Nik Heynen

The Political Ecology of Uneven Urban Green Space: The Impact of Political Economy on Race and Ethnicity in Producing Environmental Inequality in Milwaukee

This article investigates the role of urban political economy, private-public property relations, and race and ethnicity in the social production of Milwaukees urban forest. By integrating urban-forest canopy-cover data from aerial photography, United States Census data, and qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, this analysis suggests that there is an inequitable distribution of urban canopy cover within Milwaukee. Since urban trees positively affect quality of life, the spatially inequitable distribution of urban trees in relation to race and ethnicity is yet another instance of urban environmental inequality that deserves greater consideration in light of contemporary and dynamic property relations within capitalist societies.

The neoliberalization of nature: Governance, privatization, enclosure and valuation

These passages by Marx help to explain the inextricable logic and ongoing momentum behind global economic, political, cultural and environmental relations. As Marx suggests, there can be no human history without the environment, because human history has been made possible only through the metabolization of the environment through human action. Today, neoliberal capitalism drives the politics, economics and culture of the world system, providing the context and direction for how humans affect and interact with non-human nature and with one another.

Urban political ecology I The urban century

It has been over 15 years since the term ‘urban political ecology’ (UPE) was coined. While still often not incorporated into larger discussion of political ecology, its growing visibility in the published literature suggests that it has gone beyond an emerging theoretical lens to one that has fully emerged. This report characterizes the current literature that explicitly utilizes the language of UPE, discusses its theoretical evolution that is now seeing a second wave, as well as catalogs some of the new arenas through which the sub-field has offered novel insights into the socionatural unevenness of cities. A central contribution of this survey is to illustrate the myriad articulations of how urban environmental and social change co-determine each other and how these metabolic processes offer insights into creative pathways toward more democratic urban environmental politics.

Green urban political ecologies: toward a better understanding of inner-city environmental change

This research uses a Marxist urban political ecology framework to link processes of urban environmental metabolization explicitly to the consumption fund of the built environment. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I argue in this paper that Marxist notions of metabolism are ideal for investigating urban environmental change and the production of uneven urban environments. In so doing, I argue that despite the embeddedness of Harveys circuits of capital within urban political economy, these connected notions still have a great deal to offer regarding better understanding relations between consumption and metabolization of urban environments. From this theoretical perspective, I investigate urban socionatural metabolization as a function of the broader socioeconomic processes related to urban restructuring within the USA between 1962 and 1993 in the Indianapolis inner-city urban forest. The research examines the relations between changes in household income and changes in urban forest canopy cover. The results of the research indicate that there was a significant decline over time in the Indianapolis urban forest canopy and that median household was related to these changes, thus demonstrating a concrete example of urban environmental metabolization.

Bending the Bars of Empire from Every Ghetto for Survival: The Black Panther Party's Radical Antihunger Politics of Social Reproduction and Scale

Among the most important political achievements of the Black Panther Party (BPP) was the success of their Free Breakfast for Children Program. At the Breakfast Programs peak in late 1969 and early 1970, the BPP and other volunteers fed thousands of children daily before they went to school across the country. The historic importance of the BPPs Breakfast Program rests both in the fact that it was imperative for the social reproduction of many inner-city communities and that it was both the model for, and impetus behind, all federally funded school breakfast programs currently in existence within the United States. At the heart of the BPPs Free Breakfast for Children Program and the spatial practices that led to its ultimate success are a set of scalar politics that played out as a result of (1) the failures of the U.S. national welfare state, (2) the BPPs evolved scaling of their revolutionary praxis, and (3) the local spatial practices they employed to serve the poor. All of these processes occurred despite attempts by the state to sabotage the BPPs political efforts.

Cooking up Non-violent Civil-disobedient Direct Action for the Hungry: ‘Food Not Bombs’ and the Resurgence of Radical Democracy in the US

This paper examines the efforts of one of the fastest-growing (anarchist) social movement groups in the world, ‘Food Not Bombs’ (FNB), to redefine urban anti-hunger politics in the US. The aim is to understand how FNB contests the politics and processes of poor people’s containment through their efforts to develop new, decommodified modes of biopolitics. As it is central to their success, the paper focuses on how FNB uses non-violent civil-disobedient direct action to provide an alternative grassroots response to the destructive market-driven imperatives of neo-liberal capitalism. The case of FNB provides an example of the continued potential for mutual aid and cooperativism in the city and does so against the backdrop of growing injustices within an ever-globalising world. Ultimately, the paper shows that FNB offers an example of the kinds of resistance necessary to secure the most fundamentally inherent right to the city, which is the right to eat and survive in the city.

