other’. In: Graham S and McFarlane C (eds) Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context. New York: Routledge, 153–166.
Loftus A. (2019). Political ecology I: Where is political ecology? Progress in Human Geography 43(1): 172–182. DOI: 10.1177/0309132517734338.
Heynen N. (2018). Urban political ecology III: The feminist and queer century. Progress in Human Geography 42(3): 446–452.
Gandy, M. (2015). From urban ecology to ecological urbanism: An ambiguous trajectory. Area, 47(2), 150–154. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12162.
Tzaninis, Y., Mandler, T., Kaika, M., & Keil, R. (2023). Introduction: Urban political ecology for a climate emergency. In M. Kaika, R. Keil, T. Mandler, & Y. Tzaninis (Eds.), Turning up the heat. Manchester University Press.
| Keywords | mountainous landscape, critical spatial practices, situated knowledge, urbanization, and nature |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
