Speaker
Description
In this talk I argue that Urban Political Ecology’s (UPE) ontologies, epistemologies, and methods are not
simply an academic exercise; they are scientific developments that make academic research more relevant
to the politics of climate change. UPE unsettles ‘traditional’ understandings of ‘cities’ as ontological entities
separate from ‘nature’, and develops methods to examine how urbanization is inseparably and
metabolically interlinked with flows of capital, labour, and resources, and with the metabolism of the entire
biophysical world. In the talk, I propose ways forward, to replace the currently dominant catastrophism
over climate, with new forms of prefigurative politics and use values to promote socio-political action for
‘impossible’ solutions. I draw partly upon the books: Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a
Climate Emergency (Kaika, Keil, Mandler and Tzaninis (eds), 2023; Manchester UP); and Class Meets Land:
the Embodied History of Land Financialization (Kaika and Ruggiero, 2024, U of California Press)