Scalar dialectics in green: urban private property and the contradictions of the neoliberalization of nature

Walking through Milwaukee’s affluent Eastside, it is difficult to imagine that the presence of its well-maintained trees has been produced by anything but decidedly local processes. However, it is more likely that the distribution of these maples, ash, and locusts is influenced by, and influences, global socionatural processes shaped through the edicts of neoliberal global capitalism. It is also likely that the urban forests of thousands of other cities across the planet are produced through correspondingly contradictory structural processes. One need travel only 20 blocks west from the Eastside to realize that Milwaukee’s “inner-city” conspicuously lacks the presence of mature and well cared for trees. It is not their presence, but in stark contrast, their absence 20 blocks away that provides the most striking example of the impact of the globalized processes of neoliberalization on something as seemingly obscure and mundane as the distribution of urban trees.

The Point is to Change it: Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of Crisis

Introduction: The Point Is To Change It: Noel Castree, Paul Chatterton, Nik Heynen, Wendy Larner and Melissa W. Wright 1 Now and Then: Michael J. Watts 2 The Idea of Socialism: From 1968 to the Present-day Crisis: Hugo Radice 3 The Revolutionary Imperative: Neil Smith 4 To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations: Tania Murray Li 5 Postneoliberalism and Its Malcontents: Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore and Neil Brenner 6 D/developments after the Meltdown: Gillian Hart 7 Is the Globalization Consensus Dead?: Robert Wade 8 The Uses of Neoliberalism: James Ferguson 9 Crisis, Continuity and Change: Neoliberalism, the Left and the Future of Capitalism: Noel Castree 10 Money Games: Currencies and Power in the Contemporary World Economy: John Agnew 11 Pre-Black Futures: Katharyne Mitchell 12 The Shape of Capitalism to Come: Paul Cammack 13 Who Counts? Dilemmas of Justice in a Postwestphalian World: Nancy Fraser 14 The Communist Hypothesis and Revolutionary Capitalisms: Exploring the Idea of Communist Geographies for the 21st Century: Erik Swyngedouw 15 An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene: J. K. Gibson-Graham and Gerda Roelvink Index

Urban political ecology II The abolitionist century

Attention to the urban and metropolitan growth of nature can no longer be denied. Nor can the intense scrutiny of racialized, postcolonial and indigenous perspectives on the press and pulse of uneven development across the planet’s urban political ecology be deferred any longer. There is sufficient research ranging across antiracist and postcolonial perspectives to constitute a need to discuss what is referred to here as ‘abolition ecology’. Abolition ecology represents an approach to studying urban natures more informed by antiracist, postcolonial and indigenous theory. The goal of abolition ecology is to elucidate and extrapolate the interconnected white supremacist and racialized processes that lead to uneven develop within urban environments.

Knowing climate change, embodying climate praxis: experiential knowledge in southern Appalachia

Whether used to support or impede action, scientific knowledge is now, more than ever, the primary framework for political discourse on climate change. As a consequence, science has become a hegemonic way of knowing climate change by mainstream climate politics, which not only limits the actors and actions deemed legitimate in climate politics but also silences vulnerable communities and reinforces historical patterns of cultural and political marginalization. To combat this “post-political” condition, we seek to democratize climate knowledge and imagine the possibilities of climate praxis through an engagement with Gramscian political ecology and feminist science studies. This framework emphasizes how antihierarchical and experiential forms of knowledge can work to destabilize technocratic modes of governing. We illustrate the potential of our approach through ethnographic research with people in southern Appalachia whose knowledge of climate change is based in the perceptible effects of weather, landscape change due to exurbanization, and the potential impacts of new migrants they call “climate refugees.” Valuing this knowledge builds more diverse communities of action, resists the extraction of climate change from its complex society–nature entanglements, and reveals the intimate connections between climate justice and distinct cultural lifeways. We argue that only by opening up these new forms of climate praxis, which allow people to take action using the knowledge they already have, can more just socioecological transformations be brought into being.